Oligrachs gone wild, in a brutal and darkly comic Argentinian noir
Mr. Luis Machi is an unforgettably loathsome and hilarious Argentinian oligarch who made his fortune collaborating with the worst elements of society—parasites, pushers, and secret policemen. He has a cocaine habit, a collection of three hundred ties, ten million dollars in the bank, and a bloody corpse in the trunk of his BMW . . . but as far as the body goes, he's completely innocent. He has no idea who the victim could be, or who among his many, many enemies might be trying to frame him for murder, and he doesn't have much time to find out . . .
The profane and uproarious Like Flies from Afar follows Machi through twenty-four hours of his eventful life—one full day in which to solve this mystery, or at least to make sure he isn't the one to take the fall.
The first novel to appear in English by the "subway janitor by night, novelist by day," who began his writing career while an undocumented immigrant in the United States, Like Flies from Afar will demonstrate why K. Ferrari is already an award-winning star of international crime fiction. A hardboiled noir thriller, a whodunit, a black comedy, and a filthy catalog of the excesses of wealth, this is a Jim Thompson novel for the globalized world.
"Not only is Like Flies from Afar a tough, perfectly constructed novel, it was written with the understanding that the noir is the new protest novel of the twenty-first century." ―Paco Ignacio Taibo II
"K. Ferrari is one of the most important voices in the contemporary Argentine crime novel. His unique tone creates characters that are unforgettable―realistic and poetic all at once. Like Flies from Afar is yet another example of his literary mastery." ―Claudia Piñeiro
A darker shade of absurdist noir featuring an Argentine businessman, as contemptible as he is successful, who finds his life inexplicably falling apart.
The opening of this short novel finds Mr. Machi in the afterglow of a fellatio-induced, cocaine-driven orgasm, luxuriating in his obscenely opulent success, as he prepares to take a drive. “He doesn’t need to wonder what success is, because he can feel it in the potent purr of the accelerator beneath his right foot, in the cushioned upholstery, in the power steering, in the sunlight and the stares of astonishment and envy reflecting off the BMW’s gloss finish,” writes Ferrari, who works as a subway-station janitor in his native Buenos Aires after having been deported from the United States in the 1990s. This is his first work to be translated into English, and it could pass as a madcap mixture of Kafka, Bukowski, and Jim Thompson. In quick order, the corrupt, politically connected Mr. Machi finds his tire sabotaged and his trunk somehow occupied by a corpse whose face has been mutilated beyond recognition. Then more clues seem to link Mr. Machi himself to the murder. He has no idea who the victim is, who the perpetrator was, or why he has been targeted. The book follows his efforts over one day to dispose of the body and the evidence and to discover the motive and culprits. He “feels there’s no bottom to the pit he’s fallen into,” and his attempts to dig himself out find him falling deeper in. He believes he has no enemies, but as he ponders his predicament, it appears to the reader that pretty much everyone he knows could have wished him ill—his wife and their children, his employees and partners, his rivals. His daughter’s boyfriend is a writer who supports himself with menial work (like the author) and has plans to write a detective novel much like this one, in which Mr. Machi would be the protagonist “and terrible things would happen to him.”
Though ultimately unsatisfying as a mystery, it works as an existential parable, with a protagonist whose character is destiny. - Kirkus Reviews
Like Flies from Afar comes with epigraphs from Jim Thompson and David Goodis, and Ferrari's writing is clearly modeled after theirs -- fast, sharp, and pitch-black dark; the third epigraph, squeezed in between the other two, is from Karl Marx, suggesting the novel's other focus, as its protagonist is the embodiment of ugly capitalism. Yet another epigraph on a separate page, from Rodolfo Walsh, spells the combination out more clearly: "If someone wants to read this book as a regular old thriller, that's their right" -- implying, of course, that it can also (or should) be read as something more than that.
Like Flies from Afar begins with a coked-up (and Viagra-supplemented) Luis Machi getting a blow-job and then lighting up an expensive cigar. He is one for enjoying the fruits of his labor, getting his due; his business empire is called 'El Imperio', and he likes to see himself and be seen as an emperor-figure, bending every-one and -thing to his will (and whims). A supplicant on her knees, offering him gratification, sets the stage just right.
It is early morning, and Machi wants some domestic satisfaction too: he calls his wife and demands that she have breakfast waiting for him when he gets home in what he imagines will be: "an hour, give or take". But breakfast, it turns out, will have to wait.
Machi gets in his car, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar BMW, and begins the drive home. He does not immediately realize there are two things in his car that don't belong. One is a book that his daughter, Luciana, dropped -- Michel Foucault's The Order of Things -- though she calls him up to be on the lookout for it, because she needs it for an upcoming midterm. The Order of Things famously begins with the observation that: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges", as Machi sees when he leafs through the book; the passage -- quoted by Foucault -- is from Borges' 'The Analytical Language of John Wilkins' and is itself a list Borges reports finding in a work by Franz Kuhn, who attributes it to a Chinese encyclopedia, the 'Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge' ('Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos'), categorizing animals; the listed categories are used by Ferrari as the titles of the thirteen parts of his novel, with the final, fourteenth one -- "que de lejos parecen moscas" -- taken for the title of the novel.
