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With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound by Manuel Corleto, translated by Michael B. Miller
The author of this unusual novel is a Guatemalan stage director and painter. The material of his nontraditional work condemns the hypocrisy, despair and perversion of Latin American politicians and of Catholicism (perhaps all of Christianity). Told in a series of vignettes rather than as an entire story with a developing timeline and a goal to reach, this is a disturbing, surreal book. Corleto claims that With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound strives to promote the ideal of selfless love as the cure for worldly ills. If that is true, it is written in a manner reminiscent of scratching a right ear with a left, overhead hand. The story lacks one kind-hearted gesture. Every action is disfigured with selfishness and guile.
It is to translator Michael B. Miller's credit that he succeeded in translating the work without abandoning the misery-laden text. The story is told out of sequence and with a confusing cast of characters in fluid relationships that are difficult to define. Corleto's website is rife with spelling and grammatical errors in English, and I suspect that Miller had much revision to do with the book. He cleverly preserves the disturbing and confusing story for English readers by providing a reference guide to the characters and their relationships. It is a necessary innovation for holding the interest of otherwise bewildered readers.
Miller is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Gallaudet University, and brought the book to my attention. He indicates that "As a translator, I found the novel extremely challenging, given certain expressions endemic to Guatemala, the book's eclectic style, the lack of time sequence, and the revolving appearance of the characters. I did feel the need to soften the starkness of some of the sexual content, since it did not come across very well in English translation... I found the work fascinating in its kaleidoscopic presentation of a distorted society living under the hardships depicted in the novel."
The opening chapters of "With Every Drop of Blood from the Wound" describe the sexual escapades of priests and parishoners, and clerical reassignments to the Congo and other dangerous locations by guilt-ridden, punitive bishops and rectors who facilitated the dalliances. Until the end of the surrealistic tale, Corleto portrays the futility of Catholicism as fundamentally hypocritical and disconnected, tangentially related to a Church devoid of spirituality. Priests who are not suckered into killer assignments marry wealthy patrons and live lives of moral bankruptcy. The book doesn't improve in its depiction of nuns, politicians or laity. Even the faithless citizens who reject church dogmas and despise secular legal authorities prey on one another.
Subsequent passages relate betrayals between former friends, supremely corrupt politicians and a sordid array of depressing human behaviors accentuated by the presence of mangy, abused animals. By the time a bride approaches her wedding day, the author relates to us not only her perverted sexual dreams but also those of her attending nun. Soldiers confiscate the car of an impoverished coffee farmer caught up in the lucrative narcotics trade and friends torture each other with taunts and physical brutality. A child's dolls are mutilated with the horror of a sexual deviant. A chess game at the end of the story is reminiscent of the scene in "The Seventh Seal," when Max von Sydow outwits the Angel of Death. The reader senses a glimmer of revelation about to pour forth from the author about the benefits of facing reality as the author sees it. However, Corleto skews the gamesmanship and the social commentary, again castigating authority figures as he presents the senselessness of a protagonist's murder. Crudity and despair fill every page without resolution. There is no hope for Corleto's characters nor the reader.
The book ends with the plaintive singing of a verse that lends itself to the title:
if you tear my life away/if you carry it off with you
/don't leave me here alone/with death
/because it's clear my luck's running out
/with every drop of blood from the wound
/with every wound that bleeds drop by drop.
Corleto is a brutal critic of his society. If a researcher wanted evidence of self-loathing, and proof that Latino Catholics despise every aspect of their heritage, this book is essential material. Corleto won the 1996 Rogelio Sinán Award for Central American Literature on the basis of his successful if outré depiction of Latino life. Published in 2004 by iUniverse, an unusual publishing outlet for an academic work but completely understandable in this age of overtaxed university presses, the paperback is priced at $11.95 US, $15.95 Canadian, and about ten Euros.
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