El avispero (novela corta) by Luis Bonafoux (review)

Not all forgotten writers merit recuperation, and a reading of El avispero (novela corta) may very well show that Luis Bonafoux (1855–1918) is a case in point. It is true, as Luis Álvarez-Castro outlines in his introduction, that Bonafoux had a history. Among the most polemical figures of his day, he lived in limbo between nations, attacked almost everything in his path, and relished the scandal that followed him as a self-identified crusader of Justice. Born in France, he spent his early years in Puerto Rico due to family ties, and after his university studies in Madrid, returned to the island to practice law. The plan proved short-lived, however, when his provocative publication on the lasciviousness of the carnival brought him the ire of the local people and an unexpected expulsion. Three countries and as many duels later, Bonafoux went on to become a fixture in the periodical scene of Madrid and, later, Paris, often serving as a correspondent from the French side of the Pyrenees. He also had a stint in Cuba, which is noteworthy for its relevance to his fiction, but there, too, the situation quickly soured. His life ultimately ran its course in London, following the death of his beloved wife, and what little legacy he still enjoys today stems, primarily, from the allegations of plagiarism and public offensive he leveled at Leopoldo Alas.

His first and only novel shares this history. Published in 1892, with evidence to suggest copies were circulating in 1891, El avispero (novela corta) reflects the chaos that defined Bonafoux’s life and the age in which he wrote. Raw, ego-driven, and cynical, it is also something of an anomaly for its fragmentary, experimental nature and colonial settings. Álvarez-Castro, for his part, points out that it is a transitional work representative of emerging aesthetic shifts and social currents of the day, such as decadence. What little plot there is begins with Manuel Roldán, who is an autobiographical projection colored by the author’s unwieldy will to style, and his Madrid fling in chapter three with Pitusa, a young woman powerless against the corrupting forces of an ugly world. The rest takes place back in Majagua, a fictional city inspired by Bonafoux’s time in San Juan and Havana, after Roldán returns to his colonial homeland of petty quarrels, hypocrisy, and vileness. Within this frame, we witness the death of Adela, the protagonist’s pure-hearted sister, and the horror provoked by the mixing of races. Plagued by tropes of the erotic tropics and a pseudo-sentimental lexicon in disharmony with the clinician’s metaphoric scalpel, Bonafoux’s writing is less confident, less original, and less coherent with each successive chapter. Indeed, when the disconnected episodes interspersed with epistolary exchanges and pushed forward by transparent shifts of narrative circumstance finally conclude with, “¡Manolo se moría!” (139), the scene could not be more anticlimactic.

Still, a Bonafoux left to oblivion would be counterproductive, and for this reason, Álvarez-Castro’s efforts are to be commended. For one, an appreciation of Bonafoux’s personal history reveals a seldom-seen panorama of the period on both sides of the Atlantic. To be sure, the edition’s introduction has shortcomings. The dependence on lengthy quotations in an effort to make evident what everyone else had to say about Bonafoux results in a patchwork of secondary sources that predominate the prose. Moreover, there is an imbalance between the attention paid to Bonafoux’s biography and what might be considered meaningful about the novel and other works included in the appendix. Bonafoux is presented as a problematic writer, but the writing itself is not problematized enough. Álvarez-Castro delivers a thoroughly researched edition, and several of his insights, even when made only in passing, promise to engage readers interested in the period and the transnational tensions at play. These include the relationship between journalistic and fictional writing, the contradictions of...