In an arid and dusty landscape, in a border territory sandwiched between the eastern and western highlands and that could be located anywhere in Central America, terrible events take place that are narrated in ‘The Third World’ (Lumen), Karina’s second novel Sainz Borgo (Caracas, 1982).
This Venezuelan writer and journalist on this occasion has followed the imprint of Comala, that ghost town inhabited by the dead and recreated by the Mexican Juan Rulfo in his immortal ‘Pedro Páramo’. Along with this reference, Sainz Borgo makes a rereading of the myth of Antígona. ‘The third world’ speaks of the impossibility of burying the dead: “Things do not last forever, they cannot be taken for granted, so that a right as elementary as the one to be buried can vanish in circumstances more powerful than the individuals ».
The prose writer is suspicious of the social utility of literature, does not believe that books serve to correct reality, but quite the opposite. Do books transform our life, as is sometimes repeated? ‘They may change it until a certain point in our own biography, but books are not made to solve problems. Books do not correct reality. On the contrary, the books have to introduce a lot of disorder and discomfort, a kind of tectonic movement. I distrust literature with good intentions, I don’t like it at all.
Some writers get stuck and erratic when they have to tackle the writing of their second novel. It could have happened to Sainz Borgo, especially considering that his novel debut was with ‘La hija de la española’, which was published in 22 countries and reaped overwhelming success. But that fear did not grip the author; rather, the Latin American news spurred it on.
“I could not let this story escape, which coincided with a series of traumatic migrations, such as the caravan that crossed all of Central America, an exodus to which the belligerence of Donald Trump was added with his promise to build a wall and the bodies abandoned on the border that nobody claimed. All this together gave me a shock. It has therefore not suffered the dread of the blank screen. What’s more, he has doubled the bet and has dared to tell a choral story, which, as Sainz admits, are “big words.”
The novel contains raw and painful dramas. The writer worried about traveling to places evocative of the tragedy, she met dingy cemeteries that stand in the middle of the aridity, and brave women, like those that swarm in ‘The Third World’. Women like Angustias Romero and Visitación Salazar. The first flees the plague, along with her husband, and carries the bodies of her two seven-month-old children, whom she wants to bury with dignity; the second governs a secret moridero. Despite the gloomy and dark of some scenes, the reader closes the book catching a glimpse of light. “Regardless of how violent and harsh it may be, the reader is going to find a novel about friendship, compassion and piety. Solidarity takes on a lot of weight among characters to whom everything turns against them and who have absolutely nothing ”.
Sainz Borgo has boldly searched for a sober and elegant prose that does not become engrossed in the description of “the unpleasant and the ugly.” Although one of the constants in his literature is violence, this is also expressed through a sullen and barren landscape. His desire has been not to incur a banal tremendousism.
Influences
In contrast to what one might think, Karina Sainz Borgo does not drink from the literary tradition of North American realism. His influences look to the other side of the Atlantic, specifically to the European and Central European writers of the 20th century, to authors such as Doris Lessing or the Nobel Prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee, but also to Latin Americans, with whom he is linked by a “blood” link. “All of them are hybridized in my relationship with Latin American literature, present in my prose in an almost genealogical way.” In any case, the admiration for García Márquez and company cannot be traced in ‘The Third World’. “A good friend told me that the things I write are tragic realism, not magical realism. To follow the universe of a writer like García Mazquez, with such a personal mark, would be very naive ».
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