Almost like an Exorcism: An Interview with Writer Roque Larraquy

“I think humor is a tool that allows us to make visible the critical relationship between themes and materials explored in the text.”

Disciplines Roque Larraquy Has Studied:
Phrenology
Mesmerism
Alienism

Comemadre, according to one of the narrators of Argentine Roque Larraquy’s short, eponymous novel, is “a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdoms that warrants further study) microscopic larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind; the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.” The only remaining samples of comemadre belong to British gangsters who use it to dispose of evidence, much the way Larraquy himself seems to have done, narratively speaking, with his invented plant. In spite of its titular prominence, comemadre appears only fleetingly in the novel, as if it had been consumed by the larvae of other plot devices, and yet its metaphorical sap is everywhere. Comemadre is a book about liminality, the spaces and connective tissues between things, and the transformations that take place in transit from one world to another, whether they are the taxonomic kingdoms of art and science, or life and death.

Comemadre is divided into two parts. The first takes place in 1907, at a sanatorium in Temperley, Argentina. The narrator is one Doctor Quintana, a physician at quack clinic offering a miracle cancer cure that reels in terminal patients who are then cajoled into participating in a grandiose, metempsychotic research experiment: to learn what awaits us after death. Led by their boss, Quintana and the rest of the clinic staff launch a “scientific” experiment under the hypothesis that, since the brain remains active for several seconds after decapitation, decapitated people will have a slim margin during which they can report on what they see. One of the doctors predicts that the “results will be more like poetry than prose… A fortune-teller’s opacity: ethereal nouns, verbs with no easily identifiable subjects.” When Quintana and his colleagues at last get down to guillotining their patients, their experiment unravels, as does Quintana’s authority over the story he’s telling, which itself seems to become a report from a different world.

The second part of Comemadre is set in Buenos Aires, in 2009. The narrator is an obese gay artist who is responding to a dissertation about his life and work by a scholar at Yale. His novelistic annotation tells the story of his sentimental education from lonely child genius to art-world phenom after he meets a doppelgänger who imitates him and becomes his collaborator. Like the Temperley doctors, he uses the human body—his own, however, in...