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Milton Hatoum’s ‘Orphans of Eldorado’, a book I picked up at random this weekend, turned out to fit Carl’s ‘Once Upon a Time Challenge’ perfectly, so I’m counting it as my first read on The Journey. How nice when your reading synchronises with your challenges all by itself.Hatoum’s novella is part of the Canongate myths series and seems to promise to tell the story of Eldorado. Picture me imagining explorers dashing through cities of gold and humming the ‘Where is Carmen Miranda’ theme tune. What the book actually does is spin a sort of unrelated story around the Brazilian legend of The Enchanted City. The afterword explains that the myth of Eldorado may just be the Spanish conquistadors interpretation of the Enchanted City, as the myth (like many myths, legend and fairytales) has many versions and interpretations.
When I say ‘Orphans of Eldorado’ talks around this myth, I mean it goes way around until the story of the Enchanted City is way in the distance. It’s only very late on in the book that the narrator, Arminto Cordovil, reaches anything that approaches a hidden or, enchanted city. The rest of the book is spent following Arminto’s fall in fortunes, as he pursues a mysterious girl from the local convent and neglects the rubber business his father left him. References to the Enchanted City of myth, submerged beneath the sea appear sporadically through Arminto’s tale, but the real focus is on his desperate search for the mysterious girl Dinaura who may, or may not have run away to the Enchanted City.
The writing is full of description of every day life, but has almost a dead pan, emotionless tone and a rigorous pace that marches you ever onward to the next common place detail:
‘Talita looked after the garden and cleaned the stone centrepiece of the fountain. It was in the shape of my mothers head; Amando had had it made after she died. From a very young age, I used to look at the young face, the grey stone eyes which seemed to question me. I was on my knees in front of the head when I smelled the waft of scent from the Bonplant perfumery. Florita informed me that the bath was full. After the bath she served lunch: beans with pumpkin and maxixe, grilled fish and farofa with turtle eggs.’
I feel rather ungenerous saying this, but ‘Orphans of Eldorado’ is a book which uses description and pace to disguise more basic problems with his novella. It has been a long time since I finished a novel so devoid of any kind of forward movement, either in terms of plot, character, or emotion. Although things happen in this novel, for example Arminto sleeps with Dinaura; later he spends some time negotiating the sale of his house, the focus of this novella is on Arminto’s rather indulgent, leisurely examination of his own life. Arminto is a character of stasis, who does very little as events happen around him. In short: he is rather dull and no wonder Dinaura ran away after one night with him.
If I’m being fair I’d say this aspect of his character is probably deliberate, as the novella is preceded by part of a Cavafy poem called 'The City' that talks about a son’s inability to escape from the city he was born in:
‘You will not find new lands, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same streets. And you will grow old in the same neighbourhood.’
Clearly Arminto’s troubled relationship with his father, who dies part way through the novel links back to the poem, although I was never really clear how Arminto’s father’s influence from beyond the grave was really keeping his son from developing. I get the feeling Arminto places the blame for his misfortune on his father’s oppressive personality, when really, as the reader can see, it’s his own lassitude and obsession that destroys his fortune. It’s possible that the poem links to Arminto through its description of the sons inability to escape the inheritance of his birth city and Hatoum is contrasting Arminto to the son of the poem by having him make no real attempt to escape. Frustrated ambition is a typical, tragic story, but Hatoum could be subverting this by creating a character whose lack of ambition and failure to realise that frustrates his life. He could be deliberately creating a character readers are not supposed to support.
I’ve no problem with authors making characters unlikeable, but their unpleasantness must at least be interesting. ‘Orphans of Eldorado’ was not the most exciting reading experience I’ve ever had. When I started reading I just let the words flash past me in a colourful whirl and reading the book that way, for the isolated images and the rhythms of language is wonderful. But half way through I started wondering when my questions about the deliberately obscured elements of the novel would be answered, which is when I started to notice that not much was happening. I was just bumming around a couple of islands with Arminto’s haze of angst, romantic idealism and laziness, waiting for his father’s lawyer to slap him and bring him to his senses (never happened unfortunately). Once I noticed these things and added them to the feeling that Dinaura was operating as the biggest manic pixie girl in the world (she rarely speaks, but she gets her clothes off a few times before she disappears with excessive mystery) I got bored. There are potentially salacious revelations quite late on. I did not care and I am always interested in the sexy gossip bits of a book. I shouldn’t be able to get bored in the middle of a novella that is 130 pages. If that happens, something has gone wrong.
Maybe the best way to approach this book is to just breeze through it without looking for plot, or answers. Maybe if I’d just stayed focused on the attraction of Arminto’s surroundings or the pleasing contrast of the intense imagery and the soothing rhythms of the prose I’d have enjoyed ‘Orphans of Eldorado’ more.
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