19 ago 2010

Mundo Cogtazá: Glamourama, Bret Easton Ellis


La primera mitad de Glamourama está plagada de toques de Ellis: sexo superficial (ménages á trois. engaños), tentempiés (Xanas, Mentos) y rock and roll (la inauguración de un club con tanta aceptación que hace que Moomba parezca el Harlev Davidson Café). Pero entonces, tras unos cientos de páginas de posar y bostezar entre confeti, las sandeces adquieren un cariz surrealista. Victor Ward, el protagonista, viaja a Londres en el Queen Elizabeth II v se ve involucrado en una conspiración clandestina de modelos-terroristas que pasan el tiempo libre haciendo explotar hoteles pijos y asesinando con crueldad a un elenco al parecer arbitrario de vips: el hijo de un diplomático extranjero, un modelo de pasarela por aquí, un actor de segunda fila por allá. Abrirse paso a través de este argumento absurdo es como hacerlo a través de dos bolas de algodón de azúcar: crea adicción. es empalagoso v enfermizo, y parece como si no pudieras contenerte hasta que estás a punto de vomitar. Es así de intenso. Glamourama, tan moralista como cómica, le hará reír, encogerse y retorcerse en el asiento. 


Fragmento (en inglés)

In a calm and purposeful fashion I try to express everything that has been happening: how they memorize maps, passwords, warning signals, airline timetables, how they learn to strip, assemble and load an array of light machine guns—M16s, Brownings, Scorpions, RPGS. Kalashnikovs—to throw off tails, how one day they had to eliminate everything in our computer system that connected them to Libya. I tell Palakon about the detailed maps of various American and Israeli embassies scattered throughout the house, that at any given time three million dollars in cash is hidden in a closet downstairs next to the gym, that we know certain people only by code names, that intermediaries lunch frequently in the house and there are so many parties. I tell Palakon about how fake passports are arranged and how those passports are constantly being shredded and burned, how Bobby is always traveling to Belgrade or to Zagreb and visas are applied for in Vienna and there are anxious consultations and trips to villas in outlying suburbs. How I am constantly being introduced to just another young Palestinian with a "troubled past" or to someone who was partially blinded by an Israeli letter bomb, patriots who had strayed from the path, people offering pretexts for refusing to negotiate, beautiful men boasting of secret alliances.
I tell Palakon about the bombing of the Institute of Political Studies, the bombing at Café Flore, the bombing on the métro at Pont Royal. I tell Palakon about a car lined with 120 pounds of explosives that rolled down a hill in Lyons and smashed into a police station, killing eight people, four of them children, injuring fifty-six. I explain the attempted bombing of the Louvre, how Jamie Fields poisoned the pool at the Ritz, the whispered references to TWA flights leaving Charles de Gaulle, how new social security numbers were invented, aerial reconnaissance photos were taken, certain vanishings accomplished. I tell Palakon about a chaotic party, then about another chaotic party, while I'm gripping the comforter and it all seems so insubstantial that I'm reminded of a Basque separatist movement's motto one of the scriptwriters showed me one day in a red spiral notebook: "Action Unites. Words Divide."

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