I remember being told last week that we had made it to the end of the “linguistically difficult” texts. After reading this, I’m not sure about that. I’m certainly not complaining, though: my favourite part of this book was the way it was written, however hard it may be to follow along with the dialogue at times. There were several points at which I wished I could check the Spanish original for comparison, since even in translation the language is complex and full of subtle details. In the conversation video, Juan Poblete refers to the style as “popular baroque” in how it integrates “high” and “low” language, but this is hardly a binary opposition of two discrete modes; rather, it’s written on a strange continuum of poetic, conversational, romantic, political, confessional, comedic, and pornographic, each of which is coloured with heavy irony. As any literary critic would point out, it really brings out the artificiality of all language and social performance while simultaneously revealing the absence of any essential core hiding beneath these performances.

Though attention isn’t drawn to it in the same way as in Lispector or Menchú, I found the voice of the narrator played an interesting role throughout this book. Due to the lack of quotation marks or line breaks during dialogue, it can be hard to tell where the characters’ voices end and the narrator’s begins, but there were points where the narrator seemed to take a partisan position in the story’s conflicts.  For instance, the topic everyone seems to stumble over when discussing this book: the Queen on the Corner’s gender identity. Going by her description throughout the majority of the story, it’s hard to imagine her as anything but a transgender woman, however anachronistic the term may be. The way she is portrayed, both through her own voice and the narrator’s, is so overwhelmingly feminine that it can be extremely jarring when other characters address her as “mister” or with “he/him” pronouns (which she always takes in stride, showing far less discomfort than I felt). Yet, there is an interesting exception near the beginning, where she is briefly referred to with masculine pronouns in the narrator’s voice for what I believe is the only time in the book (“All he needs is his Prince Charming, whispered the old ladies standing on the sidewalk across the street, watching him through an open window as he flitted about like a hummingbird”). If it weren’t for this one slip, it would be far easier to interpret the narrator as objective, but here it is revealed that the narrator is as susceptible to social perceptions (such as those of the old ladies) as any other character. As such, the Queen’s femininity becomes not a hidden yet inherent aspect of her identity confirmed by the objective voice of the narrator but an interested, asserted, even revolutionary position, understanding of which is reserved to an exclusive in-group including her, her loca friends, the narrator (for most of the book), and, towards the end, Carlos (there’s an interesting parallel here: as the Queen builds revolutionary consciousness through her association with Carlos, he too is introduced into her own world of revolutionary sexual politics). And, for a brief moment, this revolutionary assertion is successful, as Pinochet is “fooled” into perceiving her as a woman, again paralleling the momentary revolutionary assertion by the Patriotic Front that later takes place on the very same road.

Did others notice points at which the narrator intervened in the story in an active, interested way?