The list -- and its transmitters, Borges and Foucault -- thus very obviously serve as a scaffold for the novel. Machi is, unsurprisingly, oblivious to it, unimpressed by what his daughter is studying and by Borges; amusingly, he eventually purchases a new copy of the book -- and, at the suggestion of the counter girl at the bookstore, Barthes' Writing Degree Zero -- as well as two Sidney Sheldon novels (for his wife).
If The Order of Things pretty much goes over his head and is nothing more than a slight irritation -- at what his daughter is wasting her time with, at what he's wasting tuition-money on -- the other thing he finds in the BMW proves to be considerably more urgently problematic. He doesn't realize it immediately, but soon enough he's in for a very rude surprise: there is a dead body in the trunk of the car. Complicating matters further, it's handcuffed inside -- making it even harder to dispose of -- with a personal accessory, the pink fur handcuffs he likes to use in some of his sexual encounters.
Machi has a problem -- and it's a confounding one too. He's baffled by how the body came into the trunk. Machi lives in a gated community, and his office garage is well secured. So there are a lot of open questions about this corpse that he can't even identify, and how it got there:
Where, Mr. Machi asks himself.
Who, he asks himself.
He asks himself how.
And why.
Last of all, Mr.Machi, a businessman above all else, can't stop wondering: What did they expect to get out of planting a body in his trunk ?
He spends the next couple of hours driving around, trying to figure all this out. And trying to get rid of the corpse.
It brings him -- and his very showy car -- to neighborhoods where he stands out like a sore thumb. He's covered in elitist markers: Scappino, Versace, Rolex, Armani. And he's sitting in that obscenely expensive BMW. Driving through these common neighborhoods, he can't help but be outraged , his blinding sense of entitlement leaving him baffled: "Why are they all calm and not me ?" He can buy anything -- and anyone -- so why can't he have the piece of mind he deserves ?
Like Flies from Afar is then a fast-paced ride-along, as Machi tries to extricate himself from this very uncomfortable situation he finds himself in -- and wonders who he can trust and who has it in for him -- complete with some blasts from the past and examples of his cutthroat policies and the damage they've done. His rise is one of ultra-capitalist success -- taking advantage of the possibilities, having the right connections, trampling anything in his way. It mirrors the Argentine experience in general, complete with high-finance games that crush the general population and benefit only a few winners. And Machi is one of those winners:
I passed the factory over to the investors at Varano, we issued bonds, we stripped the motherfucker down, and we declared bankruptcy a few years later. In '92 all we had was a second-rate textile plant and in '94 I could put two million just into remodeling the club, see ?
Like Flies from Afar is a novel of comeuppance -- but Ferrari doesn't go for facile moral tales: if this is the story of Machi's fall (into the abyss), it isn't the one of straightforward justice. Machi remains oblivious. Machi continues to believe he can get his way. And, mostly, Machi does. Sure, his wife has cleared out by the time he finally does get home, pissed off that she made him breakfast and he didn't show. But, hey, he bought her some Sidney Sheldon novels; it'll all be good in the end, he figures.
As the invocation of Jim Thompson and David Goodis at the opening suggested, Ferrari's writing heart is in a deep, dark place, and that is where he brings the novel to in its conclusion. If most of Like Flies from Afar is a traditional tale of dark countdown suspense -- will the authorities catch up to what Machi is hiding or will he somehow extricate himself from this predicament ? -- its conclusion finds Machi confronted with the fact that he's at best managed a brief detour in the game that's actually being played with him. Does Ferrari play fair ? Absolutely; it's the perfect conclusion for this tale -- even as it leaves everything open. (But, yeah, it's hard not to think that Machi might have met his match.)
Like Flies from Afar is a cruel portrait of a modern-day success story, its protagonist, forced by rare circumstances beyond his control, to navigate the world at large -- exposing him to how the other 99 per cent live, but he incapable of even beginning to comprehend the divide (much less accept any blame as to his own role in creating the conditions around him, or what is happening to him). Machi is being taught a lesson, but regardless how it's hammered home he doesn't seem to learn, which is part of the (sometimes grim) fun over the course of the story; the nice closing touch suggests that it won't be that easy for him to escape in the long run, which is fun too.
Much here is familiar excess and outrageous behavior, but Like Flies from Afar is fast and furious and sly enough in Ferrari's presentation to work well on its multiple levels -- whether as simple thriller, socio-political critique, or anything in between. A solid little thriller, of and for our times. - M.A.Orthofer
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/trcrime/ferrarik.htm
K. Ferrari telegraphs his intentions from the outset of his novel “Like Flies From Afar.” Newly translated from the Spanish, the book opens with epigraphs from Jim Thompson, Karl Marx and David Goodis: a trinity of writers who guide, or inhabit, Ferrari’s sensibility.
