Island of the Doomed

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Here is undoubtedly one of the strangest novels of the twentieth century, written in haste and with passion, and which irresistibly evokes another book (not a novel, but where to draw the line?) published in the middle of the preceding century by a young man (of the same age, in fact) under the title Les Chants de Maldoror. In reality, very different books, one produced by the unbearable exile of a young Uruguayan in the most typically intellectual city of his time, the other by a militant in the anarchist movement that culminates in the rise of fascism and war. Yet, what one reads in these books is similar, even if Dagerman never mentions the writing of Isidore Ducasse: one finds in them the same resurgence, the same iconoclastic and torrential, uncontrolled, darkly jubilant will, the same self-destructive humor. What links these two books is the period, the extreme conformism of the bourgeoisie of the Second Empire for Ducasse, for Stig Dagerman the loathing of the right-thinking politically involved people, the self-satisfied militance during clashes between classes, and the birth of great humanitarian undertakings — all of which was negated by the cowardice of abandon in the Spanish civil war and by the obscenity of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Latin America. Another literary example of the spirit of the times would be the pessimistic and suicidal Juan Rulfo, author of one of the key novels of the twentieth century, Pedro Páramo, conceived in the violence of the counterrevolution in Mexico in the 1930s.

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