Gaming the system

LIKE a lot of American readers, I have come to equate Latin American fiction with magical realism, that style of playful and exotic world-bending most closely associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With a title like “Turing’s Delirium” and a blurb from Mario Vargas Llosa on the cover, Edmundo Paz Soldan’s recently translated 2002 novel has all the markings of another romp through the colorful lives of folksy Latins who whip up enchanted aphrodisiacs made with chocolate and local herbs. Instead, Soldan, who won the Bolivian national book award for this, his sixth novel, has crafted a bleak but engaging quasi-thriller that follows a handful of disenchanted people through a disenchanted place: Rio Fugitivo, an invented contemporary city marked by civil unrest, cyber-crime and psychological stress.

Soldan is one of a number of Latin American writers associated with the McOndo literary movement. Rejecting magical realism, which some of these writers see as an exotic and politically correct export aimed for a Euro-American market, the McOndo writers instead embrace gritty urban realism -- a style fit to explore their concerns with money, power and pleasure in a globalized, technological world. In the place of Macondo -- the fabulous village that Marquez evoked in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” -- these writers look through their windows (and computer screens) and see a world of McDonald’s restaurants, iMacs and condos.

The protagonist of “Turing’s Delirium” is Miguel Saenz, a professional crypto-analyst whose glory days are behind him. Nicknamed after the famous British code breaker and computer scientist Alan Turing, our nonhero works in the Black Chamber, a code-breaking facility set up during Rio Fugitivo’s right-wing 1970s by Turing’s beloved boss Albert, a former CIA agent. Montenegro, the dictator that Turing and Albert served back in the day, has been reelected. Montenegro is committed to privatization, but the GloboLux corporation that owns Rio Fugitivo’s power has just called for massive rate hikes, and thousands of protesters are filling the streets -- an almost prophetic anticipation of the 2003 demonstrations against plans to export Bolivia’s natural gas. But in Soldan’s more technological take of such tumultuous times, Rio Fugitivo’s government and corporations are also being attacked by powerful computer viruses unleashed by the Resistance, a mysterious group of hackers associated with the Playground, a popular online virtual world.

And if all this weren’t enough, torrential rains are pounding the city.

With short, taut chapters and plenty of realistic detail, “Turing’s Delirium” exploits the plot twists found in much popular fiction; at the same time, Soldan keeps the pulp at literary bay by bringing to the foreground the conflicted interiority of his characters. Turing, whom Soldan wants us to identify with, is an apolitical geek whose loyalty to Albert and obsession with codes prevent him from perceiving the truth about his own life. His regretful wife, Ruth, who left the cruelties of the Black Chamber for academia, decides to come clean to vengeful Judge Cardona, who believes that the murder of his beloved cousin, a leftist activist in the 1970s, can be traced back to the Rio Fugitivo code breakers.

Soldan also crafts a number of younger characters who represent a new digitized Latin America: Turing’s young boss, a slick half-American bureaucrat, the troubled hacker Kandinsky and Turing’s daughter Flavia, a dreadlocked teen who tracks the world of Latin American hackers on her popular website.

There is little light or playfulness in these lives. While this bleakness accurately expresses the anxious texture of contemporary urban life, I suspect that it also reflects Soldan’s stylistic rejection of magical realism, with its fantastic if temporary escapes. In his portrayals of Turing and Albert, the author wants to show how the unleashed human imagination, with its powers of fabulation, can do violence to reality. Turing is blinded by his near-mystical, delirious obsession with codes, and Albert lies on his sickbed dreaming that he is the reincarnation of all the great cryptographers of history. Albert’s ragged and oracular stream of consciousness can be read as a demented parody of the circular and recurrent sense of history and character in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Soldan’s stylistic stance certainly has its limits. Besides imprisoning most of his characters in an airless chamber of anomie, realism prevents the author from presenting an adequate portrayal of the Playground, a fictional, massive online game that loosely resembles online games such as “EverQuest” and “Second Life.” Described in absurdly “realistic” terms, Playground is paradoxically unbelievable.

In other words, to realistically capture our postmodern world, you must understand fabulation. The world of online gaming is already evidence that a kind of magical realism has entered the technologies that now weave the social fabric. Only when the power goes out -- increasingly a possibility in Rio Fugitivo and here -- can we hope to put that genie back in the bottle.