Haftanın Kitabı 146: Turing’in Hezeyanı (ek)
Güney Amerika'nın önde gelen yazarlarından Paz Soldan'ın Türing'in Hezeyanı geçen yıl (2012) türkçede yayınlandıydı. Orijinali 2003 yılında çıkan kitap, Amerikanya Müttehit Devletleri'nde 2006 yılında basılmış. Yapıtla ilgili araştırmalarım sürüyor. Bir kısmını aşağıda alıntılıyorum.
Turing's Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldán
Translated by Lisa Carter. 291 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.
0. BOOK SUMMARY: Set against the backdrop of the globalization crisis, Edmundo Paz Soldán’s latest novel is a modern chapter in the age-old fight between oppressed and oppressor. The town of Río Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution—not a revolution of strikes and street riots but a war waged electronically, where computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the revolutionaries. In this war of information, the lives of a variety of characters become entangled: Kandinsky, the mythic leader of a group of hackers fighting the government and transnational companies; Albert, the founder of Black Chamber, a state security firm charged with deciphering the secret codes used in the information war; and Miguel Sáenz, Black Chamber’s most famous codebreaker, who begins to suspect that his work is not as innocent as he once supposed. All converge to create an edgy, fast-paced story about personal responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs between the global and the local, government and society, the virtual and the real.
1. Excerpt: Turing's Delirium (Part I. 1): As soon as you turn your back on the uncertain sunrise and enter your office building, you cease to be Miguel Sáenz, the civil servant discernible behind the wrinkled gray suit, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and fearful gaze, and become Turing, decipherer of secrets, relentless pursuer of encoded messages, the pride of the Black Chamber.
You insert your electronic ID card into a slot. You are prompted for your password and type ruth1. The metal door opens and the world you unknowingly dreamed of as a child awaits you. Slowly, with measured steps, you enter a vaulted glass enclosure. Two policemen greet you formally. They see the color of your card — green, meaning Beyond Top Secret — without looking at it. It was all so much easier during Albert’s time, when there were only two colors, yellow (Secret) and green. Then that smug Ramírez-Graham arrived (you had once called him “Mr. Ramírez” and he had corrected you: “Ramírez-Graham, please”), and card colors soon began to multiply. In less than a year, red (Top Secret), white (Not at All Secret), blue (Ultra), and orange (Ultra Priority) cards appeared. The color of your card indicates which parts of the building you have access to. Ramírez-Graham has the only purple card in existence, Ultra High Priority. In theory, there is only one area in the seven-story building for which the purple card is required: the Archive of Archives, a small section in the heart of the archives. Such proliferation is laughable. But you are not laughing; you are still offended that some of your colleagues have Ultra and Ultra Priority cards and can go where you cannot.
“Always so early, Mr. Sáenz.”
“For as long as the old body holds out, captain.”
The policemen know who you are; they have heard the stories about you. They don’t understand what you do or how you do it, but still they respect you. Or perhaps they respect you because they don’t understand what you do or how you do it.
You walk next to the wall where the great emblem of the Black Chamber hangs. It is a resplendent aluminum disk encircling a man bent over a desk, trying to decipher a message, and a condor holding a ribbon in its claws that bears the motto “Logic and Intuition”
in Morse code. True, both are needed to penetrate the crypt of secret codes, but they aren’t used in equal proportions. For you, at least, intuition is what lights the way, but the hard work is done by reason.
They don’t understand what you do or how you do it, but still they respect you. What you do? Is it correct still to speak in the present tense? Your glory days, you have to admit, begin to fade in the expanse of time. For example, December 6, 1974, when you detected a cell of leftists who used phrases from Che Guevara’s diary to encode messages; or September 17, 1976, when you were able to warn President Montenegro that an insurrection was brewing in the Cochabamba and Santa Cruz regiments; or December 25, 1981, when you deciphered messages from the Chilean government to its chargé d’affaires regarding water that was being diverted from a river along the border. There are many, many more, but since then your successes have been sporadic. Ramírez- Graham reassigned you, and although at first it seemed that your new job was a promotion, it actually distanced you from the action. As head of the Black Chamber’s general archives, you have become a cryptanalyst who no longer analyzes codes.
Your steps echo down the hallway. You rub your hands together, trying to warm them. The country’s return to democracy in the early 1980s didn’t end the work that was done in this building, but it did minimize it. At first messages between unionists were intercepted, and then later on between drug traffickers, careless people who spoke on easily traceable radio frequencies and didn’t even bother to code their messages. The 1990s brought sporadic work listening to opposition politicians on bugged telephones.
You were happy when Montenegro returned to power through democratic means; you thought that everything would change under his rule and your work would again become urgent. What a disappointment. There was no significant threat to national security as there had been during his dictatorship. You were forced to admit that times had changed. Even worse, during the last stretch of Montenegro’s administration, the vice president, a charismatic technocrat — pardon the contradiction — with wide eyes and dimpled cheeks, had decided to reorganize the Black Chamber and turn it into the focal point of the fight against cyberterrorism. “This will pose one of the key challenges to the twenty- first century,” he had said when he came to announce his initiative. “We must be prepared for what is to come.” Immediately thereafter the vice president introduced Ramírez-Graham, the new director of the Black Chamber: “One of our countrymen who has succeeded abroad, a man who has left a promising career in the north to come and serve his country.” A round of applause. He had annoyed you from the very start: the impeccable black suit, the well-polished loafers and neat haircut — he looked like some sleek businessman. Then he had opened his mouth and the bad impression only worsened. True, he might have had slightly darker skin than most, and somewhat Andean features, but he spoke Spanish with an American accent. It certainly didn’t help when you discovered that he wasn’t even born in Bolivia but was from Arlington, Virginia.
