Telenovela by Gonzalo C. Garcia

Review by Victoria Best

The telenovela is a uniquely Latin American creation. It began as the radionovela, a drama told in episodes of 15 minutes that was broadcast during the daytime as entertaining catnip to entice workers back to their factories – the only place where they had access to a radio. With the advent of television in the 1950s, it evolved into a set of 120 half hour episodes whose tone and content were lushly melodramatic and aimed now at housewives. Their overblown plots were often variants of the Cinderella theme, in which a female protagonist would struggle out of poverty by means of romance and hard work. They were entertainment but they also posed a question about what a person might get out of their life, what they might achieve. Popular culture is, after all, the imaginary space where popular fantasy is born and nurtured, and to dismiss it as lightweight or unimportant is to make a serious interpretative error. In Telenovela, the dream of a rich and glorious future is the only solace the characters have, whilst the oppression they endure is neither factory work nor domestic tedium but an authoritarian state.

Telenovela takes place in 1988 during the run up to the referendum on Pinochet’s military dictatorship and has an end of times feel to it. The novel focuses on one family whose links with the regime have affected them more severely than they realise. Lucho, his wife Ramona, and their son Pablo will take turns to carry the close third person narrative as revolutionary tension escalates in Santiago, and their relationships to one another fall apart.

To some extent, this is Ramona’s story, as her link to the telenovela is the most obvious. She’s an unrequited actress, trained and full of supersized fantasies about her eventual stardom. She spends a lot of time at the gym, lost in flights of fancy, imagining herself on a popular chat show, heralded as ‘A true people’s celebrity’ and surrounded by an audience ‘who couldn’t believe their luck, being so near to Ramona’. But she’s never acted professionally, having failed to win the starring role she wanted on a telenovela. She turned down in humiliated fury the bit part she was offered, and became a teacher. Since then we know that she’s spent a significant amount of time in a therapy clinic and her dreams of success are on the other end of a mental seesaw weighed down by self-hatred and depression. Middle-aged, overweight and forced onto a diet of positive thinking, Ramona is an empty shell, desperate to find a way back to herself.

Lucho has had his own creative dreams crushed. Put into the army at 17, he was swiftly estranged from the rest of his company when they found out that he wanted to write poetry and that ‘his father was none other than Captain Angel Diaz – the hero, the leader, the man.’ Angel was tight with the military dictatorship and ran The Region, a paper that was essentially propaganda. Over the course of the story, we’ll find out the extent of his abusive behaviour, and also Lucho’s response to it. But initially we meet Lucho with sympathy, the faggot poet of his regiment who has swapped his dreams of writing poetry for creating fiction in his father’s style, his recent promotion requiring him to ‘write up the nation’s inventory, and there will be nothing but abundance.’ Lucho believes ‘there was something heroic in how well he learnt to love and hate the right things,’ but what those right things are, and the real extent of Lucho’s submission to them, will chart the course of his story. The revelations about Lucho really power the plot, making him the kingpin of the drama.

Pablo is an adolescently bewildered mixture of his parents. He’s obsessed with playing his guitar and finding validation through making music – ‘His music would come on in people’s cars and they’d be thankful for the traffic because they’d get to hear the full song’ – but he’s feeling out of place in Santiago, separated from his old band and his old girlfriend. He does have a new guitar, though, since his father, in a fit of rage, shot the last one and then, in a fit of remorse, bought him a new one. Their relationship is conflicted because Pablo’s youthful anarchy is anathema to his father, who hates the music his son favours: ‘“These bastards confuse freedom of expression with the ability to enrage crowds,”’ Lucho says, and Pablo wonders ‘If his father really knew one song to be better than another, why did the bad one have to be excised? Why not let it die a natural death, alone?’ But for all this, Pablo is also aware that something of his father exists inside him, what his father calls ‘common sense’ and what Pablo fears is a cold aridity of the soul. Maybe it’s this aridity that means Pablo’s attempts to compose music are all in vain; he’s ‘songless’ and he often feels like he can’t breathe.

