Author: Luis Mora-Ballesteros

Publisher: Luis Mora-Ballesteros

Published: 2024-02-12

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 1304663310

Translator’s Note “Perhaps Schopenhauer was right: I am all other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.” By opening his debut novel with these lines borrowed from Borges, Venezuelan author Luis Mora-Ballesteros foretells the central concern of his literary project: representing the universal in the particular. Here, the particular in question is the writer’s own Táchira State, in the rural borderland that straddles Venezuela and Colombia. In its portrayal of this place and its people Mora’s work exemplifies the defining themes of the twenty-first century: migration, assimilation, and the creation of new collective identities. Diptych is a term borrowed from visual art that refers to a symmetrical composition laid out on two panels side by side; Diptych of the Border is likewise symmetrically composed. It weaves together stories of migrant families who for decades have fled endemic violence in Colombia to settle in an overlooked region of Venezuela, forming a hybrid identity unique to the area. Later in the novel, in the 2010s, we meet migrants escaping Venezuela’s current economic disaster, moving in the other direction to form a new diasporic community in Colombia. Diptych attempts to show how such collective identities are constructed. In the following excerpt from the novel’s opening pages, we see a mosaic of images: new surroundings that provoke a sense of difference (“there’s no sea here…”), snapshots of the violence that drives people away (“the march of balaclavas and rifles…”), the conditions on the ranches and sugar plantations where some will end up as migrant workers, and countless small details that lend the text an authentic sense of place. The narrative moves loosely through space and time; events usually hinge around a shifting, expansive present tense. We meet a character and are promptly told what will happen to them months or years in the future; later in the novel we encounter them at another time and in changed circumstances, without entirely knowing what happened in between. This nonlinear temporality is characteristic of Mora’s writing and suggestive of how trauma flattens time and distorts memory. The central plot of the novel concerns a journalist, Juan Ángel, who has traveled to the borderland to write a story on a mysterious guerilla leader. We learn that he attempted to write a kind of crónica, or literary journalistic piece, about the region, before giving up and focusing on a straightforward feature story. It’s revealed that many sections of the novel, including this excerpt, are part of the failed crónica. With this narrative framing device, Mora creates another layer of symmetry in his diptych: the style continually oscillates between free-flowing prose-poetry (the crónica) and a tighter realism that relates Juan Ángel’s investigations. This collating of heterogeneous styles results in a work that “straddles the line between tradition and avant-garde.” (Bernardo Navarro Villarreal, writing in Latin American Literature Today.) The book was a finalist in Spain’s 2019 Martín Fierro competition for novels of social criticism. It is the first volume of a planned trilogy. Alex Halatsis