You search the walls for a sign of salvation. Around you are only silent structures, muted by the vigilance of a supervisor who believed it prudent that employees of the Black Chamber not be distracted. Aside from the aluminum emblem at the entrance, there are no signs or notices, no noise that might distract you in the endless search for the text that resides behind all texts. But you can find messages even on immaculate walls. It’s simply a matter of looking for them. Your glasses are dirty — fingerprints, coffee stains — and the frame is twisted. There is a slight pain in your left eye caused by the lens bending at the wrong angle. For weeks you’ve been intending to make an appointment with the ophthalmologist.
Ramírez-Graham has been director of the Black Chamber for almost a year. He has fired a number of your colleagues and replaced them with young computer experts. Since you obviously don’t fit in with his plans for a generational change, why haven’t you been fi red? You put yourself in his shoes: you can’t be fired. After all, you are a living archive, a repository of information regarding the profession. When you go, a whole millennium of knowledge will go with you, an entire encyclopedia of codes. Your colleagues who haven’t yet turned thirty don’t come to ask you practical questions. Rather, they come to hear your stories: of Étienne Bazeries, the French cryptanalyst who in the nineteenth century spent three years trying to decipher Louis XIV’s code (so full of twists and turns that it took more than two centuries to decode it), or of Marian Rejewski, the Polish cryptanalyst who helped to defeat Enigma in World War II. There are so many stories, and you know them all. Your new colleagues use software to decipher codes and see you as a relic from times when the profession was not fully mechanized. The world has changed since Enigma, but being historically out of sync is nothing new in Río Fugitivo.
You pause in front of the Bletchley Room, where slim computers use complex mathematical processes to understand coded messages and fail more often than not. Years are needed to decode a single phrase. With the development of public key cryptography, and particularly with the appearance of the RSA asymmetric system in 1977, a message can now be coded using such high values that all of the computers in the world working to decipher it would take more than the age of the universe to find a solution.
The ultimate irony is that with computers at their service, cryptographers have won the battle against cryptanalysts, and people like you, who don’t depend on computers that much, can still be useful.
Your younger colleagues are adept at computer science and useless before the power of the computer itself. Their work is more modern than yours (at least according to the movies, obsessed as they are with showing young programmers in front of a computer monitor), but it’s still no use — they are just as out of date as you are. Deciphering codes in general has become a useless task. But someone has to do it: the Black Chamber has to maintain the pretense that it is still useful to the government, that power is not as vulnerable as it really is to the attacks of a conspiracy handled by means of secret codes.
The room is empty and silent. When you began work here, the computers were enormous, noisy, metallic cupboards sprouting cables. Machines have become smaller and quieter, increasingly aseptic (in the Babbage Room there is still an ancient Cray supercomputer, a donation from the U.S. government). At one time you felt you were less than those who worked tirelessly on algorithms in the Bletchley Room. You even tried to learn from them, to move from your old office to this one, which was more in keeping with the times. But you couldn’t — you didn’t last long. You liked mathematics, but not enough to dedicate the best hours of your life to it. For you, mathematics was about functionality, not passion. Luckily, most conspirators in Bolivia aren’t that good and don’t know how to do more than the basics on computers either.
You continue on your way, putting your hands into your coat pockets. A pencil, a pen, and a few coins. An image of your daughter, Flavia, comes to mind, and you are filled with tenderness. Before leaving, you went into her room to kiss her goodbye on the forehead. Duanne 2019, the heroine Flavia had created for some of her Web surfing, stared out at you from the screen saver on one of two monitors sitting on her desk, covered in photos of famous hackers (Kevin Mitnick, Ehud Tannenbaum). Or crackers, as she would insist. “You have to learn to differentiate them, Dad. Crackers abuse technology for illegal purposes.” “So why is your site called AllHacker and not AllCracker?” “Good question. It’s because only people in the know make the distinction. And if my site was called AllCracker, it wouldn’t get even one percent of the hits it gets now.” Hackers, crackers: it’s all the same to you. But shouldn’t you try to use the Spanish term and call them piratas informáticos? You prefer that term, even though it sounds strange. English had come first and become the norm. People sent attachments, not archivos adjuntos, e-mails, not correos electrónicos. In Spain they call the screen saver salvapantallas; in truth it sounds ridiculous. Still, you shouldn’t give up; it is worth going against the grain. The survival of Spanish as a language of the twenty-first century is at stake. Piratas informáticos, piratas informáticos . . .
Flavia was snoring lightly and you stood looking at her under the glow of the lamp on the bedside table. Her damp, tangled, chestnut-colored hair fell over her face with its full lips. Her nightshirt had twisted and her left breast was bared, the nipple pink and erect. Embarrassed, you covered her up. When had your mischievous, ponytailed little girl become a disturbing young woman of seventeen? When had you stopped paying attention? What had you been doing while she grew up? Computers had fascinated her ever since she was a child, and she had learned to program by the time she was thirteen. Her Web site provided information about the little-known hacker subculture. How many hours a day did she spend in front of her IBM clones? In most respects she had left adolescence behind. Luckily, she was not at all interested in the young men who had begun to flock to the house, attracted by her distant, languid beauty.
The Vigenère Room is empty. The hands of the clock on the wall read 6:25 a.m. Ramírez-Graham hadn’t been thorough enough and had left mechanical clocks in the building. Surely he would soon replace them with red numbers in quartz, analogue with digital. Such useless modernization. Seconds more or seconds less, precise or imprecise, time will continue to fl ow on and in the end have its way with us.
The building at this hour is still chilly. It doesn’t matter: you like to be the first to arrive at work. You learned that from Albert, your boss for over twenty-five years. Continuing on with the tradition is your homage to the man who did more for cryptanalysis in Río Fugitivo than anyone else. Albert is now confined to a medicinal-smelling room in a house on Avenida de las Acacias, delirious, his mind unable to respond. He is proof that it’s not good to overload the brain with work: short circuits are the order of the day. You like to walk down the empty hallways, to see the desks in the cubicles piled high with paper. In the still air your eyes rest on file folders and ghostly machines with the disdainful arrogance of a benevolent god, of someone who will do his work because some unknown First Cause has ordained it and it’s not wise to defy destiny.
