A History of Money
By Alan Pauls
Melville House
197 pages, $24.95
By Ed Taylor
Anointed as one of the best of his companeros among the continent’s living writers by the late Latin American fiction god Roberto Bolaño, Alan Pauls is a novelist, film critic, teacher and magazine editor. Pauls’ “A History Of Money,” published by a good new literary trade press, offers support for Bolaño’s assessment, as a dense, rich, slyly poetic and intense imagining of the life of a son, a father, and a mother and through them the life of Argentina from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Pauls uses Argentina’s currency during that period – five different currencies; pesos moneda nacional, pesos ley 18.188, pesos argentinos, australs, and the peso convertible – as literal and metaphoric markers of time and turmoil during the life of the three family members, set in the context of Argentina’s chaotic economy and unstable political life.
When the story begins in the 1970s the country is still ruled by military dictatorship and its “Dirty War,” which continued into the 1980s (five military coups preceded that one, earlier in the 20th century), and the son is a boy. The son grows up shuttling back and forth between his father and his mother and her new husband. When the story ends in the 2000s, the country is democratically governed but still facing upheaval and instability.
In between, in a close third-person narrative from the son’s point of view, Pauls traces the big currents of public life through the complex lives of individuals deep within those currents and money, and a symbolic building project taken on by the boy’s mother and second husband, which begins life innocuously enough as a planned vacation house. The house eventually becomes “The Beast,” and destroys the mother’s marriage and derails her life.
The father embodies a major aspect of Argentinean society, the underground economy, and is a man who proudly and skillfully makes a life and career while never having either a checking account or a credit card. His life is money, and numbers, tracked in seven notebooks discovered after his death by the son, and representing in essence a diary; with the numbers like paper pellets dropped into water that unfold into flowers, or a life, re-created.
The notebooks are the father’s running total of his life – and by extension, the lives of others in this transient, confusing world where prices aren’t listed on store items because prices fluctuate so drastically and so suddenly, and solvency and insolvency for most people exist balanced on a razor’s edge.
The twin stories of the disintegrating mother and the unsinkable father come together in the son, watching, buoyed on a fitful current of luck and money into early middle age. In long intensely observed complex sentences, Pauls moves through this world with compassion and understanding and even shades of humor, offering an absorbing story translated with muscle and imagination by Ellie Robbins.
Ed Taylor is a teacher of literature and a freelance Buffalo critic.