Book Review: A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba

´How does one love in a world with no points of reference?´

I rarely read a book because it is compared to another one, as I prefer original ideas and work of arts. Although in case the book compared to is one of my favorites, I would definitely be tempted to give it a try - depending on the terms of the comparison. However, I will never read a book because compared to one I haven´t like it. My top reference in this respect is Dr. Jivago by Boris Pasternark - when it comes to dissident writings. Another one is The Lord of Flies by William Golding. 

The multitude of references for A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba (translated by Lisa Dillman) including a wise foreword by Edmund White made me change my mind and eventually spend some good weekend hours in the company of this book. 

Told at the first person by an unnamed civil servant by the Department of Social Affairs, it reveals the fate of 32 children that used to live in the jungle area neighbouring the subtropical town of San Cristobal.TIt is a short read but very intense, as it tackle gently yet frontally the basis even of our society. Why? Because of the basic perception of how children must behave. Especially from the time of the Romantic times onwards, the child is considered a pure creature, who´s perverted by the society. Rousseau is talking about ´le bon sauvage´, the good savage, as a description of a ´mythical´ condition of our ancestors living in a natural environment, friendly environment.

´Humankind systematically personifies anything it does not understand, from planets to atoms´.

The events are placed at the end of the 1990s. The street children are feared not only because they are potential or actual criminals, but because they are shaking the average perception of how adults and children should behave. When this linear, evolutionary projection is broken, the society reacts because it feels threatened. The interactions between the 32 children - that will die in the end, being killed - and the adult inhabitants of the city are building up on fears, threats and positions of power. There is no ´original grace´ in this children, and life in the jungle made them even wilder, because nature operates differently than the intellectual assumptions assume to. ´Jungle green is the true color of death (...) The green that devours everything, an enormous, thirsty, mottled, stifling, powerful expanse in which the strong are sustained by the weak, the great steal the light from the small and only the microscopic and diminutive can stagger giants´.

On a large scale ideatic projection, the story is a metaphor for colonialism and the modern/industrialist expansion against nature. However, there is a naturalistic contradiction of the myth of the childhood purity as well. If anyone had the occasion to observe street children in their everyday life interaction or children that lived through trauma, like war, they may notice the violent-oriented behavior. We may not expect them to do it because we idealize childhood, but the human nature operates in a human environment mostly, rarely in one created by literary projections and ideas.

A Luminous Republic is a cruel story with a deeply realistic take. The tempered flow of the story and the slow pace of the narrator, interlinking the events with personal encounters, neats the corners of a story of human cowardice. It must not always be like that, but in this case, that´s the case.

Rating: 4 stars