The Implacable Order of Things by José Luís Peixoto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Suffering - An Insider’s Report

To live in utter, grinding poverty is certainly to suffer. "All my days will forever be the summer roasting me like a torturer with red hot irons," says one of Peixoto's female characters. But she knows that this, as any other, is an inadequate description of the existential pain involved: "There's no way to explain all that we're saying when we say suffering." The reader comes to understand that poverty is about more than simple economics or even relative wealth.

The suffering in The Implacable Order of Things is indescribable because it takes place in a world that is surreal, a different world from that in which those who are not so impoverished exist. Peixoto's genius is his ability to allow one inside this surreal reality, not as a description but as a lived experience through the voices of those who are trapped by it, looking out to us, the rest of the world.

From this perspective, the world of poverty is inhabited largely by grotesqueries. But no matter how handicapped, disabled or inadequate, these odd people are unremarkable by local standards within their world. The illiterate shepherd beaten almost to death by a giant, but with no recourse; the young woman raped and ostracised by the pious ladies of the town, whom the shepherd marries for no clear reason; these two, living in the place of maximum suffering, the Mount of Olives, married but unable to communicate through lack of any suitable vocabulary; the Siamese twins connected only by one finger, one of whom marries in his seventies; his bride and a new mother of seventy who communicates largely through the food she cooks; the blind prostitute, blind because she genetically lacks eyes entirely, accepted by the community because she has no other way of making a living; the writer in a room without windows who scribbles throughout the night; the carpenter with only a left side that functions; the centenarian who can testify that nothing has ever been any differen, all these are normal, or at least unexceptionable in the world Peixoto creates.

What these characters perceive as real is not what folk from the other, outer, purportedly more civilised world would notice much less accept as commonplace: The local church has statues of saints but no one knows their names; the gentry, owners of everything, are never present but exert their power invisibly; meat cooked for the masters but uneaten must never be consumed by servants but given to the dogs; the priest is also the devil who taunts and tempts; a voice in a trunk recites epic poetry; unborn babies cry out from the womb; whitewashed cottages speak; the living undergo death and yet remain alive; animals act en bloc in the interests of human beings. These perceptions are not to be questioned but simply accepted as...implacable, the results of rules and traditions whose origins are permanently mysterious.

This is a world in which chance, that is an essential randomness in life, not science or superstition or religious belief of any kind, is the only plausible explanation for circumstances. The running theme is explicit: “...perhaps suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.” There is no way out of this cosmic lottery; the middle-class myth of self-improvement has been crushed by the power of what is solidly there. In despair, the protagonist, Jose, knows the pointlessness of his life, its futility, “I believed”, he says, “…that just by wanting, by trying hard, by working, we'd have what we longed for.” But this belief is just another source of punishment without the possibility of redemption. He knows through experience "the sad despair of having lost all certainties.”

As in Kafka, if there is a logic to this world it is hidden to its inhabitants. This world functions but its purpose is completely opaque to those through whose efforts it functions. Its meaning is created elsewhere and imposed by means which no one can identify with certainty. The source of the most debilitating oppression in this world is not injustice, or consequent suffering, in itself, but the ultimate absence of reason. Absence of reason is a definition of insanity. This is an implacably insane, as well as hot, world.

View all my reviews