You press the elevator button and enter that metallic universe where the strangest thoughts have always occurred to you. Will the elevator malfunction and plunge you to your death? You are heading to the basement, to the archives, to the ends of the earth, to a death chamber that only you inhabit. It is even colder down there. Suspended in the air by thick cables, you move without moving, in peace.
There is something special about this elevator. Its green walls, simple efficiency — a solid nucleus of stable movement. What would you do without it? What would people do without them? Otis, six passengers, 1000 pounds. You stare at the name. You spell it out: O-T-I-S. Backwards: S-I-T- O. It is a message striving to break free, and it is destined only for you. I-O-T- S. I’m Obliged To Say. Who’s obliged to say what?
The general archives are in the basement. You are the link between the present and the past. You hang your jacket on a broken coat rack. You take your glasses off, clean the lenses with a dirty handkerchief, and put them back on. You pop a piece of spearmint gum into your mouth, the first of many. Never chewed for more than two minutes, they are thrown out as soon as the first flavor is gone.
You feel the need to urinate. That sense of having to go immediately has been with you since adolescence. It’s one of the worst manifestations of your anxiety, the way in which your body compensates for your apparent immunity to emotions. All of your underwear is stained the color of burned grass. You suffer from it even more now that you work in the basement; the architect never thought to put a bathroom on this floor. Perhaps he assumed that whoever would work in the archives could take the elevator or stairs up to the bathrooms on the ground floor — a normal human being, someone who might go once or twice a day and not be bothered. But what about someone who is incontinent? How insensitive.
You open the bottom drawer of your desk and take out a plastic cup with a smiling Road Runner on it. You head to a corner of the room, your back to the archives. You lower your zipper and urinate into the cup: six, seven, eight amber drops. That’s why you don’t like to go to the bathroom; the result is usually incompatible with the sense of urgency. It’s better to accumulate drops in the cup and then casually pass by the bathroom to dispose of your fragrant treasure at lunchtime.
You put the cup back in the drawer.
The pile of papers on your desk seduces you; bringing order to chaos, partially winning the battle against it, and being ready for the next onslaught is a game that lasts for days and months and years. Cryptanalysts’ desks tend to be impeccable, with papers stacked on either side, pens and reference books lined up one next to the other, the computer monitor standing guard, the keyboard on the shelf hidden beneath the desk. It is the reflection of a pristine mind that does its work with great dedication to logic.
You turn on the computer and check your e-mail at both the public and the private address. You spit your gum out, put another piece in your mouth, and all of a sudden at your private address you find an e-mail consisting of a single line:
RZWIJWJWDTZWMFSIXFWJXYFNSJIBNYMGQTTI
You notice the sequence FWJ XYFNSJI. Frequency analysis won’t take more than a few minutes. Each letter has its own personality, and even though it seems to be out of place, it is betrayed, whispers, speaks, shouts, tells its story, misses its place on earth — paper. Who could have sent you this message? From where? You don’t recognize the address. That’s strange — only about ten people know your private e-mail. Someone has managed to get past the Black Chamber’s firewalls and is teasing your heart with a crude message.
All messages from within the Black Chamber come encrypted to your private address and your computer deciphers them automatically. Perhaps something in the program failed. You hit a couple of keys to try to decode the message. No luck. It isn’t encrypted using the Black Chamber’s software, which confirms your suspicions: the message was sent by someone unknown.
It is a taunt. For now, you had better do what you do best: frequency analysis. The j has to be a vowel: a? e? o? Common sense tells you it’s an e.
You soon know: it is a simple code ciphered by substitution, a variation that, according to Suetonius, was used by the emperor Julius Caesar. Each letter has been moved five spaces to the right, so that the j is really an e, the g is a b, and so on. XYFNSJI spells stained.
MURDERERYOURHANDSARESTAINEDWITHBLOOD
Who’s the murderer? You? Why are your hands stained?
2. Reviews
2.1 New York Times
Translated by Lisa Carter. 291 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.
0. BOOK SUMMARY: Set against the backdrop of the globalization crisis, Edmundo Paz Soldán’s latest novel is a modern chapter in the age-old fight between oppressed and oppressor. The town of Río Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution—not a revolution of strikes and street riots but a war waged electronically, where computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the revolutionaries. In this war of information, the lives of a variety of characters become entangled: Kandinsky, the mythic leader of a group of hackers fighting the government and transnational companies; Albert, the founder of Black Chamber, a state security firm charged with deciphering the secret codes used in the information war; and Miguel Sáenz, Black Chamber’s most famous codebreaker, who begins to suspect that his work is not as innocent as he once supposed. All converge to create an edgy, fast-paced story about personal responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs between the global and the local, government and society, the virtual and the real.
1. Excerpt: Turing's Delirium (Part I. 1): As soon as you turn your back on the uncertain sunrise and enter your office building, you cease to be Miguel Sáenz, the civil servant discernible behind the wrinkled gray suit, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and fearful gaze, and become Turing, decipherer of secrets, relentless pursuer of encoded messages, the pride of the Black Chamber.
You insert your electronic ID card into a slot. You are prompted for your password and type ruth1. The metal door opens and the world you unknowingly dreamed of as a child awaits you. Slowly, with measured steps, you enter a vaulted glass enclosure. Two policemen greet you formally. They see the color of your card — green, meaning Beyond Top Secret — without looking at it. It was all so much easier during Albert’s time, when there were only two colors, yellow (Secret) and green. Then that smug Ramírez-Graham arrived (you had once called him “Mr. Ramírez” and he had corrected you: “Ramírez-Graham, please”), and card colors soon began to multiply. In less than a year, red (Top Secret), white (Not at All Secret), blue (Ultra), and orange (Ultra Priority) cards appeared. The color of your card indicates which parts of the building you have access to. Ramírez-Graham has the only purple card in existence, Ultra High Priority. In theory, there is only one area in the seven-story building for which the purple card is required: the Archive of Archives, a small section in the heart of the archives. Such proliferation is laughable. But you are not laughing; you are still offended that some of your colleagues have Ultra and Ultra Priority cards and can go where you cannot.
