It’s safe to say that most of us are thinking not only about what it means to be healthy in body but also and especially what it means to live in a healthy society. Recent fiction has been exploring these questions as well, and Justin Walls, a laid-off Portland bookseller, noted theirconfluence on Coffee House’s own list, pointing out a triptych he describes as “social science fiction” that examines society’s broken relationship to public health. —Erika Stevens, senior editor

In the concussive aftermath of the 2016 election, it was George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In the plague year of 2020, it’s Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Ling Ma’s Severance. The utility of a relevant dystopia has not been lost on American readers, even as concepts like timeliness and speculation are rendered moot by our current state of destabilizing dissonance.

Now, courtesy of Minneapolis mainstay Coffee House Press, we have a trifecta in translation to rival even the most shining exemplars of the “social science-fiction” subgenre, an unintended collaboration that is less loose trilogy than anthologized triptych—three singular and unaffiliated novels fabricated by three separate masters (and arriving in consecutive years), yet seemingly hinged together in a state of perpetual conversation. These disparate pieces, when taken as a thematic triumvirate, diagnose something rotten and corroded, something inherently shameful and perverse, about our relationship to public health and how it’s administered. 

The first composition depicts a sanatorium situated on the outer rim of Buenos Aires, staffed by spiral-eyed quacks operating at the convergence of scientific agnosticism and Promethean hubris, just as the twentieth century begins to ambulate. This is Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre (2018), translated into English by Heather Cleary, a grisly riff in the Grand Guignol vein that finds a cadre of physicians conspiring around some cutting-edge ritual sacrifice. The agreed-upon procedure involves luring unwitting patients into a scaled-up cigar-cutter contraption, decapitating them, and recording any postmortem utterances that might emerge. These morbid theatrics recast treatment as experimentation, a form of palliative extremism overseen by practitioners keen on conquest in lieu of compassion. It’s a novel filled with indulgent excess and, in a shocking denouement, Larraquy eliminates the surgical artifice altogether, opting instead to apply similarly gory techniques to his darkest indulgence yet—art.

Arriving at the centerpiece, we contend with Rodrigo Márquez Tizano’s Jakarta (2019), translated by Thomas Bunstead. If Comemadre represents man’s attempt to smite God, then Jakarta—blackened, bleak, smoldering, and cruel—is God’s vengeful wrath made manifest. The pestilence-ridden expanse of Atlantika, a veritable Tartarus on Earth, serves as the novel’s setting. As the bodies pile up and the sickness spreads, this inverted metropolis takes a largely janitorial approach to healthcare, hazmat suit–adorned crews cataloging corpses and exterminating vermin, while a highly habit-forming and government-regulated gambling sector mitigates dissent. It’s Old Testament fury meets rank authoritarianism, an abyssal vision of a pandemic allowed to cleave without abatement through a populace. Timelines crack and bleed as citizens burrow underground, refugees in their own land, and the presence of a glowing stone that inspires slavish devotion hints at a turn toward penitent mysticism. Jakarta is dense and sticky, perfectly presaging the comparatively antiseptic horrors that are yet to come.

With the publication of Ornamental (2020) by Juan Cárdenas, featuring a taut translation by Lizzie Davis, the triptych is complete. In this closing volume, the tenets of liberal aestheticism and mass privatization reign supreme, as test subjects—glorified lab rats culled from the “inferior classes”—are dosed with designer pharmaceuticals. Whereas Comemadre’s victims occasionally emit unnerving final remarks, a standout participant in Ornamental’s clinical study instead expels drug-induced (and meticulously documented) logorrhea. If Larraquy’s vision centers medicine as experiment, then Cárdenas’s novel frames the patient as data. Here, Jakarta’s compulsory vice is replaced with anesthetizing dependence. As the economic divide worsens and scarcity arises, rioting erupts in “peripheral neighborhoods,” with scores of women (a target demographic) forcibly seizing and stockpiling supplies. Like distant thunder, these rebellions signal a looming threat to the safely ensconced elite, a threat that, if not properly tamped down, could upset a delicate hierarchical balance. Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental is the fully transactional endgame of a market-based healthcare system and, as such, serves as the ideal culmination for all that preceded it in this devilish sequence. Beyond disease or dispossession, mad scientists or creeping death, this is it. This is the drain we were always doomed to circle.

When we next reach for fiction that simultaneously distills and distorts our up-to-the-minute fears, relating our panic and paranoia back to us in terms both fantastical and appallingly familiar, those works had better be prepared to meet a moment already marked by the rapid descent into apocalyptic wellness. The lurid pulp of Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre, the infected eschatology of Rodrigo Márquez Tizano’s Jakarta, and the scalpel-like bifurcation of Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental—each of these novels pulsates with its own infernal rhythm. Together, however, sutured into a single winged beast, they establish the basis for something new, even necessary: the literature of predatory healthcare, medical malfeasance, and the unchecked avarice that lies at the decaying heart of it all.
Bio: 

Justin Walls is a bookseller and 2020 Best Translated Book Award jury member based in the Pacific Northwest. His writing has been featured on Three Percent, Literary Hub, and the Center for the Art of Translation blog.