Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Never Did the Fire

In the middle of an argument that seemed ridiculous, when everything had already become muddled, you had shown up just to listen ambiguously, marking your distance and your irony and I couldn't, I wasn't able to keep silent, I couldn't manage it

Never Did The Fire is Daniel Hahn's translation of Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit's Jamás el fuego nunca, published by Charco Press. The dense, claustrophobic and ambiguous prose would have posed many translation difficulties, and wonderfully Hahn explained, based on contemporaneous diary entries, how he approached the task in Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, published alongside the novel.

For the Spanish-language original, in 2019 a poll of critics in El Pais ranked this in the top 100 best books of the 21st century to date (in any language), and a 2016 list in the same publication focused on Spanish-language literature in the previous 25 years had this ranked 22nd (in a very strong list, having read 11 of the top 16).

The novel is narrated by a woman, spending much of her time in the bedroom she shares with a man, both now ageing, but in their youth, members of a revolutionary cell. How long ago this was is rather blurred in the text with reference to fifty, more than a hundred, even a thousand years (the latter in part I think being a literal reference to this being in the last century and indeed millennium if one assumes the present-day action is in the 2000s and the group were active in the 1970s):

It was more than a hundred years ago that Franco died. The tyrant. Profoundly historical, Franco plundered, occupied, controlled. He was, of course, consistent with the part he had to play. One of the best actors for considering his period. An old man. A soldier. Decorated by the institutions. Not brilliant, no, never that, but effective, stubborn, neutral. Foolish, you say, he was foolish. A whole century's gone by now No, no, you tell me, not a century, it's more than that, much more. Yes, I answer you, everything moves in a certain way, imprecise, never literal, not ever. We are talking a century later — more than a century — we are calmly exchanging words that are friendly and compassionate. We need to guard against the scream that we never allow ourselves, not ever, because we might injure ourselves and break. You don't shout at me and nor do you assume overly disdainful expressions, you skip them and just let them circulate inside your head. My own determination is focused on controlling any glimmer of bitterness in order to be a part of this peace we have granted ourselves. We are in a state of peace that is something close to harmony, you curled up into a ball in the bed, covered by the blanket, your eyes closed or half-open, me on the chair, parsimoniously and lucidly ordering the numbers that sustain us. A column of numbers that accounts for the strict diet to which we are subjected, a routine and efficient nutrition that goes directly to meeting the demands of each of the organs that govern us.

As she spends much of her time watching him sleep, making him tea and feeding him bread, and curling up on the bed with him, she has time to ponder on their revolutionary history, and the eventual disintegration of their cell (the novel plays on the dual concepts of the cell in their radical movement, and the deterioration of the cells in their physical bodies). Her narration of their story, and her physical confinement to the room, is periodically broken by what seems to be her job, as a home-carer for elderly incontinent patients, her visits narrated in scatological details.

And while the picture of her and her partner's relationship and time in the militant movement is fragmentary, one theme that emerges is the death of their 2 year-old son from a respiratory condition, with their clandestine identity preventing them being able to take him to a hospital or even properly burying him.

We are, so we agreed, a cell.

We did it after the death had to be consummated don't move, not your head let alone your arms, not now because it was a death that was up to us and that tore us apart. We didn't take him to the hospital, it didn't seem like a possibility. My entreaties, I know, were nothing but rhetoric, a kind of excuse or evasion. We could not go with his body so diminished and dying, panting and dying, gaunt and dying, beloved and dying, to the hospital, because if we did, if we transported his dying agony there, if we moved it from the bed, we would put the entirety of the cells at risk because our own cell would fall and its destructive wake would start exterminating the whole threatened, diminished militant field. Although we had our instructions, we didn't know what to do with his death, where we would take his death, how we would legalise it, nor did we know how to come out of civil non-existence to enter with his body into a grave in a funeral procession that might give us away.

In what is a relatively circular novel, in the closing chapters the story branches off in two further directions. Firstly some incidents in the locale (an armed robbery ending in bloodshed, a fatal car accident) described in gory detail, and then a final chapter that causes us to question what we have been told before about their son, and indeed who exactly is narrating this tale.

By no means an easy read (both a hard story to completely understand, and at times disturbing) but a powerful one.

4 stars (3.5++)

As a footnote, this was my favourite novel in the line, as it describes me to a 'tea' (pun intended):

I think about the tea and about your premature attachment to that liquid. It was a custom you had, a curious detail, an anecdote that characterised you. Yes. Alongside your name there arose as if in a small caption your fondness for tea.