Gazapo by Gustavo Sainz

First published: 1965 (English translation, 1968)

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: The middle 1960’s

Locale: Mexico City

Principal Characters:

• Menelao, the protagonist, a confused, middle-class teenage boy from a broken home
• Gisela, his girlfriend, against her family’s wishes
• Vulbo, Menelao’s best friend, who tells about his adventures with Nacar
• Mauricio, Menelao’s roommate, an older boy who tells about his escapades with Bikina, a chorus girl
• Tricardio, Menelao’s rival for Gisela’s affections
• Matriarca, Menelao’s stepmother, the cause of his troubles with his father
• Fidel,
• Jacobo,
• Arnaldo, and
• Balmori, Menelao’s other teenage friends

The Novel

Most of the action of the novel takes place as the characters drive around Mexico City, searching for something meaningful to do. The action centers on the young and misunderstood Menelao, who has been abandoned in a seedy apartment by his divorced mother. Having left his father’s home because of his stepmother, Menelao cruises the city with his friends as they all tell stories about their escapades. The narration begins with a collage of actions: Vulbo’s telephone conversation with Menelao describes the gang’s previous evening’s activities; Menelao, in bed, imagines their drive to his father’s house in a stolen car to recover his possessions, a fact which he verifies later in a conversation with one of them; Menelao remembers his dream about Gisela, in which all is well with his family. The vantage point of this series of actions is unclear, although Menelao appears to be piecing the facts together while lying in bed. The first chapter is typical of the narrative as a whole in that events are told from different points of view and are presented in a deliberately ambiguous manner. To these actions are added tape recordings, diaries, and summaries of past events. Menelao retells the history of the fight with his father in an encapsulated version: “a) One day he went on a picnic somewhere and I quarreled with Matriarca. . . . b) Matriarca always manages to get mixed up in my business. . . . c) One evening, after an argument, I piled all my clothes. . . .” He seems to be impatient with his role as storyteller so he turns to other forms of communication for help.

Two matters preoccupy Menelao and serve as catalysts for the action: his relationship with Gisela, whom he wants to seduce, and the disintegration of his family. He convinces Gisela to go to his apartment, where he makes his advances. The novel becomes humorous when one realizes that Menelao pretends to know more about sex than he does: “I tried to convince her that sharing sexual interests and relations is very natural. Every person,’ I told her, is a coitus brought to a happy climax by his parents. Or an unhappy one, who knows?’ What is coitus?’” The scenes between the two young lovers always end badly. Once he writes all over her body with a magic marker which does not wash off; another time they are interrupted by the rent collector, whom Menelao tries to avoid. Although Menelao is thoroughly infatuated with Gisela, he mistrusts her, having caught her showering before an open window with Tricardio viewing from the roof. He also blames her for the break with his father, who dislikes her because she is of a lower social status. The relationship is further complicated by Menelao’s lies to his friends about having “scored” with Gisela. When they repeat the story in a taxi, the driver, Gisela’s father, overhears and forbids her to see Menelao again. Throughout the entire novel, nevertheless, the two lovers defy the adults by seeing each other when they should be in school.

Menelao’s independence is accidental. His mother, divorced from his father, who has married the domineering Matriarca, has gone away, leaving Menelao with no means of support. His father, overcome by his second wife, has let the situation in his home get out of hand and has sacrificed his son to his indecision. Left to his own devices, Menelao divides his time between Gisela and his friends, with no direction or aim. With precision, Menelao traces his routes through the city, giving the person familiar with Mexico City a very accurate picture of his whereabouts.

The novel has some very farcical scenes, especially those between Menelao and his senile grandmother, whom he takes out one afternoon to Chapultepec Park. During this outing, which includes a boat ride, Menelao’s grandmother dies. Yet this is not emphasized in the narration. In Gazapo, the things one generally regards as important are trivialized, while banal things are stressed. This is a reminder of the fact that Menelao, his peers, and the society in which they live are disoriented and confused. In the end, nothing happens. Reality, says Sainz, does not have a structure as a conventional novel does, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The Characters

With the exception of Menelao, Sainz puts little emphasis on character development. Even the main character is similar to his friends—middle-class teenage boys with a language directed only at their peers and designed to exclude the adults. Their preoccupations are typical of those of the adolescent of any society.

Because the novel is meant to present the generation gap from the point of view of the young, they are allowed to represent themselves in the superficial way in which one expects them to act toward one another and toward those outside their age group and social class. The adults are little more than caricatures, in some cases (Menelao’s grandmother, Gisela’s aunts, Tricardio’s father) farcical and overdrawn, even granting Sainz’s intention to show the young characters’ total lack of understanding of their elders. The female characters, such as Nacar and Bikina, remain as mysterious to the reader as they are to the boys. Sainz’s departure from the conventions of realism is signaled by the characters’ names, which are highly eccentric, not typically Mexican or Hispanic. In the case of Menelao, the allusion to Menelaus, Helen of Troy’s husband, adds to the humor. (Tricardio’s father calls him “Mentholado” in one instance.) Other names (Vulbo, Tricardio) add to the farcical characterizations and contrast sharply with the geographical accuracy of the characters’ travels through the city.

Critical Context

Gazapo, Sainz’s first novel in a prolific career, was one of the pioneer works in a genre that emerged in Mexico in the 1960’s as a result of the student movements, the novela de la onda or “new wave” novel. Along with other writers of his generation, Sainz sought to take Mexican literature away from historical themes and social protest, instead portraying urban society and the generation gap. Like the other “new wave” works, Gazapo experiments with narration techniques and emphasizes language to convey its message. Because of their humor and their comic-book qualities, these “new wave” novels have not been taken as seriously as those of Sainz’s predecessors, including Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo. Nevertheless, Gazapo emerged as one of the works that turned the direction of Mexican fiction toward urban settings and universal themes. Most important, as Sainz’s other novels have shown, Mexican writers have incorporated in their works a sense of commonality with world literature which has made their works more accessible to those outside their country.

Bibliography

Davis, Philip J. “Searching Anaya, Sainz, Fuentes, and Baca for a Common, Cultural Center.” Confluencia 11 (Spring, 1996) 137-161. Davis explores common themes in the works of Mexican American authors. He examines the ways in which the authors portray urban and provincial life and a national identity.

Gould, Eric S. “Carnival with a Conscience: Carnivalesque Discourse and the Adolescent Construction of the Self in Gustavo Sainz’s Gazapo.” Hispanofila 119 (January, 1997): 59-72. Examines Sainz’s depiction of adolescence and the use of the carnivalesque in the novel.

Shaw, Donald L. “Three Post-Boom Writers and the Boom.” Latin American Literary Review 24 (January/June, 1996): 5-22. Shaw discusses the “Boom” in Spanish American fiction of the 1950’s to the 1970’s, viewing Sainz as emphasizing literature’s social responsibility.

Williams, Raymond. “The Reader and the Recent Novels of Gustavo Sainz.” Hispania 65 (September, 1982): 383-387. Williams details the role of reader response in the novels of Sainz.