Glaxo

Starred review from December 12, 2016
Argentinian novelist Ronsino’s compact, atmospheric English-translation debut follows four characters—Vardemann, Bicho Souza, Miguelito Barrios, and Ramón Folcada—for 40 years at the end of the 20th century. The small Argentinian industrial town of Glaxo, with its eponymous factory and incessant train traffic, creates a gritty, noirish backdrop, accentuated by repeated references to Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in the film Last Train from Gun Hill. When Folcada suspects his stunning, inscrutable wife, La Negra Miranda, of infidelity, he sets a trap, in the process revealing details about his own past that shape the story and force the reader back to the book’s beginning for the subtle, closely observed details that breathe life into four narratives shifting in time. The author knows his Faulkner, and the story’s central figure, Vardemann (the same name given a credulous child in Faulkner’s modernist masterpiece As I Lay Dying), a barber who relates his story in brief, repetitive snapshot vignettes, is a sly homage to the modern novel. Ronsino’s story leads, finally, to a surprising conclusion during Folcada’s stream-of-consciousness admissions. Though easily read in one sitting, the novel packs a mean, memorable punch.

October 15, 2016
Argentine novelist Ronsino's debut in English, a brief, brooding novel set on the windswept edge of the pampas.Not much happens in Chivilcoy, which, though in the province of Buenos Aires, might as well be on the moon. The story opens ominously, in 1973, when workers come without notice and dig up the town's rail link to the outside, leaving the massive Glaxo factory an island out on the grassland. The narrator is one of four figures who, in this gloomy place, play a part in a killing whose motives are obscure, recapitulated, in a way, by a finger-shooting game in which bored kids re-enact a gunfight from a Western film. Jealousy plays its part as the Dulcinea of the piece, the lovely La Negra Miranda, provokes the requisite deadly sins while pretty much minding her own business. All these years later, and she has gone, and, as the second narrator, now speaking from a vantage point a quarter-century after the events, says, "Here, in the Don Pedrin, Lucio Montes tells me about a ghost, because to name La Negra Miranda is like naming a ghost." She is not the only specter, not the only secret the little town seeks to hide as it tries to forget the killing of an innocent--and, at the same time, the involvement of some of its inhabitants in the murderous dictatorship of the 1970s and the punishment of some who committed no crime; jealousy is one thing, but wanton and casual violence is quite another. Allusive and reserved, as if peeking out at the scene of the crime from behind drawn curtains, Ronsino's short novel has an almost claustrophobic feel to it; if the only way to escape the place is to be imprisoned or drafted, the only way to get out of the narrative is to see people at their indifferent worst. An atmospheric mystery that is never obvious.

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