Comemadre is the first of three published novels by Roque Larraquy, an Argentine writer, screenwriter and audio-visual design instructor.
We see that Roque Larraquy has blended both his screenwriting and visual design skills with his writing. Black comedy movie frames flow through the pages of the book. If you ask me who the director is, I would say Lanthimos or David Lynch.
Larraquy, who has always dreamed of writing a novel in two parts, dreams of these two parts clinging to each other like parasites, feeding on a common root, living a common life like two heads in one body. The main story is a text about the contemporary art world at the intersection of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In other words, it is the second part of the book set in 2009.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau – An evaluation on Confessions
- Where is the Tomb of the Great Hun Emperor Attila the Hun?
For the first part, Roque Larraquy says in an interview: “At the turn of the century, I was fascinated by non-literary texts on galvanic medicine, spiritualism, phrenology, all self-proclaimed “sciences” that have lost their scientific status over time and have sunk into oblivion. What interests me about them is that they are disciplines that try to legitimize themselves in this way and produce texts that are angry, argumentative, that try to convince the world: therein lies the truth. And they also build a lexicon – names, words, scientific terminology – that somehow embodies the discipline.
That’s why it seemed to me so closely related to literature. It is really texts that are read a hundred years later, that have an impact. If one forgets that they are trying to establish a concept of “truth”, they are extraordinary as fictional constructions. While I was reading all this, I found an advertisement in Caras y Caretas, a really important magazine in Argentina at the time, where serious political debates were taking place. It was an advertisement promising cancer treatment in a suburban clinic in this town, not yet developed and not yet incorporated into Buenos Aires: Temperly. And then, what really intrigued me was that the ad said that the serum was developed by a Dr. Beard in Edinburgh, England. This fallacy really seemed to me to be the perfect seed for developing a narrative world.”
Yes, Larraquy finds a seed and reverse engineering begins to work.
He constructs two texts questioning transcendence in science and art, and the objective use of the human body as an absolute solution in these two disciplines.
In the first text, the criticism of health institutions, the use of patients as guinea pigs, irrational experiments and obsessive love affairs within the institution are handled with black humor.
The narrator of the first part is Dr. Quintana. In 1907, Dr. Quintana and a group of colleagues attempt to conduct a scientific experiment at the Temperley Clinic to prove that the human brain is awake until a few seconds after death. To this end, they advertise that a serum – sugar water – has been developed at the Temperley Clinic to cure cancer patients. Patient applications begin. The patients who do not benefit from the serum and who are waiting for death promise to donate their bodies to science.
“How do we give back value to a dying patient? By turning his body into something useful: postmortem.”
As the gruesome experiment continues under the watchful eye of cold-blooded doctors, the hospital corridors are ablaze with the flames of love. Dr. Quintana is smitten with Menéndez, the clinic’s head nurse. Not only him, but nurse Menéndez also draws several other doctors to her axis with her seductive release of estrogen.
The experiment is based on the idea that the brain is awake for a short time after death and that people can express their thoughts. The results are verses that could be poetry rather than prose.
“Gurian and Gigena think that the result will be more like poetry than prose because of the fragmentary sentences that will be spoken, as predicted. Divine nouns with the vagueness of a fortune teller, simple verbs with no clear subject or object. The vocabulary of most donors does not exceed a hundred words, including prepositions and definitions, and under these conditions it is very difficult to come up with anything other than poetry.”
Through those who see the advertisement, come for treatment and then donate themselves to science, we also get a reflection of the author’s social analysis. He criticizes that people speak in a very simple language, that their vocabulary is limited and that these people easily believe what they see and hear. He conveys to the reader through the text that the steps taken without questioning bring the bitter end of humanity.
The second part, which takes place one hundred years after the first one, is the main issue that prompted the author to write the novel.
I, the narrator, reads the draft of a dissertation written about him by a doctoral student named Linda Carter. In the letter he writes in response to her, he explains how he overcame the pains of his overweight childhood thanks to his artistic genius and where he got the inspiration for the absurd ideas for the legacy he will leave to the contemporary art world. Sebastian, with whom she has her first sexual experience that will enable her to make peace with her body, which causes her to be ostracized from her environment, is also the bridge that connects the first part with the second part. Because Sebastian’s great-grandfather is Dr. Quintana.
Roque Larraquy chooses artists who put the principle of realism at the center of their art, who made fun of the politics and values of the period, whose sexual preferences were considered a grave crime in the period, and who were isolated in the art world by receiving great reactions to form the backbone of this chapter. Velazquez, Hogarth, Aubrey Beardsley are some of them.
Comemadre, which gives the book its title, is a plant that emerges from the creative talisman of Larraquy’s imagination. This plant, which means ‘Mother Eater’, disappears along with a plant in Patagonia about twenty years after the first story takes place. In England, however, it lives on as motherseeker or momsicker. The plant sap secreted by the prickly comemadre produces microscopic larvae.
The larvae kill the plant by drying it out. The remaining parts feed the soil and restart the process. The larvae, which are separated in a laboratory environment, are again used in the Temperley Clinic as the object that unites the two parts of the novel, and a hundred years later to produce extraordinary works for the sake of contemporary art. It symbolizes the destruction of both oneself and others like a harmful larva and the rebirth from the ashes for the sake of sustaining one’s existence and attracting attention.
Comemadre is the perfect place to get to know Roque Larraquy, who pays tribute to the crazy journeys taken for the sake of science and art.