“Always so early, Mr. Sáenz.”
“For as long as the old body holds out, captain.”
The policemen know who you are; they have heard the stories about you. They don’t understand what you do or how you do it, but still they respect you. Or perhaps they respect you because they don’t understand what you do or how you do it.
You walk next to the wall where the great emblem of the Black Chamber hangs. It is a resplendent aluminum disk encircling a man bent over a desk, trying to decipher a message, and a condor holding a ribbon in its claws that bears the motto “Logic and Intuition”
in Morse code. True, both are needed to penetrate the crypt of secret codes, but they aren’t used in equal proportions. For you, at least, intuition is what lights the way, but the hard work is done by reason.
They don’t understand what you do or how you do it, but still they respect you. What you do? Is it correct still to speak in the present tense? Your glory days, you have to admit, begin to fade in the expanse of time. For example, December 6, 1974, when you detected a cell of leftists who used phrases from Che Guevara’s diary to encode messages; or September 17, 1976, when you were able to warn President Montenegro that an insurrection was brewing in the Cochabamba and Santa Cruz regiments; or December 25, 1981, when you deciphered messages from the Chilean government to its chargé d’affaires regarding water that was being diverted from a river along the border. There are many, many more, but since then your successes have been sporadic. Ramírez- Graham reassigned you, and although at first it seemed that your new job was a promotion, it actually distanced you from the action. As head of the Black Chamber’s general archives, you have become a cryptanalyst who no longer analyzes codes.
Your steps echo down the hallway. You rub your hands together, trying to warm them. The country’s return to democracy in the early 1980s didn’t end the work that was done in this building, but it did minimize it. At first messages between unionists were intercepted, and then later on between drug traffickers, careless people who spoke on easily traceable radio frequencies and didn’t even bother to code their messages. The 1990s brought sporadic work listening to opposition politicians on bugged telephones.
You were happy when Montenegro returned to power through democratic means; you thought that everything would change under his rule and your work would again become urgent. What a disappointment. There was no significant threat to national security as there had been during his dictatorship. You were forced to admit that times had changed. Even worse, during the last stretch of Montenegro’s administration, the vice president, a charismatic technocrat — pardon the contradiction — with wide eyes and dimpled cheeks, had decided to reorganize the Black Chamber and turn it into the focal point of the fight against cyberterrorism. “This will pose one of the key challenges to the twenty- first century,” he had said when he came to announce his initiative. “We must be prepared for what is to come.” Immediately thereafter the vice president introduced Ramírez-Graham, the new director of the Black Chamber: “One of our countrymen who has succeeded abroad, a man who has left a promising career in the north to come and serve his country.” A round of applause. He had annoyed you from the very start: the impeccable black suit, the well-polished loafers and neat haircut — he looked like some sleek businessman. Then he had opened his mouth and the bad impression only worsened. True, he might have had slightly darker skin than most, and somewhat Andean features, but he spoke Spanish with an American accent. It certainly didn’t help when you discovered that he wasn’t even born in Bolivia but was from Arlington, Virginia.
You search the walls for a sign of salvation. Around you are only silent structures, muted by the vigilance of a supervisor who believed it prudent that employees of the Black Chamber not be distracted. Aside from the aluminum emblem at the entrance, there are no signs or notices, no noise that might distract you in the endless search for the text that resides behind all texts. But you can find messages even on immaculate walls. It’s simply a matter of looking for them. Your glasses are dirty — fingerprints, coffee stains — and the frame is twisted. There is a slight pain in your left eye caused by the lens bending at the wrong angle. For weeks you’ve been intending to make an appointment with the ophthalmologist.
Ramírez-Graham has been director of the Black Chamber for almost a year. He has fired a number of your colleagues and replaced them with young computer experts. Since you obviously don’t fit in with his plans for a generational change, why haven’t you been fi red? You put yourself in his shoes: you can’t be fired. After all, you are a living archive, a repository of information regarding the profession. When you go, a whole millennium of knowledge will go with you, an entire encyclopedia of codes. Your colleagues who haven’t yet turned thirty don’t come to ask you practical questions. Rather, they come to hear your stories: of Étienne Bazeries, the French cryptanalyst who in the nineteenth century spent three years trying to decipher Louis XIV’s code (so full of twists and turns that it took more than two centuries to decode it), or of Marian Rejewski, the Polish cryptanalyst who helped to defeat Enigma in World War II. There are so many stories, and you know them all. Your new colleagues use software to decipher codes and see you as a relic from times when the profession was not fully mechanized. The world has changed since Enigma, but being historically out of sync is nothing new in Río Fugitivo.
You pause in front of the Bletchley Room, where slim computers use complex mathematical processes to understand coded messages and fail more often than not. Years are needed to decode a single phrase. With the development of public key cryptography, and particularly with the appearance of the RSA asymmetric system in 1977, a message can now be coded using such high values that all of the computers in the world working to decipher it would take more than the age of the universe to find a solution.
The ultimate irony is that with computers at their service, cryptographers have won the battle against cryptanalysts, and people like you, who don’t depend on computers that much, can still be useful.
Your younger colleagues are adept at computer science and useless before the power of the computer itself. Their work is more modern than yours (at least according to the movies, obsessed as they are with showing young programmers in front of a computer monitor), but it’s still no use — they are just as out of date as you are. Deciphering codes in general has become a useless task. But someone has to do it: the Black Chamber has to maintain the pretense that it is still useful to the government, that power is not as vulnerable as it really is to the attacks of a conspiracy handled by means of secret codes.
