When I read on the Reading Globally South American theme read thread that Saer is considered one of the top Argentinian authors, I knew I had to move this book to the top of my TBR pile. And yes, Saer is an amazing writer, whose language flows on the page. And yes, he has an imagination and a remarkable ability to focus on details. But while I admired this book, I never warmed to it.

At the heart of the novel is a murder: a husband and wife go out duck hunting with a bottle of gin, and she winds up dead. But, until the last section of the novel, which is told from the point of view of the murderer, the book focuses entirely on the narratives of three other people, a journalist, a nonpracticing lawyer, and a judge, all of whom are connected to the aftermath of the murder. These narratives start months before the murder, so the murder is only a peripheral part of their stories.

And what of their stories? The journalist is an 18-year-old who lives with his still partying 36-year-old mother and writes the weather reports for a local paper, although he seems to aspire to become a crime reporter. He hangs out with some friends, fights with his mother about their individual bottles of gin and her slutty mode of dressing, thinks a lot about sex, and becomes obsessive about thinking he sees his exact double on the street. In fact, all the narrators are obsessive. The nonpracticing lawyer has become an obsessive gambler, and the details of his lengthy nightly baccarat games are described in infinite detail. The judge is disillusioned about humanity and endlessly describes his automobile routes around the city as well as the "gorillas" who inhabit it. Only the murderer, in his brief section, seems to have the spark of humanity. Also, with the exception of the murderer, the narrators are all involved in literary ventures: the journalist, aside from writing, is a big reader and likes to talk about books; the gambler writes essays about comic book characters, and the judge is translating The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Needless to say, I had to think about why this author is great and what on earth he was trying to do with this book. And here's what I came up with. Partly, Saer is looking at identity and how we create meaning in our lives: the journalist who sees his double and is trying to figure out what his life is about, the lawyer who has become a gambler and obsessively tries to figure out systems for winning, the judge who reduces humanity to "gorillas," yet doesn't hang up on a threatening caller who repeatedly phones him. Partly he is getting inside his characters' heads and relentlessly recording their obsessions. Partly he is showing that what's important to one individual may be meaningless or just a blip to others.

In the end, I was left scratching my head. Saer writes well and gave me food for thought, but I didn't enjoy reading this book. Further, the women in the book are all just adjuncts to the men; none of them rise to being full characters.

Luis Fiore just shot his wife in the face after a day of hunting with his family. This fictitious brutality serves as the plot hub for Scars, a 1969 novel by Argentine writer Juan José Saer (1937-2005) that was recently published in an English translation by Open Letter Books. Four spokes radiate outwards from the novel’s murderous hub, each one comprising a stand-alone vignette with a different protagonist and a unique connection, some intimate and some remote, to Fiore’s crime. Other than the final section of the novel, which is told in the voice of the murderer himself, the other three sections revolve around their own unrelated events and distinct motivators. With this unique structure, Saer seems to be making the point that even the most dramatic event matters only to those directly involved in it. For the rest, the event is merely a blip in everyday life.

In a very brief space, Saer creates four distinct protagonists. In the novel’s first section, a young journalist struggles to write daily (usually fictional) weather reports while living with his irritable mother. In the second and third sections, a lawyer is hopelessly addicted to gambling, and a judge recognizes the meaninglessness of his life. Even the judge’s hobby of translating Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray into Spanish adds nothing to the world (“Whole passages come out exactly the same as the versions of the professional translators.”). In the final section, the novel telescopes into Fiore’s day of hunting and his fatal moment of misjudgment.

Scars is a beautifully-structured lesson in humility and perspective, accented with sparkling, if dark, humor. Dolph’s lively translation captures the underlying play and tension in Saer’s writing. I would have preferred more resolution of the distinct stories and less focus on hyper-realistic details (do we really need to know every turn the judge makes in his car on his way to the office every time he makes the trip?). Nonetheless, Scars delivers the rare combination of entertaining suspense and thought-provoking, intelligent writing.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. ( )