So, Garcia presents us with a family who are all simultaneously devoted to, and dislocated from, the arts. Drifting through each character’s narrative are the ghostly traces of their creativity – fragments of Lucho’s poetry, the scripts from the telenovela that Ramona failed to get a part in, and bars of music. The work of the novel will be to put creativity within their reach – or within an illusion of it in any case – as Lucho is asked to track down a poet whose presence embarrasses the current regime, and Pablo finds a new avant garde band to play with, and Ramona meets a woman at the gym whose husband will cast her in his commercials. Garcia’s brilliance here is to convince us of the genuine passion his characters have for their art, whilst making us realise how impossible it is for them to create in a state of self-alienation. Art requires permission, lacking in an authoritarian regime where the possibility of thinking differently is foreclosed. Intriguingly, the ‘real’ poet in this novel, who appears in a kind of cameo role, escapes the regime entirely and has no qualms about his agency. Art both contains and deploys real power; there are reasons why our characters long to create it.

The other essential strand of this novel is intergenerational trauma. Garcia shows us how the family is the place where culture and history meet and that this space is often unconsciously saturated with ideology. One scene that really struck me was a memory Lucho has of his father tearing a page of poetry about Ramona out of Lucho’s notebook and crumpling it in his fist. ‘“Men in love become a bore,”’ his father says, ‘“They become fragile.”’ Offering his fist to Lucho he tells him that he can have the page back and finish writing the poem if he can wrest it from his grasp. Lucho tries but his father is too strong. ‘“Try harder,” his father had said, “you’re not trying – let me buy you a dress, madam.’” The phrase toxic masculinity is old coinage now, but it strikes me, reading this, that if men are brought up to despise every quality that might be called feminine, then how are they truly to love women? There’s a thread in this novel of missing mothers. Lucho’s mother – an artist – leaves her intolerable life with his father, and Ramona leaves Pablo, when her own life becomes intolerable, for the clinic. Lucho has no idea how to reach Ramona in her sadness, and Pablo’s fury with women who let him down will ultimately provoke the family’s final disintegration. And so perhaps it’s emotionally logical that despite everything, this novel ends on a note of hope for its female characters. To think that love equals fragility is a fundamental psychological error – it’s the qualities of kindness, gentleness, compassion, the qualities that connect us all together, that provide a society’s strength.

Telenovela is a fascinating book, profound, intricate, subtle and intelligent. It’s stayed with me and keeps offering new perspectives, because it’s nothing if not timely. Pinochet’s Chile in 1988 has far too many points of contact with the most disturbing aspects of American and British culture, not least the soap opera quality of society in chaos. In Telenovela, the lives of the characters are dissolving into melodrama in acts of betrayal and abandonment, police raids and revolutionary violence, whilst their inner worlds are dazzled by fantasies of glittering prizes. It doesn’t seem very far away from the mess that is late-stage selfish capitalism. There’s an unusual energy operating in this text that creates both restless apathy and sullen explosions of rebellion. It’s the energy of despair, I think, that Garcia transforms into surreal scenes more than harrowing ones. But the careful, detailed portraits of his characters mean that we can’t fall back on easy stereotypes or write them off as heroes and villains. Instead, Garcia points out how simple it is for people to become complicit in authoritarian states, when what’s right is a fixed commodity offering people an easy way out of negotiating the complex differences between us. It’s work that we neglect at our peril. As Garcia writes, ‘when distance grows between people, cruelty becomes a simpler endeavour.’ In the madness we currently seem to be living, I thought this statement was the clearest route back to sanity that I’d heard.

Victoria is a co-founder of Shiny, and editor at large.

Gonzalo C. Gracia, Telenovela (Galley Beggar Press, 2025). 978-1913111717, 200pp., paperback original.

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