{"id":4157,"date":"2019-09-19T21:23:59","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T21:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=4157"},"modified":"2019-09-19T21:23:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-19T21:23:59","slug":"before-after-the-pinnacle-of-happiness","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/before-after-the-pinnacle-of-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Before & After the Pinnacle of Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Truce<\/em><\/strong>: The Diary of Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9<\/em> by Mario Benedetti
\n<\/strong>Translated by Harry Morales
\n<\/strong>Paperback, Penguin UK, 2015<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"Cover<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cIn only six months and twenty-eight days I\u2019ll be in a position to retire.\u201d So begins Mario Benedetti\u2019s The Truce<\/em>\u2014a novel that takes the form of the brief and intimate diary of the forty-nine-year-old Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9, a Uruguayan widower living in Montevideo in the 1960s. Mart\u00edn\u2019s attention to life\u2019s mundane details, like the shapes of strangers\u2019 legs and his coworkers\u2019 nervous sneezes, combined with his frequent accounts of exhaustion, are what make him feel real and familiar right away. Although his world is small and provincial, his reflections are universal.<\/p>\n

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The novel was originally published in Spanish (Editorial Nueva Imagen, Montevideo, Uruguay ,1960) and was published in English by Penguin UK Modern Classics in Harry Morales\u2019s English translation in 2015. Readers should be grateful to Morales for not only capturing the contradictory nuances of Benedetti\u2019s resigned-yet-open voice so perfectly in English\u2014but also for inviting a wider audience to enjoy this timeless story of love and sorrow. The translation in today\u2019s context gives the novel a fresh, new meaning. The novel is about learning to appreciate the present, but the way in which it approaches the present is charmingly old-fashioned.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Early on in the novel the protagonist\u2019s daughter, Blanca, laments to her father, \u201cSometimes I feel sad, over nothing more than not knowing what I\u2019m missing.\u201d The girl\u2019s sentiment is one that hardly exists today. On the contrary, modern readers tend to be acutely aware of what we are missing; we are inundated with online images and texts that remind us of what-could-be on a daily basis. It\u2019s amusing to think that the very reality we have now is what Blanca might have been yearning for. Yet it\u2019s precisely this feeling of Blanca\u2019s desire\u2014a desire her father also shares\u2014that serves as the emotional premise for the entire novel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The novel embodies the thrill one feels when finding something he never even knew could happen. It\u2019s about the retrospective discovery of a hole\u2014a discovery made only after that hole has been unexpectedly filled. In the case of our protagonist, this hole is romance. Romantic love is the last thing Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9 expects or even wants to find. He is tired. He seeks only leisure and some rest, yet at the same time is depressed by the prospect of a blank agenda. The love affair he begins with his twenty-three-year-old assistant, Laura Avellaneda, just before he enters his retirement, is hardly original. But it\u2019s the way in which this experience moves and reinvigorates him, that is so potent and inexplicably memorable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mart\u00edn\u2019s celebration of his own surprising happiness is made all the more intense by his keen acknowledgement and understanding of the fragility of life and its transcendence. In a small moment midway through the novel he narrates:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She had got out of bed, just like that, wrapped in a blanket, and was standing near the window watching the rain. I approached, also looking at the rain, and we didn\u2019t say anything for a while. All of a sudden, I realized that that moment, that slice of everyday life, was the highest degree of well-being, it was Happiness. Never before had I been so completely happy than at that moment, but still I had the cutting sensation that I would never feel that way again, at least at that level, with that intensity. The pinnacle of happiness is like that, surely it\u2019s like that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mart\u00edn Santom\u00e9\u2019s unexpected bliss is poignantly balanced with an underlying fear of loss: \u201cAre we burning?\u201d he asks his lover. The novel beautifully explores the frightening contradictions that are inherent in love, and it\u2019s easy to see why the book still stands as such a revered classic in Latin America, and why it deserves to be read everywhere else. Harry Morales\u2019s translation of La Tregua<\/em> is a novel you will read without stopping and will never forget. It will be a physical experience that marks you, twists you, and pulls something out of you. It will make you weep and narrow your eyes at details you\u2019d never before noticed: the wood of a table, a dog outside a window. It will make you think about your own emotional life like a chart on paper: where do the peaks and the valleys lie? And, most importantly, what happens in between them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn only six months and twenty-eight days I\u2019ll be in a position to retire.\u201d So begins Mario Benedetti\u2019s The Truce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":4160,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[6,1178,1179,1180,1181],"class_list":["post-4157","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-caitlin-killion","tag-harry-morales","tag-mario-beneditti","tag-the-truce-the-diary-of-martin-santome"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBefore & After the Pinnacle of Happiness - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/before-after-the-pinnacle-of-happiness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Before & After the Pinnacle of Happiness - 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