The following review of the novel, THE NATURE OF TRUTH, by Sergio
Troncoso, recently appeared in Janus Head, a journal of Philosophy,
Literature and Psychology.
To write "the philosophic novel" is to risk both oversimplified
analysis and watered-down narrative in a single volume. To avoid
either, the balance between idea and drama must be perfect, the
integration seamless. It's daunting work, long and precarious. But
for those who care passionately about rigorous argumentation and
compelling, character-driven fiction-and Troncoso is obviously such a
man-the challenge to combine the two modes must prove unbearable. . .
..
As meta-fiction and the novel of information continue to attract more
and more of the literary spotlight, it's refreshing to see a writer
like Troncoso put his ranging intellect to work fashioning a powerful,
old-fashioned story, complete with suspense, rising action, climax and
a denouement. No sooner does Troncoso establish his Yale setting with
lyric, razor-sharp detail-painting a campus of "pale yellow stone
walls" -than does his protagonist, Helmut Sanchez, start boldly
down the road to crisis. This occurs when Helmut, a handsome, morally
scrupulous research assistant of Mexican and German descent, identifies
his employer Werner Hopfgartner as the author of an inflammatory
article some fifty years old. The handiwork of a revered cultural
critic, Professor Hopfgartner's rambling piece of pseudo-scholarship
from post-war Vienna extols a virtue ethics of shamelessness and
strength for those Teutons still harboring guilt over the genocide
committed by their parents. Far worse than this, though, and as Helmut
learns while vacationing (and sleuthing) in Central Europe, Hopfgartner
has buried a demonic past in his native Austria, a past that, for sheer
repugnance, makes his present-day philandering with comely
undergraduates appear mere dalliances-at least in Helmut's view.
What can't be overlooked in Hopfgartner, what can't even be spoken
aloud to his adoring, willful girlfriend, Ariane, drives Helmut to
assume the role of metaphysical judge, jury and executioner.
None of this, in Troncoso's hands, reads as the tabloid fodder it
might become. If we are shocked by the depths of Hopfgartner's
depravity, we are at least primed to accept them. From the initial,
work-obsessed exchanges rendered between this villain and his
assistant, to the revelation of Hopfgartner's near fascist diatribe
from 1949, Troncoso swiftly conjures a Heidegger for the 21st century,
an intellectual giant whose guilt extends outside the confines of
academia and into living history. . . . A sensitive, generous lover and
natural-born Samaritan who once saved the life of a suicidal
undergraduate, Helmut betrays an empathy more than capable of reaching
into the past, toward a little girl all but obliterated by history and
the brutality of her persecutors. Helmut's dark, new knowledge-a
knowledge of rape, murder and Herr Professor's one-time Nazi
allegiance-is all the catalyst needed for realistic tragedy. When
Helmut does set out to assassinate Hopfgartner, Troncoso delivers the
scene in precise, evocative language that renders the morally fantastic
utterly believable: "He sprinted over snowbanks, sliding and
slipping. His face glistened with perspiration. His cotton shirt was
soaked under his black leather jacket, which gleamed like shiny
plastic.". . .
It is with this trio [Helmut Sanchez, Ariane Sassolini, and Detective
Jack Rosselli] that the author excels as both fictionist and moral
epistemologist. When Helmut ventures beyond good and evil, Troncoso
refuses to leave his reader behind. It is more than a liberating world,
Troncoso suggests. It's also nightmarish one, inducing the worst
symptoms of psychosis even in its most well-meaning inhabitants. In
conveying this, Troncoso's powers of characterization and description
are equal to his analytic ones: "The blade in his hand glimmered in
the moonlight. He sliced into the fatty tissue of his forearm. He felt
exquisite pain. Blood, hot blood, ran out of his arm. Helmut clenched
his fist, and the red stream became fuller, warmer, quicker." With
Ariane Sassolini, Sergio gives us a hero for the story playing out in
the novel's subtext. A scholar every bit as inquisitive as Helmut,
Ariane yet comes to embody the truth that Helmut has forsaken: that
conventional taboos, though conventional, serve a grand ethical
purpose. When her crisis arrives, again in the form of knowledge, she
must make a life-altering decision, and her one of compassion and
forgiveness for Helmut betrays a moral fortitude far exceeding that of
her beloved. Rosselli, on the other hand, lacks the imagination
required for compassion that large. He's too mired in the data of
criminology to ever truly understand the criminal. Unable to identify
the real killer, motivated not by vengeance but by idealism, Rosselli
allows an innocent man, Atwater, to suffer at the hands of thugs.
Clearly, then, The Nature of Truth is no allegory. All three of the
characters come to embody more than a philosophic agenda. But operating
within the minds of each is a set of epistemic practices that Troncoso
deftly contrasts. When juxtaposed, the Nietzschean valor of Sanchez,
the Christian pragmatism of Sassolini and the blind inductivism of
Rosselli make for a sustained, intellectual tension that perfectly
complements the narrative one. If Troncoso occasionally tips his hand,
as he does when Helmut self-consciously asks "What was morality
anyway?", or when the street-wise Rosselli puts forth a rather
academic-sounding theory of racial division, the author is careful
never to make the conflict between his characters' "truths" too
explicit. The subtlety, and fairness, with which Troncoso presents
these conflicting frameworks stand as the novel's crowning
intellectual achievement, side by side with the artistic one: a
convincing tale of murder and ruminating guilt. . . .
---Bryan R. Farrow for Janus Head, an interdisciplinary journal of
Philosophy, Literature and Psychology
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