Lola Robles’s El Informe Monteverde — also available in an English translation by Lawrence Schimel as Monteverde (published by Aqueduct) — is an odd, pensive, charming little book. I think it’s the first book I have ever tagged with the “relaxing” mood on Storygraph? and I’m now looking forward to reading all of the rest of her work as soon as I can get my hands on it.
El Informe Monteverde has a somewhat circuitous publishing history. it was originally published in 2005, and the English translation is based on that edition, but the 2018 edition I have has been somewhat expanded (possibly based on changes made for the English translation? this information is only in the blurb and ambiguously phrased). this edition includes a handful of black and white illustrations by Marina Vidal, done in a fairly sketchy style that I think suits the contents of the book.
the novel is a composed of collection of fragments — excerpts from an interview transcript, passages from a doctoral dissertation, journal entries — of the work of Rachel Monteverde, a field Linguist assigned by the Society for the Study of Interstellar Languages to document the languages of the planet Aanuk, home to two populations, both relatively recent arrivals: the Aanukiens, a pastoral culture most of whom continue to practice traditional transhumance but some of whom have, following renewed contact with interstellar society, settled in small towns; and the Fihdia, a congenitally blind society who live in caves and are often active at night. Rachel is to be the first Linguist (more on that capital letter in a moment) to document both cultures’ languages, a project that takes her in unexpected directions and opens her to new perspectives.
and that’s it: that’s the plot, such as it is. this is a novel that meanders, letting us follow the shifts in Rachel’s thoughts and attitudes over the more than four years she ultimately spends on Aanuk. we see her get to know the Aanukiens; we see her, with some difficulty, finally come to meet the Fihdia; we see her try to reconcile what she comes to know of the Fihdia with the Aanukiens’ perspective on their neighbors; and we see her try — with mixed success — to make sense of two cultures that are organized radically differently than the world she has come from.
some of Robles’s influences are easy to identify: Le Guin looms large, in particular, I think, but this reminded most strongly in some ways of Rocannon’s World rather than any of the later Hainish Cycle novels (though there are also certain echoes of The Dispossessed). Elia Barceló, I think, is here, too — the pacing of the novel reminded me of El mundo de Yarek (itself a clear homage to Rocannon’s World), and its interest in communication has something in common with Consecuencias naturales/Natural Consequences, and perhaps also with Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton in the latter’s interest in communication across different systems of meaning, though it explicitly brackets both Barceló’s and Delany’s interest in gendered subjectivity. this is a book about language per se.
the parts of the book I found most striking were, first, some of the background world-building. while the substance of the novel is very different, it seems likely that Robles has at least read Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, as she presents a world where the Society for the Study of Interstellar Languages is not simply an academic body but a powerful political and economic organization, because communication is the basis of trade. Linguists — and the Society — have institutional power because their work is essential to open up new markets across the many worlds, known and as-yet-unknown, that are inhabited by the human(oid) descendants of the long-destroyed planet known as Una who colonized the galaxy millennia ago. much to unpack here!
while it sits in the background, the questions that this framing raises loom over Rachel’s work, in light of the ambivalent position of the Aanukiens as, notionally, galactic citizens (there is a small spaceport on the planet, visited once or twice a year at most, and a few hundred Aanukiens were educated offworld) but also as “primitive” anthropological subjects. there’s a particularly interesting moment where Rachel describes the Society’s director’s comments on her preliminary report, which caution her against seeing the Aanukiens as, in effect, noble savages — a caution that, Rachel implies, says more about the director’s own assumptions about what her report on Aanuk must be like than it does about the actual contents of her report.
and then there is the portrayal of the Fihdia. at first glance, the Fihdia seem to emerge from common, stereotyped ideas about blindness, incorporating on the one hand a pitiful kind of grotesqueness (the Fihdia are insular, ugly, theocratic, literal troglodytes, etc.) and, on the other, a romanticization of blindness as ascetic and intellectual (the Fihdia are wise, profound, the “head” to the Aanukiens’ “heart”). as the novel progresses, however, it becomes apparent that Robles was aware of these stereotypes and was, in fact, invoking them deliberately through Rachel’s perspective: as she comes to know the Fihdia, she comes to know them as people in their own right — neither Pitifully Disabled nor Wise and Prophetic, but people. if I were to identify the climax of the novel, I would say it’s a brief conversation between two of Rachel’s friends, the Aanukien Ridra and the Fihdia Guutiga-Nama, where Ridra — who has recently been in the care of the Fihdia after, essentially, a mental breakdown — offers, unprompted, an explanation of several colors not from a sighted starting point but by analogy with the sounds, textures, smells, and emotions through which the Fihdia interact with the world. Guutiga-Nama offers, then, a prayer in the secret, sacred language of the tanka-la-intu, the Fihdia’s priestesses:
–En el gutia –nos dijo la fihdia– hay trescientos ochenta y ocho salmos. Todos tienen su razón y su momento de ser, dirigidos a la divinidad. En este caso, le doy las gracias porque tengo amigas que me han enseñado algo que no sabía sobre el mundo.
[“In Gutia,” the Fihdia told us, “there are three hundred eighty-eight psalms. All of them have their reason and their moment for being, directed at the Divinity. In this case, I give thanks to her because I have friends who have shown me something I didn’t know about the world.”]
while I would say the novel ultimately does not entirely escape Rachel’s initial condescension, I appreciated this affirmation of the value of communication, the idea that there is something wonderful — something worth rejoicing in, thanking a god for if you believe in one — about the possibility of getting to know others and understanding their perspectives. that we should be grateful to be able to learn something about the world that we didn’t know before.
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