The room is empty and silent. When you began work here, the computers were enormous, noisy, metallic cupboards sprouting cables. Machines have become smaller and quieter, increasingly aseptic (in the Babbage Room there is still an ancient Cray supercomputer, a donation from the U.S. government). At one time you felt you were less than those who worked tirelessly on algorithms in the Bletchley Room. You even tried to learn from them, to move from your old office to this one, which was more in keeping with the times. But you couldn’t — you didn’t last long. You liked mathematics, but not enough to dedicate the best hours of your life to it. For you, mathematics was about functionality, not passion. Luckily, most conspirators in Bolivia aren’t that good and don’t know how to do more than the basics on computers either.
You continue on your way, putting your hands into your coat pockets. A pencil, a pen, and a few coins. An image of your daughter, Flavia, comes to mind, and you are filled with tenderness. Before leaving, you went into her room to kiss her goodbye on the forehead. Duanne 2019, the heroine Flavia had created for some of her Web surfing, stared out at you from the screen saver on one of two monitors sitting on her desk, covered in photos of famous hackers (Kevin Mitnick, Ehud Tannenbaum). Or crackers, as she would insist. “You have to learn to differentiate them, Dad. Crackers abuse technology for illegal purposes.” “So why is your site called AllHacker and not AllCracker?” “Good question. It’s because only people in the know make the distinction. And if my site was called AllCracker, it wouldn’t get even one percent of the hits it gets now.” Hackers, crackers: it’s all the same to you. But shouldn’t you try to use the Spanish term and call them piratas informáticos? You prefer that term, even though it sounds strange. English had come first and become the norm. People sent attachments, not archivos adjuntos, e-mails, not correos electrónicos. In Spain they call the screen saver salvapantallas; in truth it sounds ridiculous. Still, you shouldn’t give up; it is worth going against the grain. The survival of Spanish as a language of the twenty-first century is at stake. Piratas informáticos, piratas informáticos . . .
Flavia was snoring lightly and you stood looking at her under the glow of the lamp on the bedside table. Her damp, tangled, chestnut-colored hair fell over her face with its full lips. Her nightshirt had twisted and her left breast was bared, the nipple pink and erect. Embarrassed, you covered her up. When had your mischievous, ponytailed little girl become a disturbing young woman of seventeen? When had you stopped paying attention? What had you been doing while she grew up? Computers had fascinated her ever since she was a child, and she had learned to program by the time she was thirteen. Her Web site provided information about the little-known hacker subculture. How many hours a day did she spend in front of her IBM clones? In most respects she had left adolescence behind. Luckily, she was not at all interested in the young men who had begun to flock to the house, attracted by her distant, languid beauty.
The Vigenère Room is empty. The hands of the clock on the wall read 6:25 a.m. Ramírez-Graham hadn’t been thorough enough and had left mechanical clocks in the building. Surely he would soon replace them with red numbers in quartz, analogue with digital. Such useless modernization. Seconds more or seconds less, precise or imprecise, time will continue to fl ow on and in the end have its way with us.
The building at this hour is still chilly. It doesn’t matter: you like to be the first to arrive at work. You learned that from Albert, your boss for over twenty-five years. Continuing on with the tradition is your homage to the man who did more for cryptanalysis in Río Fugitivo than anyone else. Albert is now confined to a medicinal-smelling room in a house on Avenida de las Acacias, delirious, his mind unable to respond. He is proof that it’s not good to overload the brain with work: short circuits are the order of the day. You like to walk down the empty hallways, to see the desks in the cubicles piled high with paper. In the still air your eyes rest on file folders and ghostly machines with the disdainful arrogance of a benevolent god, of someone who will do his work because some unknown First Cause has ordained it and it’s not wise to defy destiny.
You press the elevator button and enter that metallic universe where the strangest thoughts have always occurred to you. Will the elevator malfunction and plunge you to your death? You are heading to the basement, to the archives, to the ends of the earth, to a death chamber that only you inhabit. It is even colder down there. Suspended in the air by thick cables, you move without moving, in peace.
There is something special about this elevator. Its green walls, simple efficiency — a solid nucleus of stable movement. What would you do without it? What would people do without them? Otis, six passengers, 1000 pounds. You stare at the name. You spell it out: O-T-I-S. Backwards: S-I-T- O. It is a message striving to break free, and it is destined only for you. I-O-T- S. I’m Obliged To Say. Who’s obliged to say what?
The general archives are in the basement. You are the link between the present and the past. You hang your jacket on a broken coat rack. You take your glasses off, clean the lenses with a dirty handkerchief, and put them back on. You pop a piece of spearmint gum into your mouth, the first of many. Never chewed for more than two minutes, they are thrown out as soon as the first flavor is gone.
You feel the need to urinate. That sense of having to go immediately has been with you since adolescence. It’s one of the worst manifestations of your anxiety, the way in which your body compensates for your apparent immunity to emotions. All of your underwear is stained the color of burned grass. You suffer from it even more now that you work in the basement; the architect never thought to put a bathroom on this floor. Perhaps he assumed that whoever would work in the archives could take the elevator or stairs up to the bathrooms on the ground floor — a normal human being, someone who might go once or twice a day and not be bothered. But what about someone who is incontinent? How insensitive.
You open the bottom drawer of your desk and take out a plastic cup with a smiling Road Runner on it. You head to a corner of the room, your back to the archives. You lower your zipper and urinate into the cup: six, seven, eight amber drops. That’s why you don’t like to go to the bathroom; the result is usually incompatible with the sense of urgency. It’s better to accumulate drops in the cup and then casually pass by the bathroom to dispose of your fragrant treasure at lunchtime.
You put the cup back in the drawer.
The pile of papers on your desk seduces you; bringing order to chaos, partially winning the battle against it, and being ready for the next onslaught is a game that lasts for days and months and years. Cryptanalysts’ desks tend to be impeccable, with papers stacked on either side, pens and reference books lined up one next to the other, the computer monitor standing guard, the keyboard on the shelf hidden beneath the desk. It is the reflection of a pristine mind that does its work with great dedication to logic.
