Arminto Cordovil, the first-person narrator of Orphans of Eldorado, is the estranged only son of Amando, an Amazonian shipping magnate; when his father dies, Arminto inherits the fortune. He’s not interested in commerce, though; he spends his days obsessing over a mute Indian orphan, Dinaura, who allows him to sleep with her once and then vanishes into the jungle. When his father’s dubious business practices cause the company to collapse and Arminto to be left almost penniless, he is reduced to living in a hut and repeating his tale of lost love to anybody who will listen.
Orphans of Eldorado is part of Cannongate’s Myth series, standing alongside works by authors such as Margaret Atwood and Michel Faber. Hatoum’s story is saturated with mythic references: he has taken the Eldorado story of the conquistadors and blended it with the native legends of an enchanted city under the waters of the Amazon, creating a strange reality that seems to belong neither to realism nor to magic realism – Arminto’s fascinations with the local mythologies, his belief that Dinaura has left him to live in the enchanted city, and in the villagers’ tales of shamans and magical beings, sit alongside his job in the shipyard, his drinking and carousing with the women passengers on his father’s ships, and the reality of shady business dealings and bankruptcy. The novel looks at a life lived through myth; Arminto chooses to believe not only the legend of an enchanted city, but also the myth of romantic love – Dinaura’s silence doesn’t strike him as something to worry about, but something to make her stand out from the crowd, and her withdrawal fuels his obsession rather than signalling a close to their relations. Each of Hatoum’s characters mythologise the rest – Amando is idolised by his lawyer, and his housekeeper/lover, Florita, while he himself makes his dead wife a legendary figure, even commissioning a giant statue of her head for a fountain, which Arminto then venerates as an idol – but as the novel progresses, each of these legends is shown to be based on false pretensions: Amando is a cheat and his wife had taken a lover. Hatoum’s warning to the reader is not to rely on mythic narratives to shape your own life: when Arminto discovers the truth about Dinaura, he is already broken and alone. His almost-legendary status in his home-town, sitting in his hovel and endlessly retelling his story to curious tourists, is a cautionary tale.
Orphans of Eldorado is an extended monologue, a single chapter ending with Arminto directly addressing the reader. It’s a swift, almost breathless novel with little space for the reader to take stock of events; Arminto doesn’t stop to explain or clarify his tale, and the story leaps constantly back and forth in time, from his present impoverished state to his childhood and the adventures of his father and grandfather. The novel opens with various accounts of the native legends – Arminto’s own story doesn’t get going for a while, and I found this early section jarring, with no clear sense of who was speaking or what was the driving thrust of the narrative. As Arminto’s personal tale took over, the story was easier to follow, but I found the characterisation one-dimensional: it’s possible that Hatoum did this deliberately, using stereotyping to emphasise the dangers of mythologising, but it doesn’t make for an engaging read: Florita, Amando and the lawyer are stock props in Arminto’s quest first to seduce, then to rediscover Dinaura, and Arminto himself is an unsympathetic character – lazy, inconsiderate, and whining. There’s some rich local colour – the convent orphans, the local legends themselves, and the town celebrations are all detailed and fascinating – but the main narrative lacks tension. I didn’t care, ultimately, whether Arminto ever found his lover, or whether his plummeting fortunes would leave him destitute. The trajectory of this story is more a downward diagonal than an arc – Arminto’s life gets worse and worse and there’s never any real possibility of recovery, so there’s no huge incentive for the reader to plough on through to the end.
Any Cop?: Hatoum’s use of mythological narratives to highlight the dangers of living too far outside reality is clever, and his retelling of those myths is picturesque, but the underlying narrative, one man’s path to financial and emotional ruin, didn’t engage me at all. There’s better books in the Myth series, and if you’re out for post-colonial-type exoticism, I’d send you right back to Garcia Marquez…
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 