Southeaster - Haraldo Conti (Translated by Jon Lindsay Miles)

Guest review by Jayne White

Haroldo Conti was an award winning, highly regarded, Argentinian writer and this is the first of his novels to be translated into English. Jon Lindsay Miles first translated it under his Immigrant Press imprint; this was then picked up by And Other Stories who have brought it to a wider audience. Conti's work has been likened to John Berger and Ernest Hemingway, and Gabriel García Márquez has called him ‘One of the great Argentinian writers’. Southeaster was his first novel. It was originally published in 1962. He wrote three further novels and several short story collections before he disappeared following his arrest in 1976.

The novel is set in the Paraná Delta which is a river delta encompassing several islands and a large floodplain bordering on Buenos Aires. Boga is a drifter who falls into working with ‘the old man’ for a time. When the old man dies, the old woman gives him an old boat as payment and he travels around the delta, fishing camping and trading.

Boga and many of the people of the Delta live incredibly simple life with very few possessions. They have few clothes other than the ones they stand up in and articles such as knives are prized possessions. Their possessions are so few that each of them has a story attached and a small dilapidated boat is the stuff of dreams.  Even a pile of rubbish isn’t wasted.

“He put aside the things that might be useful in some way, regretting, first of all that he didn’t have both rowlocks. The knife blade was a Solingen which, fitted with a handle, could serve him very well. The magazines would kill some time, even though he’d never been a reader in his life, or they could get the fire going, or even make his cigarettes, if it was needed. The boathook tip was good to have, and possibly the best thing there. He’d fit a decent handle to it, privet would be good, or perhaps he’d use bamboo, which even if it fractures does the job.”

Conversely most of the people seem to be without history, many characters are nameless. Life is lived according to the season. Boga is in tune with the mists and the changes in the air. He knows when and where to fish. The south-easterly wind from which the novel takes its name might speed him home at night to his camp or whip a storm to destroy him.

“It was then a gentle gust of wind, coming from the south-east, folded up the never-ending murmur of the islands. And this was when he felt on his own with the boat. And felt it in a special way. Something like nostalgia and mistrust and also reverence, and all of this at once. However you explained it, a feeling of a gentle pain that, rising in himself, concerned the boat as well as him, as if they were in some way one.”

The description of the waters and their changing moods elevate the river to a character in its own right. The humans of the Delta have comparatively little impact against the ever changing influence of the river. The whole book has a very cinematic feel, with the waters and the weather lovingly described with Boga’s thoughts and feelings alongside. There’s a wealth of detail, but it never becomes dull or tedious to read.

Eventually Boga’s travels take him closer to the more populous areas and the pace of his life quickens as he falls in with more people and sees more ‘civilisation’. I found the action scenes involving several characters hard to follow towards the end. This is because he keeps up the convention of using very few names for characters. This left me struggling to keep track of which ‘man’ was which and which ‘he’ we were observing in each paragraph. Although, having said that, it didn’t spoil the novel for me because it ended beautifully.

There are copious notes included with this edition which give a great deal of information about the translation and the original spanish version plus a lot of information about the life and times of Haroldo Conti. If you’re looking to appreciate more work in translation, I think this is a really good one to choose.

Jayne White is a freelance proof reader and copy writer. Follow her on twitter @ElethaWhite