Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number by Jacobo Timerman; Tony Talbot

Review by: Elizabeth B. Marshall

Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 11, No. 21 (Fall - Winter, 1982), pp. 69-71
Published by: Latin American Literary Review
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Reviews 69

ty of Neruda's work: ?In these eight volumes we find love poetry and nature
poetry, we observe Neruda as public poet and as a deeply personal poet? (p.
176).
It is difficult to find fault with a book that treats the entire poetic pro
duction of Pablo Neruda in such a prolific way. The clarity of its style
should serve as a model to those that believe that complicated discourse is a
*
key to sophisticated literary analysis. Earth Tones achieves its aim: it is a
book that is easily enjoyed.

MARJORIE AGOSIN
Wellesley College

Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. By Jacobo Timerman.

Translated by Tony Talbot. New York: Knopf, 1981. 177 pages.

On its simplest level as reportage, Timerman's book is a reasoned in

dictment of fascist misrule; but his account of the retaliation he suffered
because of his out-spoken commitment needs to be considered in its literary
rather than its political context?as a work in the tradition of lyrical protest
laid down in Sarmiento's Facundo and reanimated inMallea's Story of an
Argentine Agony. Like these earlier writings, classics of their kind,
?Prisoner? is a rhapsodic outpouring of eyewitness observations mingled
with intense feelings, by turns polemic and autobiographical. The blurring
of reality suggested in Timerman's title, along with his dark utterances and
his distancing of events in time and space lend an air of fiction to his nar
rative, although his experiences and those of others caught up in the same
barbaric cycle of humiliation, bodily harm, and probable extinction have
become common knowledge through the world press. His is an impassioned
artistry worth remarking.
Timerman begins in epic fashion, ?in the middle of things,? when he is
already in that desolate place where (in his own words) ?there is a total
absence of tenderness? and where the hours are made bearable only
?through psychological subterfuge.? The facts of his life emerge sporadical
ly throughout the pages of a foreword, eleven successive chapters, and an
epilogue. Born in 1923 in the Ukraine, Jacobo was brought to Argentina at
the age of five by his Jewish parents; like his fellow emigr?, Alberto Ger
chunoff, whose recollections of Jewish settlers among the gauchos of Entre
R?os Province throw some light on Timerman's saga, he made his career as
a newspaperman in Buenos Aires, exercising great influence because of his
liberal editorial policies. In the spring of 1977, Timerman was abducted
from this apartment, jailed, interrogated, and tortured; he was forcibly
deported to Israel in the autumn of 1979. He is understandably bitter about

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 70 Latin American Literary Review

his ordeal, his thirty months of imprisonment and beatings: ?I don't want
to forget, and I will not forgive.? (p. 145)
Iri the matter of subterfuge to maintain the stoicism required to with
stand the endlessness of time, the filth of his surroundings, and the
brutishness of his captors, Timerman brought all his considerable acumen
to bear. His aim throughout was to isolate himself from the real world out
side his place of confinement. He meditated on the possibilities of suicide
and madness as compensatory measures:

Suicide is a usable value because of its definitive, hopeless

nature. And can anyone within that obscurity of torture and
darkness conceive that the place where he is, the space where he
is, is anything other than definitive and irremediable?. . . . But
at some point you must reach a decision to abandon the idea.
When the possibility of suicide no longer exists .... there
remains the temptation of madness. . . . Yet madness is
unavailable, and you can await it in vain.
I awaited the protective mantel of madness, but it did not
come. (pp. 95-97, passim)

Another of Timerman's recourses was creativity, not conscious think

ing or reflection, but concrete mental labor that denied memory and involved
only a kind of physical, private activity. He decided to write a book. He
spent a great deal of effort on the selection of a suitable style. He considered
and discarded as models the poets Neruda and Lorca, Stefan George,
Chaim Nachman Bialik, Mayakovsky, Paul Eluard, Claudel, and Aragon,
Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Miguel Hern?ndez, and Cernuda, settling finally
on Stephen Spender. He describes this imaginary literary task in one of his
most impressive passages:

The book I was working on absorbed me for days, though now I

can't remember a single line. For a time I recalled paragraphs,
but now they are profoundly buried. And the thought that they
may resurface is as frightening as the notion of reliving those
solitary hours. Some day I suppose I'll be forced to re-encounter
myself by way of all that. Perhaps I'm experiencing the same
problem as Argentina, an unwillingness to be aware of one's
own drama, (p. 36)

Although he feels the bonds of his Argentinity and makes use of Arlt
and Borges in his analysis of the country's problems, Timerman is even
more deeply conscious of his Jewishness. Like Gerchunoff, he sees his life
as a stage in the whole Judaic experience and, again like Gerchunoff, he
sounds a note of optimism which is surely a triumph of hope over sorrows
shared.

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Reviews 71

In his story collection Jewish Gauchos [Los gauchos jud?os, Editorial

Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1964/ Gerchunoff has a tale about a stolen
horse whose gaucho owner accused a certain Rabbi Abraham of the theft.
The Rabbi, who was in the midst of his harvest and entirely innocent in the
matter, paid the fine decreed by the local political boss in order to get back
to his fields as fast as possible. Gerchunoff makes two comments?one in
the epigraph taken from an Old Spanish account that contrasts ?Jewish
dogs and Christian men of worth,? and another when he intrudes as author
to say that Jews are suspect simply because they are different but also to
counsel patience until the time when he believes things will change. In the
same spirit, Don Jacobo rounds out his tale of survival in the apocalyptic
world of the Eighties. He has witnessed uncommunicable horrors; yet he re
mains moral and believing.

I know there ought to be a message or a conclusion. But

that would be a way of putting a concluding period on a typical
story of this century, my story, and I have no concluding period.
I have lost none of my anxieties, none of my ideology, none of
my love or my hate.
I know too that the Argentine nation will not cease to weep
for its dead, because throughout its often brutal history, it has
remained loyal to its tragedies. I know that it will succeed in
overcoming the paranoids of every extreme, the cowards of
every sector. And it will learn how to be happy, (p. 176)

His message seems abundantly clear.

ELIZABETH B. MARSHALL
Salt Lake City Schools

Jo?o Guimar?es Rosa. By Jon S. Vincent. Boston: Twayne, 1978, 182 pp.

If there was ever a body of work in search of a reader's guide such as

the Twayne series usually provides, it is that of the world-class Brazilian
writer, Jo?o Guimar?es Rosa, the density and intensity of whose style is
matched only by that of his philosophical vision. While in Brazil the pro
duction of literary criticism on Guimar?es Rosa has taken on the dimen
sions of a national industry, there still exists no study, in any language, of
the author's oeuvre as a whole. For its success in meeting both of these
needs, and to the degree in which its critical perspective exceeds that of a
popular guide, Jon S. Vincent's Jo?o Guimar?es Rosa asks for serious con

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