Impressions: 'Caterva' by Juan Filloy

How this Argentine writer escaped the English speaking world for so long is a mystery to me. Caterva (meaning ‘Horde’ or Rabble’) is a highly dense, playful, comedic novel which follows a rag tag group of would-be revolutionaries throughout the Argentine countryside looking to spark a worker’s revolution.

There’s hardly a ‘plot’ to speak of but the novel is full of linguistic games, philosophical explorations, comedic episodes, political insights, and a tremendous amount of word play which will have some readers running for the dictionary.

From 1937, the novel is a creature of its time and in a lot of ways far ahead of it. While reading it, one thinks of novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, whose equally dense and playful novels wouldn’t appear until over 20 years later. Fans of Pynchon’s work should read this. They’ll find a kindred spirit.

Dense, sometimes surreal, mysterious, funny, Caterva is one of those novels (like Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’) that one will come back to again and again and always find something new and interesting to contemplate. It may take some time to read this — and one may not digest all it has to offer — but it’s well worth the read.

Translated from the Spanish by Brendan Riley

Caterva is available here