[b:Trafalgar|52692607|Trafalgar|Angélica Gorodischer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1619341498l/52692607._SY75_.jpg|2430749] is another of those irresistible mauve Penguin Classics editions that I cannot leave on the library shelf. It's a work of 1970s Argentinian scifi, collecting the anecdotes recounted by an interstellar travelling salesman named Trafalgar Medrano to his friends. Thus it reads as a set of short stories, each with the framing mechanism of chatting over coffee in a cafe. The author appears to comment in her own voice on the limitations of this structure:

"You could," said Trafalgar, "write a story with each of my trips."
"Not even if I was crazy," I answered. "In the first place, stories proposed by other people never work: stories choose one, one does not choose stories. And in the second place, your stories are always the same: a bunch of strange things happen to you, your throw yourself, generally successfully, at the prettiest one around there, you earn piles of dough, and what do you spend it on? On bitter coffee and black cigarettes and Pugliese records."

This is accurate and Trafalgar's womanising tendencies result in some rather dispiriting sexism. His anecdotes also include some really intriguing ideas, however I found the framing mechanism left limited scope to explore them. My favourite was the chapter titled 'The Best Day of the Year', which deserves a whole novel. It's set on the planet where natives have a constant syncretic awareness of time but visitors find themselves accidentally and unexpectedly time-travelling.

The episodic structure and tone reminded me of original Star Trek, if the Enterprise had lived up to its name and visited strange new worlds in order to sell them stuff. I enjoyed some of the wild concepts, while finding the framing mechanism a bit frustrating. I've read another novel by Angélica Gorodischer, [b:Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was|534595|Kalpa Imperial The Greatest Empire That Never Was|Angélica Gorodischer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1354903256l/534595._SY75_.jpg|184641], which has a similarly unusual structure and obtrusive narrator but in my view does more interesting things with both. I'd recommend that over [b:Trafalgar|52692607|Trafalgar|Angélica Gorodischer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1619341498l/52692607._SY75_.jpg|2430749], although both are distinctive enough to be worth reading. ( )

Maybe it was good when it was published, but I'm not a huge fan of the writing style. I'm also even more not a fan of Trafalgar as a character. I get that there's supposed to be questions of whether he's telling the truth or not, but the lying out of his teeth and sleeping with everyone and taking advantage of everyone just gets really old and there's not enough emotion in the writing (which I think is a product of its style and not really the fault of the author) to carry it through.

Gave up after The Best Day of the Year which was definitely the most interesting story thus far, but wasn't interesting enough. ( )

Picked this up shortly after reading Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial, yes, because it was translated by Ursula K. LeGuin.
This book had a different translator, but the 'voice' is very much the same (confirming, I guess, that both translators did a good job!)

I didn't like this one as much; but it was still enjoyable, and it did have quite a few similarities, both in format and theme. Both books are very concerned with the narrative voice, with storytelling as a human phenomenon. Both are (sort-of) collections of short stories which are intended to form a cohesive whole (this one even exhorts the reader to please read them in the given order.)

The narrator of this book has a friend, named Trafalgar, who likes to tell stories. His stories may or may not be tall tales; they all relate his adventures as an interstellar merchant, which are very reminiscent of Golden-Age science fiction adventures. It remains intentionally unclear if space travel is a given in the narrator's world.

At times, this reminded me a bit of George Alec Effinger and Spider Robinson. But only a little bit. Your mileage may vary. ( )

There seems to be a bit of a dispute if Trafalgar is a novel or a stories collection. It can be either of them or it can be a mix between them. It does have an internal coherence though which makes it closer to a novel or a collection of linked stories. Small Beer Press called it a novel so this is how I am calling it as well.

Trafalgar Medrano is born in Rosario in 1936, an only child of the city's clinician and his wife. Nothing unusual about him - except that he decides to become a businessman (and merchant) and he has a gift of telling stories about the places he had been in. And those places are not on Earth - literary - Trafalgar travels between different worlds, with his trusty old clunker (his spaceship) and then when he is back, he likes telling people about those places and what he had seen and done. And he has one big vice - coffee - he drinks it by the gallon, almost like a comic relief in some parts of the novel.

This is the framework that Gorodischer uses to build her worlds - each chapter is a story from Trafalgar describing a new world - some of them imagined, some of them from the past of the Earth of 1492 (with Columbus, Isabella and Ferdinand, the Inquisition and the discovery of America), some of them based on local cultures (the castes of India for example). Each of these world fully formed, fully executed and totally believable. There is death and betrayal, there is love and sweetness, there is longing for home and thirst for adventure. And at the end of the book, the novel makes a circle, connecting the start with the end (and thus making it more a novel than just stories) - to show that no matter how interesting his adventures are, Trafalgar is still a normal guy.

There is a little problem of course - noone else had ever been on a trip to another planet and through the text, there is the question if these are imaginary stories or if it all happened. But the more you read, the more you realize that it does not matter - they could have happened or might not have happened - it is up to the reader to decide how to read and understand it. I choose to believe that Trafalgar had really traveled to other worlds - because this is what science fiction is all about after all. It is interesting that Gorodischer decides to introduce an aunt, a matron from the older generation to be the voice of reason (she cannot even imagine that these are space stories and tries to position them somewhere in Africa or close to India) while everyone else is open to the idea of space. How one wants to interpret this is up to the reader.

But those stories are not only about women and grand adventures - they are a way for Gorodischer to talk about the meaning of things, the time and the norms. Set the story on a foreign world and it does not sound as if you are talking about what is happening on Earth. There is two ways to read the book - at a face value, as the adventures of Trafalgar in space or as something a bit more, with looking for metaphors through it.

It a way it is also a meta novel - Gorodischer is a character in her own novel, the Argentina of the time and the manners of the ladies of the land are part of the novel, she even mentions one of her novels (the only other one that is translated into English really).

At the end I suspect that everyone will read and understand this book differently - depending on what they expected, what they felt while reading and what they are used to reading. And that is what makes it good literature - it has so many facets and so many possibilities - but without making it confusing or incomplete. It is highly readable, skillfully planned and executed book that ultimately shows what the science fiction can be (and what it had been for a while considering when the book was written). And the translator (which usually would be mentioned only if things had gone wrong) had done marvelous job here.

I am not surprised that Gorodischer is so popular amongst the readers of Spanish. I wish that someone will translate more of her work into English though... ( )