Sleeping With the Enemy
Op woensdag 6 april a.s. spreekt de Cubaans-Amerikaanse schrijfster Ana Menéndez de Tweede Cola Debrot-lezing uit in de Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam (klik hier voor meer informatie en het reserveren van kaarten). The New York Times besprak vorig jaar haar laatste boek, The Last War.
by Gaiutra Bahadur
The narrator of The Last War has received an anonymous letter accusing her war correspondent husband of infidelity. So, unfortunately, did the book’s author. It speaks to Ana Menéndez’s maturity — as a woman and a writer — that her novel doesn’t go where it might have. It doesn’t constitute literary payback.
Sure, it’s clear to a small, knowing circle that Brando, the character cast as a cheater, is an avatar of Menéndez’s ex-husband, Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter formerly based in Iraq. And yes, she does kill Brando off in a roadside bomb attack. But blowing him up only makes him a martyr to the cause of journalism, and Menéndez ultimately vindicates Brando, having a woman he had a chance to seduce tell his wife: “He was loyal to you.” The book even includes the prominent acknowledgment: “To Dexter Filkins, who showed me the whole world, my everlasting gratitude and affection.”
The details about the letter to Menéndez surfaced publicly in 2005, but barely registered beyond the small community of working journalists. So extraliterary interest goes only so far as a justification for heeding the novel, the third work of fiction by Menéndez, a former columnist for The Miami Herald. Nor is its insight into the commonplace drama of possible adultery especially acute. The narrator, Flash, is a photojournalist. She and her husband are a team, veterans of joint overseas assignments. The letter’s appearance at their home in Istanbul, where she waits before joining Brando in Baghdad, causes her to wander the city in a mawkish fog of doubt, interrogating the past.
The Last War is best when it emerges from this cloud into the clear air where Menéndez began, before her own tear-gas canister of a letter landed. She has said that the letter, arriving as she was midway through her writing, altered it radically. The novel was originally intended to evoke the macabre merry-go-round of reporters who have whirled in and out of Iraq — and, thankfully, it still does. It remains a character study of those who have found their purpose in bearing witness to bloodshed. The truth of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a book by the journalist Chris Hedges on the perverse hold of war on whole societies, resonates for them in the most immediate way. As it turns out, Flash shares this affliction with Brando. And it isn’t just a case of adrenaline addiction.
Flash’s memories keep returning to a scene that unfolded in Afghanistan, where she was on assignment with Brando. After witnessing an execution in a stadium, she saw two boys poking the ground with a stick. When she realized they were tormenting a gecko, she grabbed the stick and whacked one of the boys with it, over and over again. Her breakdown complicates the novel in welcome ways. It makes Flash’s Afghan translator — and others in her group — dislike her. It makes the reader’s feelings about her more conflicted. And it leads to an encounter that tests her own fidelity.
The scene also hints at the broken psyches that pull certain people to spectacles of violence — including a few who have risked their lives to report on the conflict in Iraq. “We were the war junkies,” Flash says, “endlessly drawn to the ragged margins where other people hated and died. It was as if we believed constant movement would deliver us finally from the disappointments of an ordinary life.” The Last War shows how that instinct can lead to dispatches about the bedroom, as well as those from the war zone.
The Last War by Ana Menéndez
225 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99
Gaiutra Bahadur reported from Baghdad for the Knight Ridder newspapers in 2005.
[uit The New York Times, June 24, 2009]
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