You turn on the computer and check your e-mail at both the public and the private address. You spit your gum out, put another piece in your mouth, and all of a sudden at your private address you find an e-mail consisting of a single line:
RZWIJWJWDTZWMFSIXFWJXYFNSJIBNYMGQTTI
You notice the sequence FWJ XYFNSJI. Frequency analysis won’t take more than a few minutes. Each letter has its own personality, and even though it seems to be out of place, it is betrayed, whispers, speaks, shouts, tells its story, misses its place on earth — paper. Who could have sent you this message? From where? You don’t recognize the address. That’s strange — only about ten people know your private e-mail. Someone has managed to get past the Black Chamber’s firewalls and is teasing your heart with a crude message.
All messages from within the Black Chamber come encrypted to your private address and your computer deciphers them automatically. Perhaps something in the program failed. You hit a couple of keys to try to decode the message. No luck. It isn’t encrypted using the Black Chamber’s software, which confirms your suspicions: the message was sent by someone unknown.
It is a taunt. For now, you had better do what you do best: frequency analysis. The j has to be a vowel: a? e? o? Common sense tells you it’s an e.
You soon know: it is a simple code ciphered by substitution, a variation that, according to Suetonius, was used by the emperor Julius Caesar. Each letter has been moved five spaces to the right, so that the j is really an e, the g is a b, and so on. XYFNSJI spells stained.
MURDERERYOURHANDSARESTAINEDWITHBLOOD
Who’s the murderer? You? Why are your hands stained?
2. Reviews
2.1 New York Times
By Pico Iyer, Published: July 16, 2006
The National Security Agency near Washington intercepts two million messages an hour, Edmundo Paz Soldán tells us in his information-mad sixth novel (and the second to be translated into English), "but it was increasingly difficult to decode them." That same problem seems to afflict the characters in "Turing's Delirium." "I can't even read my own notes without wondering if I'm trying to send myself a secret message while doing everything possible not to be deciphered by myself," says one cryptanalyst to two colleagues. Welcome, in short, to a wildly overloaded meta-universe of code breakers lost in a Pynchonic grid of 1's and 0's and a state of increasingly dizzying paranoia.
"Turing's Delirium" somehow lives up to both the derangement of its title and the tortured, complex mind of Alan Turing, the father of computer science who died in 1954, apparently by his own hand. It is set in Paz Soldán's homeland of Bolivia and, more especially, in the fictional hometown he often revisits, Río Fugitivo. And its starting point is a group of cryptanalysts who assemble in a body called the Black Chamber to protect the dictatorship of the moment from the "cyberhacktivists" of the Resistance, who wish to strike a local blow against globalism and bring down the System by bringing down its systems. Many of the characters converge in a fictional online world called Playground, and one of the central figures is a disembodied ghost in the machine who says things like "I was José Martí. I was José Martí. Martí José was I. José was I Martí. Was. Martí. I. José." If that sounds like anime on speed, then you're underestimating the pacing of Paz Soldán's imaginings.
The author, who teaches at Cornell, is one of the charter members of the McOndo literary movement, an unmagic-realism camp that believes South America today lives in a different universe from the one in Gabriel García Márquez's sleepy, never-never Macondo, with its ascending angels and insomnia plagues. It is a point of pride with McOndoites that, as here, the kids in their novels carry "the latest Nokia," central events take place at an Internet cafe called Portal to Reality and Thomas Pynchon's recurring notion of entropy is at once honored and updated in a reference to a Web site called attrition.org. In Paz Soldán's previous novel, "The Matter of Desire," the protagonist goes to a Bolivian cafe called Berkeley to talk to a local band called Berkeley about his deceased father's coded novel called — what else? — "Berkeley." In "Turing's Delirium," we first meet the most alive flesh-and-blood character — a drug-addicted prostitute — at a McDonald's. She does herself up at times as a "University of California cheerleader" (perhaps unaware that the dreamspace of the characters in the new book seems to have relocated to the home of both global circuit making and antiglobalization protests, Seattle).
The idea behind McOndo is a timely and a tonic one, and Paz Soldán, who commutes fluently between his home country and his adopted one, is well placed to redress what he might call the global inequities of the imagination (Bolivians in "Turing's Delirium" imagine America to be the source of all up-to-the-minute intelligence, while Americans often see Bolivia in terms of low-tech machines and blackouts. Yet a novel like this one effectively replaces magic realism with virtual reality, dreamspace with abstraction. Speed-dialed through pages of academic theory, treatises on the history of codes from Khnumhotep II to Xerxes, vague allusions to Nazi fugitives and nostalgia for the antiglobalization riots of 1999, you can easily forget that you are in the poorest country on the continent, and a largely indigenous one at that.
The story itself, nicely translated by Lisa Carter, is supple and not without potential. A bureaucrat called Ramírez-Graham, half-Bolivian and half-Kansan, is brought down from the N.S.A. to try to upgrade the Bolivian government's systems and protect them from the new cyberguerrillas, who seem able to hack into them at will. One of the veteran code breakers has a 17-year-old daughter who somehow manages to interface with the digital insurgents on Playground. An avenging judge on Bolivian marching powder is thrown into the mix, as are a history professor and a voice that intones, "I am the Spirit of Cryptanalysis. Of Cryptography." That the characters are named — or code-named — Flavia, Kandinsky, Turing and Montenegro gives you some sense of Paz Soldán's global ambitions (his epigraphs come from Borges, Shakespeare and the cybernovelist Neal Stephenson).
The trouble is that the whole scheme feels like a blur of downloaded ideas, or even gestures. Some chapters are written in a Jay McInerneyish second person, some are delivered in the voice of an "electric ant," as he calls himself. One minute we are in the virtual world of Playground, the next we're back in the airless claustrophobia of the Black Chamber. And each time lovers are seen wooing by comparing "monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic substitution codes" — or we are reminded that "Everything means something else, and that something might be what transcends" — character and emotion and plot seem increasingly far off.
