{"id":300246,"date":"2015-01-21T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/01\/21\/fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires-an-attainable-utopia\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:29","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:12:29","slug":"fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires-an-attainable-utopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/01\/21\/fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires-an-attainable-utopia\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia<\/em> (narrated by Julio Cort\u00e1zar) is, not disappointingly, as wild a book as its title suggests. It is a half-novella half-graphic novel story about . . . what, exactly? A European tribunal, Latin American literary figures, a comic book superhero, international conspiracies, an attack on culture, multinational vampires.<\/p>\n

Fantomas<\/em> begins with \u201cthe narrator\u201d reading a Mexican newspaper on a Belgian train (it was the only paper available at the train station), increasingly distracted, in spite of himself, by the comic book he finds inside\u2014an issue of Fantomas<\/em>: \u201cInteligencia en llamas.\u201d It becomes clear that the protagonist, referred to by the narrator as \u201cthe narrator,\u201d is actually Cort\u00e1zar himself. \u201cThe narrator\u2019s\u201d narrative bleeds into that of the comic book he is reading, which pulls in other figures of contemporary literary history, including Octavio Paz, Susan Sontag, and Gabriel Garc\u00eda Marquez.<\/p>\n

The writing is quick and snappy and very funny. It\u2019s also very strange and a little perplexing. A woman at the train station in Brussels only has Mexican newspapers to sell, thinks Mexico is \u201cover near Asia, everyone knows that,\u201d and discusses the delicacies of radioactive hake, all over the course of a page and a half. Later on, the narrator tells Susan Sontag to fuck off. (Actually, not quite. He tells her he \u201cloves her too much to tell her to fuck off.\u201d) The text flows from this strange, funny dialogue pretty seamlessly, almost unnoticeably, into more serious, political things like excerpts of the Russell Tribunal and rhetoric like:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey have a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand names . . . but above all they\u2019re called ITT<\/span>, they\u2019re called Nixon and Ford, Henry Kissinger or CIA<\/span> or DIA<\/span>, they\u2019re called Pinochet or Banzer or Lopez Rega, they\u2019re called General or Colonel or Technocrat or Fleury or Stroessner, they have those special names where every name means thousands of names, the way the word ant<\/em> means a multitude of ants even though the dictionary defines it in the singular.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This, within the very same aforementioned conversation with Ms. Sontag.<\/p>\n

This mixture of ridiculous, hilarious, and somber sincerity carries through in the illustrations as well. The text is interspersed not only with panels from the comic strip, but also other photographs, newspaper excerpts, drawings of Fantomas\u2019s various disguises, and diagrams\u2014one of the passengers in the narrator\u2019s train compartment and another titled \u201cThe CIA<\/span> organizes coups all over the world,\u201d just for two examples.<\/p>\n

An afterword by the translator, David Kurnick, confirmed what I had been wondering the whole time I was reading this book\u2014_is this all real?_ And it is. In 1975 Julio Cort\u00e1zar served on a tribunal in Brussels investigating war crimes in Latin America. Around the same time a comic book called _Fantomas_\u2014originally a superlatively popular antihero in France, Fant\u00f4mas, in the turn of the century\u2014was popular in Mexico. Its writers often featured real, important, contemporary cultural figures. In one (real) issue \u201cInteligencia en llamas,\u201d these were literary figures\u2014Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and yes, Julio Cort\u00e1zar. Cort\u00e1zar used all original illustrations from this issue of Fantomas in his book, writing his plot around them, weaving it into his own.<\/p>\n

The strangest part about the experience of reading this book is that what is strange is not all of the oddities we eventually accept\u2014the conflation of fiction, reality, and comic books, the celebrity guest appearances, the jokes about radioactive fish\u2014but the ending. The whole final quarter of Fantomas<\/em> centers around Susan Sontag\u2019s insistence that Fantomas can\u2019t fight this battle alone, until it crescendos into a sort of rallying cry. Fantomas and Cort\u00e1zar both learn their lesson, and voices from all across South and Central America join together in a call to arms. It feels odd that we\u2019re supposed to take this ending seriously, and yet I did. Fantomas<\/em> is a very funny book; it\u2019s a riot to read, but a riot with a purpose\u2014the utopia is attainable, after all.<\/p>\n

For days after I read this book all I wanted to do was tell people about it. Not recommend it to them, per se (though that was a part of it), but at least just tell them about it. There was this popular Mexican comic book in the 70s, Julio Cort\u00e1zar wrote a book around it, there are vampires (?), he tells Susan Sontag to fuck off (sort of). I only wished I had known about all of this sooner, I kept feeling like I should have known about this sooner. Everyone should know about this book. It\u2019s a real wonder that no one has translated it before now. Reading Fantomas<\/em> is an amazing experience and everyone should have access to it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia (narrated by Julio Cort\u00e1zar) is, not disappointingly, as wild a book as its title suggests. It is a half-novella half-graphic novel story about . . . what, exactly? A European tribunal, Latin American literary figures, a comic book superhero, international conspiracies, an attack on culture, multinational vampires. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[59406,59416,57966,13826,57956,6516],"class_list":["post-300246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cameron-rowe","tag-david-kurnick","tag-fantomas-versus-the-multinational-vampires","tag-julio-cortazar","tag-semiotexte","tag-spanish-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300246","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\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336726,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300246\/revisions\/336726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}