The Incompletes

August 26, 2019
In the latest of his discursive novels to be translated, Chejfec (The Planets) composes an intensely ruminative travelogue about a mysterious man. The Argentine narrator thinks back on his compatriot and friend, Felix, who many years ago “decided to leave his country and survive in the world like a wandering planet.” Felix sends back occasional messages from his travels, postcards and notes constituting “only the smallest part of a reality concealed from .” The latest of these missives is written on Moscow hotel stationary, whose logo of an open door seems to invite the narrator to speculate on Felix’s hazy life. The hotel, on the outskirts of Moscow, “would serve perfectly as a residence for outcasts, as a hospice for the terminally ill, or as a graveyard for the living dead.” Its manager, Masha, the narrator imagines, is “an imprecise being with the mutable consistency of a dense fog,” whose life is as circumscribed as Felix’s is boundless. The novel has few characters and fewer events. Masha finds a bundle of old currency in an unoccupied room; Felix follows her on her morning errands. In the narrator’s imaginings, each finds the other unknowable, a mere fabrication or character, an “incomplete” whose true nature, like foreign lands, can never be fully apprehended. This is a dense, knotty read that provides glimpses of murky identities behind half-open doors.

September 15, 2019
A novel of lonesomeness and recollection that takes the construction of characters as its subject. The question "Who's responsible for this?" often takes on a tone of indignation, but in Argentine writer Chejfec's latest novel it's not an admonishment so much as a practical consideration. As the book opens, the narrator informs readers that he is going to tell us a story--"something that happened one night, years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed"--and yet the novel is filled with several stories, large and small, as well as multiple nights and evenings. Just as the missives described by the narrator from his friend Felix grow from postcards to full-blown letters, so too do the accumulated moments grow larger and more significant as the novel moves from Buenos Aires to Barcelona to Moscow, where Felix checks in at the Hotel Salgado. From there Felix's story intersects with that of Masha, the hotel's owner. We're let in on her innermost thoughts and feelings, as we are with Felix's. She's as persistent as Felix is transient, going about her day wrapped in shapeless bundles and gliding across the floors in shearling boots as she completes her tasks. As their stories begin to intertwine and pieces of their stories begin to resemble one another (a woman whom Felix met at lodgings prior to the Hotel Salgado complained to a clerk about losing money in her pants; Masha, while cleaning a room she is staying in, finds a stack of money in the closet), readers are uneasily reminded of the fact that, in the end, neither Felix nor Masha is telling the story at all. They barely say a word--it is the narrator adorning simple correspondence from a friend with drama and stemwinding diction. The effect it conjures gets at the heart of narration in general: What is the responsibility of the storyteller to adhere to the facts as told? Is it possible to ever completely know what happened? If the story is vivid and engaging--as this book is--does it matter? In this innovative novel, Chejfec is gesturing toward the grand European traditions on his own terms.

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