The Pentagon

Antonio Di Benedetto

NOVEL, 1955. EDITION BY ADRIANA HIDALGO EDITORA 2005. 156 PAGES

First published in Buenos Aires in 1955 and written in the previous decade, The Pentagon has attracted the attention of critics for years, not so much for questioning certain guidelines of realistic story construction, but perhaps because it is one of the most mysterious books in Argentine literature. It has even been pointed out that its original composition is a precursor of the nouveau roman and the avant-garde of Julio Cortázar's Rayuela.

The stories that make up this novel each constitute an autonomous piece and, at the same time, find their point of union in the character who obsessively creates them as variations on a classic theme: the love triangle. Thus, the pentagonal schematization results from the articulation of the stories around the drawing of two triangles that, sharing the same vertex (the narrator), trace in turn a relationship between the narrator's two rivals. In the middle of this deceptive symmetry are the women, and at the apex, imposing his mayastatic presence, the "I". In its apparent latency, another imaginary triangle - the oedipal triangle - defines both the guilty infraction and the compulsion to repetition in this geometric figuration of the passions.

Thus, the marital infraction (the thematic core of the book) motivates and originates the aesthetic infraction: the dissatisfaction with the canonical form, the pretension of creating a different novel.

 

PUBLISHED BY: Spanish ADRIANA HIDALGO EDITORA

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