Paz Soldán is certainly bringing us a side of Bolivia that even those of us who often visit the country have seldom dreamed of. And he's usefully rescuing us from provincialism by reminding us that even in underdeveloped Andean cities, people flourish "KILL MICROSOFT" stickers next to their posters of Kurt Cobain. But a larger sense of vision somehow gets lost in all the talk of "multiple historical temporalities" — delivered by characters who seem to have telecommuted in from a Richard Powers novel — and the ideas that lie behind all the hypertexting are not as novel as they should be ("The information age produces so much information that it winds up suffocating itself"). At some point, alas, reading of how "meteorological changes save us from our panic at empty spaces," my eyes began to crash. Or, as a character here puts it, in what probably sounds almost as metallic in Spanish, "my taciturn face" became "extraordinarily remote."
Pico Iyer's most recent books of nonfiction include "The Global Soul" and "Sun After Dark."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
2.2 San Francisco Chronicle
Cryptologist faces evil hacker in morality thriller
Reviewed by Andrew Ervin
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 9, 2006
By bringing the entire history of cryptography to bear on a story about anti-globalism protests and a would-be revolution in Bolivia, "Turing's Delirium" combines the excitement of a political thriller with the intellectual ambition of a literary novel of ideas. Upon its initial publication in 1992, the novel won the Bolivian National Book Award, and it now appears in English for the first time, translated by Lisa Carter.
It's the second of Edmundo Paz Soldán's novels to appear in English, after "The Matter of Desire." The author is associated with the McOndo literary movement, which opposes the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and his generation (albeit while splashing laudatory blurbs from the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa on their book covers). If "Turing's Delirium" provides any indication, McOndo rejects the essentializing cliches about Latin America and looks instead to the cosmopolitan reality as influenced by American popular culture and by globalism in general.
In keeping with his complicated subject, Paz Soldán, now a professor at Cornell University, tells his story unconventionally, with chapters dedicated to different members of a larger ensemble cast than one might typically expect in a book this size. The events of his story unfold slowly and sequentially and they occasionally overlap, with the same encounter or conversation repeated from different perspectives. It's difficult to know whom to believe or even whom to side with for very long.
The closest thing to a protagonist is an aging cryptanalyst named Miguel Sáenz (which is, tellingly, pronounced "signs"). Nicknamed Turing by his colleagues, after the English mathematician, Sáenz works for the mysterious Black Chamber, a governmental department dedicated to preventing and solving computer crimes. He's an unlikely hero, one whose best days are clearly behind him now that he has been demoted to the archives department, consigned to an abysmal basement where he is forced to urinate into paper cups he keeps in his desk drawer. The chapters focusing on Turing are the only ones told in second person:
"You were happy when Montenegro returned to power through democratic means; you thought that everything would change under his rule and your work would again become urgent. What a disappointment. There was no significant threat to national security as there had been during his dictatorship. You were forced to admit that times had changed."
Of course the rise of cyber-terrorism keeps the Black Chamber in business and provides the foundation for this labyrinthine potboiler. The immense pleasure of reading "Turing's Delirium" derives from a carefully orchestrated moral ambiguity. No one's hands are clean here, and with the exception of the formerly evil dictator Montenegro, it can be tough to distinguish the good guys from the bad. Not even the heartless Italian-American consortium GlobaLux, which has taken over the operation of Río Fugitivo's electricity grid, is universally reviled.
Montenegro has charged Turing and those at the Black Chamber with the difficult task of tracking down the evil mastermind Kandinsky, a renegade "cyberhacktivist" bent on overthrowing the government. Kandinsky has been inspired by the social upheaval he's seen on television. "In 1999, his attention had been held by the enormous protests by anti-globalization groups against the WTO in Seattle. Young people from the West were protesting against the new world order in which capitalism was the only option. If there was discontent in industrialized nations, the situation was even worse in Latin America." With his computers, and some irony, Kandinsky sets out to use the electric power GlobaLux provides against itself. Normally, it would be easy for a reader to invest sympathy in such a cause, but some of his methods appear rather questionable, to say the least.
Turing's long-suffering wife, Ruth, is equally conflicted. She wants to expose the goings-on of the Black Chamber and its complicity with an evil regime, but that would mean sacrificing her family for the sake of the nation's well-being. Their dreadlocked teen daughter Flavia, a hacker in her own right, eventually provides the novel's moral compass. When Turing's boss at the Black Chamber gets desperate to track down Kandinsky, he turns to Flavia for help. She's a fascinating character, one deserving of her own novel or at least more space than she gets in this one.
There's a problem, however, with the book's narrative strategy -- it takes Paz Soldán much too long to establish the setting. One must wade through approximately 50 pages of background exposition before anything resembling a story rears its head. Once past the setup, though, "Turing's Delirium" turns into an exciting and rewarding techno-thriller. It reads like a Robert Stone novel that has been watered down for the mass-market paperback crowd. That is to say, it's an excellent page-turner, perfect for a lazy afternoon next to the pool.
San Francisco Chronicle
2.3 The Age
Turing's Delirium
Author Edmundo Paz Soldan
Genre Fiction
Publisher Scribe
Pages 288
RRP $30.0 (Australia)
Olga Lorenzo, Reviewer
August 26, 2006
Bolivian novelist Edmundo Paz Soldan offers a very different portrait of Latin America. Turing's Delirium explores themes of human responsibility and morality.
IN 1967, THE WORLD received Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, set in an unspecified country in the mythical town of Macondo. For many Latin American writers, the result has been 40 years of feeling pressured to produce and reproduce magic realism of the decades-of-tiresome-rain and grandmother-stored-in-the-closet variety.
The Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet wrote, "Unlike the ethereal world of Garcia Marquez's imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call 'McOndo' - a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicised, young, apolitical writers like myself are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences.
"Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en Espanol), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeno-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape."
Part of the McOndo movement, Edmundo Paz Soldan's Turing's Delirium explores themes of human responsibility and morality, using the premise that technology can be used for good and evil and that often things are not what they seem. Computer hackers may be code-breakers in the war against the exploitation of the poor by multinationals.