Thompson and Goodis were among the most unrelenting of the 20th century American noirists, their fiction set in a universe that is indifferent, if not outright hostile, to their character’s concerns. And Marx, of course, is Marx, perhaps the most influential political philosopher of the last 175 years — regardless of whether, or to what extent, we agree with his worldview.
“Like Flies From Afar” collapses these perspectives — the hard-boiled crime novel as social allegory. Ferrari, born in 1972, was deported as a young man from the United States and works as a janitor in a Buenos Aires subway station. He has published six other books in Argentina, but this is the first to appear in English.
Unfolding over the space of a single morning, it revolves around a character known only as Mr. Machi, who, as the action begins, is in the office of his Buenos Aires club El Imperio, high on cocaine and engaged in some sexual hit-and-run.
Mr. Machi is a walking act of blunt force trauma, pushing his way through the world in his Versace sunglasses and a BMW that electrifies the road like “a black bolt of lightning” and sparking his Montecristo cigars with a gold Dupont. He is a bad father and a worse husband, a bully who has trafficked in power for so long — first during Argentina’s junta of the 1970s and now under its democratic successor — that he cannot recognize that he, like all of us, is vulnerable.
His precarity asserts itself after his tire is flattened on the Panamericana highway. On his way to retrieve the spare, he finds a man handcuffed to his trunk, his face shot away with a bullet from Mr. Machi’s own Glock.
That’s a terrific set-up for a crime novel: The locked-room murder mystery transplanted to the cocoon of the car. Ferrari, however, is not after resolution so much as entanglement, a widening net of implication in which Mr. Machi finds himself ensnared. The body in the trunk is less important in its own right than as the catalyst for an internal reckoning, in which Mr. Machi is forced, through a series of recollections, to assess the flashpoints of his life.
More often than not, these reexamined moments involve the people (his son, his enforcer, a business partner, the maid he cheats with) whom he has used or wronged. Ferrari’s plotting is ingenious, not only in the way it unveils the kaleidoscopic, potentially viral network of Mr. Machi’s connections, but also in how it shatters the illusion of his mastery to reveal “the great beast of paranoia” within.
“When all’s said and done,” he writes of Mr. Machi, who is trying to soothe himself, “I’m a good guy, he thinks. … But the crack’s already there and doubt is threatening to blow his skull wide open.” The ensuing breakdown — heightened by Ferrari’s strategy of blurring Mr. Machi’s point of view into his own as well as those of other characters — is the real subject of the novel, which is less about any external crime than the disintegration of his protagonist’s arrogant façade.
“Like Flies From Afar” is, in other words, an existential mystery, in which corruption emerges from the inside and the most pressing dangers are those we bring upon ourselves. Ferrari makes the point explicit during a scene in which Mr. Machi’s enforcer, an assassin named Pereyra, pulls a gun on a student in a Che Guevara tank top that features an inverted (and misattributed) version of Emiliano Zapata’s slogan: “Better to live on your feet than to die on your knees.”
Ferrari knows exactly what he’s mocking, as he reveals with Pereyra’s response. “I’ll give you ten seconds to choose,” the killer barks, reframing the line correctly: “Live on your knees or die on your feet.” After the frightened young man sinks to the ground, he shoots him in the kneecaps anyway. The scene is horrifying but also, in context, bleakly comic, reflecting both Pereyra’s brutality and the callowness of bourgeois youth. Even as we shudder at the violence, we cannot help but appreciate the ironies.
Mr. Machi himself is not unaware of these incongruities; early in the novel, he pitches Foucault’s “The Order of Things” from his car after discovering that his daughter has left a copy there.
The postmodern text is a signifier, as Ferrari makes clear when Mr. Machi reads from it: “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought.” Something similar happens to Mr. Machi as the order of his life is swept away.
The idea takes unexpected shape late in the novel when we meet the daughter’s boyfriend, a crime writer and a radical, who decides he will “write a novel with Mr. Machi as protagonist, and terrible things would happen to him.” It’s a spectacularly meta move, framing him (perhaps) as not just author but antagonist.
For all that, “Like Flies From Afar” is hardly a work of literary gamesmanship. Instead, it offers contrapuntal pleasures — a propulsive chase across Buenos Aires as well as a finely rendered portrait of a man so enraptured by his wealth and power that he has lost sight, if he ever had it, of his frailty. The novel takes prodigious turns as Mr. Machi pushes harder, every decision leading to more disruption and more doubt.
What happens when your world blows up, when everything you thought you could count on is revealed to be a reverie? It’s a question a lot of us are asking in the surreal, occluded moment we have come to occupy.
“[H]e can’t trust his recollections just now,” Ferrari writes of Mr. Machi. “He’s nervous, he feels hemmed in, stuck in a dream or some other kind of irreality. But the stink of his own vomit tells him it’s real.” - David D. Ulin
Subtlety is not something Ferrari has time for. He barrels through this blackly comic story the way his protagonist, Luis Machi, barrels through life: loud, crude and indifferent to the finer points of character and plot as he rushes inexorably toward doom ... Heavy on action and dark humor — fluidly rendered in West’s translation from the original Spanish — Like Flies From Afar is for those who like their noir fast, short and nasty. - David Gordon
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