{"id":276416,"date":"2010-02-07T18:03:06","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T18:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/02\/07\/op-oloop-by-juan-filloy-btba-2010-fiction-longlist\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:40","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:40","slug":"op-oloop-by-juan-filloy-btba-2010-fiction-longlist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/02\/07\/op-oloop-by-juan-filloy-btba-2010-fiction-longlist\/","title":{"rendered":"&#34;Op Oloop&#34; by Juan Filloy [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Over the next nine days, we&#8217;ll be highlighting a book a day from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/index.php?id=2431\">Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist.<\/a> Click <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?s=tag&amp;t=btba-2010\">here<\/a> for all past write-ups.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><div align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/images\/288.jpg\" border=1><\/div>\n<p><b><a href=\"http:\/\/shop.idlewildbooks.com\/book\/9781564784346\"><em>Op Oloop<\/em><\/a> by Juan Filloy. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. (Argentina, Dalkey Archive)<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I waited <em>years<\/em> for this book to come out. Years. Back in the early 2000s I went on an editors trip to Germany that was organized by the wonderful Riky Stock and included stops in Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt. During one of these visits (my memory! I assume now that I&#8217;ve been in publishing for 10 years, I can start forgetting some details, right?) I met with the guys from Tropen Verlag, who not only were super-cool, but told me that rather than pimp any of their German authors, the one person I needed to pay attention to was a semi-obscure Argentine author named Juan Filloy. <\/p>\n<p>Once I got back to the States, I started looking into Filloy and this handful of facts convinced me that no matter what, we (re: Dalkey Archive) <em>had<\/em> to publish him:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> He lived in three centuries\u2014born in the nineteenth, and passing away in 2000 at the age of 106;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Julio Cortazar loved him, and references Filloy&#8217;s <em>Caterva<\/em> in chapter 108 of <em>Hopscotch<\/em>;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Freud was a fan of <em>Op Oloop<\/em>, which led to a personal correspondence between the two;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Filloy was a lover of palindromes and wrote over 6,000;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>and, not to be overlooked, almost all fifty-plus of his novels and collections of poems have seven-letter titles. (<em>Op Oloop, Caterva, Vil y Vil<\/em>, so on and so forth.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The plot of <em>Op Oloop<\/em> is pretty simple: it chronicles the final day and night in the life of its titular character, Op Oloop, a Finnish transplant in Buenos Aires who is recently engaged to Franziska, the Finnish consul\u2019s niece. As he likes to state, Op Oloop is a \u201cman of method,\u201d a statistician who lives his life in a very orderly, pre-arranged way.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Thus, Op Oloop was convinced yet again that it was simply impossible for him to act contrary to his nature. \u201cSUNDAY: <span class=\"caps\">WRITING<\/span>, <span class=\"caps\">BETWEEN<\/span> 7:00 <span class=\"caps\">AND<\/span> 10:00 A.M.\u201d That was the rule. When life is as ordered as a mathematical equation, you can\u2019t just skip a digit whenever you feel like it. Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine; even such a trivial, graphical set such as addressing an envelope he\u2019d already begun while still within the allotted time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It\u2019s clear from the start that Op Oloop isn\u2019t all there\u2014his speech to the employees at his local spa about the need to unite on tipping and form a \u201cGratuity International\u201d is proof enough\u2014but on this particular day, things go from bad to worse, as Op\u2019s \u201cmethod\u201d is thwarted and he can\u2019t regain his sense of order.<\/p>\n<p>Filloy\u2019s protagonist is a step beyond eccentric, and Lisa Dillman\u2019s ability to capture his peculiar speech, wordplay, and insanity is quite impressive. This is especially true in the lengthy section detailing Op Oloop\u2019s special dinner with his friends (in preparation for him to sleep with his 1,000th prostitute\u2014a situation that doesn\u2019t go according to plan and is the final nail that breaks Op\u2019s mind). This dinner is the section of the book that seems most Cortazar-like (<em>Hopscotch<\/em> is filthy with groups of characters bantering and making statements about Argentina and its people), although Filloy\u2019s not quite as tight and witty and fluid as Cortazar (who is?).<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cIn Hollywood, everyone knows the caloric value of everything. Just as they all aspire unanimously to stardom, they\u2019re all equally fanatical about being <em>tres mince<\/em> rather than overweight. Truly, there\u2019s a veritable obsession with fat. Dieting forces them all to undertake endless calculations and combinations. All portions are measured on a basis of one-hundred-calorie units. For example, one hundred calories equals: a tablespoon of honey, or two mandarin oranges, or four dates, or twenty asparagus tips, or a quarter-inch thick steak measuring five inches long and two and a half inches wide . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cSo you must\u2019ve gone round with tape measures, eyedroppers, and scales . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s not a joke. You know, I\u2019ve noticed that Argentines in general tend to be quite sarcastic, yet they\u2019re entirely lacking in humor deep down. They make fun of everything in particular, and yet as a nation are all unanimously dull. It\u2019s truly incongruous!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As the novel lurches from scene to scene, Filloy creates an interesting account of one man\u2019s mental breakdown. With the exception of what happens at the whorehouse, most of the underlying motivations for his breakdown are mysterious, summed up by the idea that he\u2019s \u201cmethod personified.\u201d A more conventional book would delve into this issue, maybe explain how the hell he ended up with Franziska in the first place, etc., etc., but this isn\u2019t a conventional book. Which is why it&#8217;s on the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist . . . <\/p>\n<div class=\"ad_banner\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/catalog.openletterbooks.org\/authors\/4-kjaerstad#discoverer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/images\/320.jpg\"  \/><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the next nine days, we&#8217;ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Op Oloop by Juan Filloy. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. (Argentina, Dalkey Archive) I waited years for this book to come out. Years. Back in the early [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[7656,29976,3306,25116,7766,6516],"class_list":["post-276416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-argentine-literature","tag-btba-2010","tag-dalkey-archive","tag-juan-filloy","tag-lisa-dillman","tag-spanish-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334746,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276416\/revisions\/334746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}