Becca Rothfeld at Bookforum:
DON DIEGO DE ZAMA works as a counselor for the provincial Gobernador, but what this post entails is difficult to discern, because he takes great pains to do anything and everything but his job. Instead of performing his duties, he seethes, nurses grudges, squanders his money, erupts into paroxysms of rage, and lusts after women he does not succeed in courting. Occasionally, he performs the odd bureaucratic task or half-heartedly meets with a petitioner, but his true vocation is resentment. He is an Americano—a white man and an officer of the Spanish crown who was born in Latin America, for which reason he cannot aspire to the promotions or privileges afforded his Spanish-born colleagues. At most, he can hope for a transfer to a more central Latin American city and a reunion with his wife and sons, who remain in a distant part of the viceroyalty. In the meantime, he victimizes his mixed-race and Indigenous subordinates, loses his temper, and waits. “My career was stagnating in a post that was, it had been implied from the start, only a stopgap appointment,” he groans. In the first scene of the book, he spots a monkey corpse floating in the water by the docks without drifting further down the river and immediately identifies himself with it: “There we were: ready to go and not going.”
more here.
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