Sergio Chejfec’s Baroni: A Journey opens with an important artwork by a Venezuelan artist – the wooden figurine of a fabled doctor and healer from a small mountain town in Venezuela whose economy largely relies on tourists drawn by his story. Inspired by the legend of the real-life Jose Gregoria Hernandez, the wood carving celebrates the man’s mythic status in Latin America. As a way of illustrating the doctor’s effect on people, the wooden figure is holding a child who looks up at the doctor as if “he has found the refuge denied him until that moment by the rest of the land and its people”.
In the pages gathered in Baroni, the narrator doggedly pursues an understanding of the Venezuelan artist Rafaela Baroni, who is well-known for carving wooden figurines and for living an unusual life. Though the narrator is not identified in the novel, their sentences reveal their character – tentative, smart, and deeply interested in artistry in the country. Through painstaking observations of the artist and her work, the narrator breaches thoughtful insights into the nature of art, performance, and glorification.
The presence of the miraculous
Baroni lives in a town in the Andean foothills where she turns the faces of her figurines towards a view of the outside world so that they may enjoy it. She includes a small parrot in each of her carvings, to “keep a sharp eye on the evolution of saints and people” in her work. She performs her own death and resurrection twice a year as a “preparatory exercise for herself and a lesson for the rest”. She chooses primarily saints, healers and virgins as the inspiration for her work.
The miraculous finds a place in Baroni’s art as it does in her life, where she offers people predictions and diagnoses. Baroni’s figures are understood to each be a “representation of herself.” Aside from the obvious implication that Baroni believes herself to be among the pious, the narrator points out that carving something as familiar as one’s own face is “skill alone at work, much like automatic speech”.
Fascinating as Baroni’s art is, she appears to also be a lens through which to understand the narrator. The voice in the novel is alternately assured and cautiously sceptical of its own conclusions. They periodically inject a phrase such as “something like that” or “I have no better way to describe it” in order to separate their words from the illusion of an irrefutable truth. There is a continual sense of postponement and endless time with the reader – the narrator tells us throughout the book that they will probably return to the allusion they just made at a later point, though they rarely do.
There is almost a complete absence of direct quotes – the narrator documents conversations with Baroni, other artists, and friends by paraphrasing or summarising the content. As the reader gets deeper into the book, it is clear that a single intelligent gaze, though limited in some ways, can hold an elasticity that allows it to evolve and view its subject from a number of angles. The narrator doesn’t know Baroni intimately, but they do try to understand the artistic part of her as well as they can, adjusting their perception with each new interaction or reflection upon a particular piece. As the narrator journeys through small towns in Venezuela including the saintly doctor’s home town, they’re confronted by questions about why we glorify the people – saints, virgins, artists – that we do.
Fluidity of feelings
Baroni is not a book that necessarily compels the reader to keep turning the pages. Translated from Spanish by Margaret Carson, it is Indian publisher Almost Island’s first international acquisition. Similar to another one of this publisher’s books, Sharmistha Mohanty’s Five Movements In Praise, this one is a work of prose without a traditional narrative and without a commitment to any single genre.
A sloth climbing a tree or a poet picking out a jacket for his eventual funeral can take up three pages on their own without losing the reader’s attention. Somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, Baroni is an enterprise that revels in getting a reader to pause at the end of the sentence or in the middle of a paragraph so that they can read the section again.
The precise, crystalline sentences are a product of artistry themselves. Take for example this description of Baroni’s workshop: “...Baroni has decided to cut herself off from the vegetal landscapes on the walls and from the finished works, so that she could be alone with the ones that were embryonic, imagined, or incomplete,” or this description of Baroni’s obsession with her garden, “...at moments Baroni spoke of future expansions as if physical limits didn’t exist and it were a question of a vast terrain belonging to her, endless...”
Describing their preferred aesthetic, Almost Island says that “every subject requires its own, perhaps revised, or new form.” Baroni has created a form that shows the fluidity of any feeling one person holds for a public figure – in this case admiration, curiosity, sympathy for the “troubled history” of Baroni’s health. The book continues to surprise as the narrator devotes their time “every day, to distinguishing what was true from what was false” while keeping themselves “on the side of the unresolved.” Baroni is a book for anyone interested in the relationship between consumer and artist, and between enjoying someone’s art and seeking to know where that art come from.
Baroni: A Journey, Sergio Chejfec, translated by Margaret Carson, Almost Island.
