Stunning.
I meant to refer to my notes to write a review, but my notes consist of the line "Holy shit this is immediately amazing," followed by a whole bunch of adjectives and superlatives. So I guess here we go: Compelling, moody, enigmatic, uncanny, philosophical, eerie, careful, skillful, elusive, ...luminous?
A rich story that is more than anything a meditation on what and how we consider civilization. ( )

Interesting premise but a bit disappointing. A few dozen children in a tight age range from 9-12 mysteriously gathering from around the country in a border town butting up against the dense primitive rainforest, with all it represents, and creating their own sort of return to a state of nature could be an exploration of responses to contemporary crisis, ecological and societal, and to some extent it is. The children create a new language, spend most of their time taking pleasure in leaderless play, and find food where they can. Interestingly the dark side of human nature is still present in the children, the author is not presenting them as a utopian community by any means - most clearly shown when the children rampage through a supermarket, and a few of them find knives and stab two adults in the store to death, an unpremeditated action that speaks to what we are capable of, and will remain capable of, whatever society we invent.

The defection of some of the town's children to this community, panicking the town's adults who fear losing their children to this future, is a great storytelling development, however it is fatally undercut by setting this story two decades after the events told. The reader knows this is all over, not even all that recent, and clearly nothing much has changed. It was an outlier, a curiosity, not something that could spool out into who knows what as time and pages go by. It's contained. It's over. Nothing similar has happened in twenty years, so while interesting, there's not much of any tension. Too bad. ( )

¿Qué tiene que suceder para que nos veamos obligados a redefinir nuestra idea de la infancia? La aparición de treinta y dos niños violentos de procedencia desconocida trastoca por completo la vida de San Cristóbal, una pequeña población tropical encajonada entre la selva y el río. Veinte años después, uno de sus protagonistas redacta esta República luminosa, una crónica tejida de hechos, pruebas y rumores sobre cómo la ciudad se vio obligada a reformular no solo su idea del orden y la violencia sino hasta la misma civilización durante aquel año y medio en que, hasta su muerte, los niños tomaron la ciudad.

Tensa y angustiosa, con la nitidez del Conrad de El corazón de las tinieblas, Barba suma aquí, a su habitual audacia narrativa y su talento para las situaciones ambiguas, la dimensión de una fábula metafísica y oscura que tiene el aliento de los grandes relatos.

Das Buch handelt von der fiktiven Stadt San Cristobal im real existierenden Argentinien. Eines Tages tauchen dort ca. 30 fremde Kinder auf. Sie sind tagsüber einfach in der Stadt und verschwinden nachts.

Die Geschichte beschreibt, wie die Bewohner:innen der Stadt keinen Umgang mit dieser Situation finden, von Ignoranz über Abwehr führt sie in ein angekündigtes Desaster.

Eine beeindruckende Story mit gelungenen psychoanalytischen Anspielungen. Dennoch habe ich lange gebraucht, um in das Buch hineinzufinden. ( )

Edmund White, introducing Lisa Dillman’s English translation of República Luminosa on Granta Books, describes Andrés Barba’s novel as “Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness”, whilst admitting that this is how a Hollywood hack would pitch it and that it gives only “the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book”. Juan Gabriel Vásquez considers it as “Lord of the Flies seen from the other side” but is quick to add that this “would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world”.

What leads these respected authors to describe this novel in these ecstatic terms? Let’s start with the easy part, that is, the comparison to Lord of the Flies. There is, indeed, a vague similarity between the premise of Barba’s novel and Golding’s work. A Luminous Republic is set in San Cristóbal, a (fictional) tropical city in Argentina bordered by a river and a jungle. The residents of the city are used to seeing poor, indigenous children around, a symbol of the uneasy conviviality between the urban settlers and its three thousand Ňeê inhabitants. However, in 1994, the town dwellers notice a new phenomenon. Thirty-two feral children descend on the city. These vagrants are not Ňeê, nor is it ever clear from where they’re coming from. They seem to stick together, communicating in an indecipherable language. At first, the thirty-two are little more than a nuisance. Then, they attack a supermarket, killing two adults in the process. Terror mounts when the adults realise that the thirty-two exert some sort of psychological influence over the other children of San Cristóbal, casting a cloud of suspicion on all young people of the town.

The narrator of A Luminous Republic is a social worker who, two decades after the events, recounts the so-called “altercations” between the children and the inhabitants of San Cristobál and the manhunt mounted to catch them. One of the intriguing characteristics of the novel is that it shows us as much about this flawed narrator as it does about the events described. Not unlike District Prosecutor Chacaltana in Roncagliolo’s Red April, the narrator adopts a formal “civil servant” style in his account, sprinkling his ‘factual’ report with references to newspaper articles, documentaries, and learned studies. We realise, however, that he had a central role in the events in question and participated in some of the dubious decisions taken at the time, and so he is hardly the unbiased reporter he makes himself out to be. His ruminations about these dark events are also linked to his relationship with his wife Maia (who, unlike him, is a Ňeê), and her daughter from a previous marriage, also called Maia, whom he refers to as “the girl”. In the “altercations” between the thirty-two and the San Cristobálians there runs throughout a sense of “us and them”. There is the same diffidence between the narrator and his wife. Despite the love he feels for her, there are parts of her which remain elusive. His attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery of the thirty-two mirror his attempt to understand his companion.

White considers A Luminous Republic as an epic novel. At just 200 pages or so “it can be read in one evening” but it feels as “full” as if it were a “1000 page novel”. I would say, rather, that it feels as if it were several novels rolled into one. It’s a weird tale, a piece of speculative (supernatural? magical realist?) fiction, a Gothic fantasy, an adventure story, but also a philosophical fable which explores (and explodes) prevalent ideas about the innocence of childhood and asks pertinent questions about the demarcation good and evil.

What I found particularly surprising is that despite the “formal” tone which the narrator tends to adopt, there are passages of striking visual beauty. We get a taste of this from the very first pages, when we first glimpse San Cristóbal, with its colours “flat, vital and insanely bright: the jungle’s intense green… the earth’s brilliant red, the blue sky so dazzling it forced you into a constant squint, the dense brown of the river Eré extending four kilometres shore to shore…” But this becomes most evident in the novel’s conclusion – when we can finally understand what the “luminous republic” of the title refers to. These passages have haunting poetry which will remain with me for a long time.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2020/04/andres-barba-a-luminous-republic.html ( )