Paz Soldan's cast is large and the opening chapters require concentration, as the reader is introduced to protagonists who each have their own forms of narrative. Miguel Saenz's sections are narrated in the second person - the reader is effectively asked to imagine that "you" are Miguel, a cryptanalyst working for the Bolivian Government's code-breaking agency, the Black Chamber.
Saenz has been nicknamed Turing after the code-breaker who deciphered Nazi messages in World War II by inventing the forerunner of the modern computer. Turing's invention helped win the war but the computer world it spawned is equally capable of being used for totalitarian purposes.
Saenz is nicknamed Turing not for his decoding ability but because "He appeared to be so dedicated to his work. So unaffected by distractions . . . All logic . . . All input . . . All output".
What is missing is the moral dimension, the ability to envision and be concerned about the possibility for corruption.
Thus Saenz slowly discovers what his wife, Ruth, a historian, has long-known - he has been a government pawn and there is "blood on his hands". His wife is intent on betraying him, partly to assuage her own moral culpability - she too worked briefly for the government, and she has stayed with Saenz.
Ruth and Saenz have a daughter, Flavia, a high-school student whose pet project is a website on hackers. She lives connected to her mobile phone and to her computer, taking on the guises of avatars and of a host of net personas, but disconnected from her parents and other warm-blooded people. Because she knows more about hackers than anyone else in the country, she too is persuaded to co-operate with the Black Chamber.
And then there is Judge Cardona, who had been in love with his cousin Mirtha in his youth. A revolutionary, Mirtha was tortured and killed by those working for dictator Montenegro, who is still in government, albeit democratically elected now.
Despite his promises to himself and to his slain young love, Cardona was seduced by the trappings of power and worked as Montenegro's justice minister.
To avenge Mirtha, he metes out death to the low and the middling. Judge Cardona kills with the dispassion of a teenager dispatching an opponent in a video game, thus falling into the immoral world of those against whom he seeks revenge.
No one fares any better in this urban, alienated and frenetic universe of computer codes and their hackers, avatars, multiple identities, surveillance cameras and mobile phones.
All the technology designed to enhance communication ultimately serves to facilitate disconnection, control and betrayal, of the "under the chestnut tree" Orwell variety. Paz Soldan's world is neither new nor brave but this novel reminds us that the "Banana Republics" - remember former treasurer Paul Keating's warning in 1986 that Australia was in danger of becoming one - face the same problems wrought by technology, globalisation and multinational corporations as we do, and that all of us can be compromised and betrayed in similar, very human ways.
Edmundo Paz Soldan examines the influence of the US in Latin America on Friday at 8pm at the Age Melbourne Writers' Festival.
The Age
2.4 The complete review
The complete review's Review:
Turing's Delirium is set, like many of Paz Soldán's works, in the appropriately named representative Bolivian city of Río Fugitivo:
Existing in multiple historical temporalities, its inhabitants dream of the modern convenience of cable TV, but are anchored to the premodern past of strikes and street protests. It is no different from the rest of the country. Many Internet cafés do not progress make. Many supermarkets and shopping centers either.
Turing's Delirium constantly pits and contrasts old against new. Central to the novel is the 'Black Chamber', the intelligence-gathering and code-cracking centre where cryptographers compete with cryptoanalysts, the computer-savvy not always better suited at dealing with codes than those who proceed a more old-fashioned way. Technology, at least of the computing sort, has not led to the progress one might have hoped for: the Black Chamber was and is a tool of a repressive government, while hackers are constantly demonstrating that technology can readily be undermined and defeated.
Though freely elected (this time around), the leader of the country is the former dictator Montenegro -- a barely disguised Hugo Banzer Suárez (who was president of Bolivia 1971-1978 (as military dictator) and 1997-2001). There's a lot of blood on his hands (and of those who helped him, one way or another ...), and inevitably some of trickles down to the present-day. Democracy doesn't seem to have helped the population out that much either, especially in this rapidly globalizing world: the local power company has been sold out to foreign interests, leading to higher rates and power outages (the name may be GlobaLux, but the policy seems to be: lights out !) -- leading, in turn, to social unrest.
A politically ambitious hacker is a big thorn in the side of the authorities: he calls himself Kandinsky, and over the course of the novel Paz Soldán describes how he rose from humble circumstances to becoming the most wanted man around. Ironically, it's technology that allows Kandinsky to put his talents to use (and to escape poverty), but:
Kandinsky would like all of Río Fugitivo to be like the Enclave -- a place frozen in time, its back to the hypermarket that the planet has become.
Part of his training comes in what has become a national obsession, the online-game of Playground, an alternate reality (think Second City) that many in Bolivia (and everywhere else) prefer to spend their time in. Among the others who spend far too much time in Playground is Flavia, the computer-whiz daughter of Miguel Sáenz (known as 'Turing') who is one of the last of the old guard at the Black Chamber. Flavia's computer skills draw her into the game between Kandinsky's group and the authorities (and dad is involved too, of course).
Turing's Delirium switches perspective from chapter to chapter, the narrative focussed in turn on, for example, Turing, his wife (who has compiled a book with too many secrets in it), their daughter Flavia, Kandinsky, the new young American-born head of the Black Chamber named Rámirez-Graham, as well as the old head of the Black Chamber, the incapacitated Albert (whose mind is still functioning, if not entirely clearly). Past and present constantly collide, especially with dirty history (was Albert a Nazi ? how complicit was the Black Chamber and those who worked there in Montenegro's dirty deeds ?) tainting the present day.
Meanwhile, social unrest escalates (leading to, for example, the closing of the university), and some of those possibly associated with Kandinsky's Resistance get killed. It's a world full of conspiracies and secrets, and Paz Soldán does a decent job of keeping up the thriller-tension with the many twists (and characters) he throws into the mix. Ultimately, however, it feels deflated, the crowded book and inter-connected stories not yielding quite as much as expected. Paz Soldán seems to be aiming for the biggest targets -- globalization ! the state spying on its citizens ! virtual worlds competing with real ones ! -- but then tempers his ambition, pulling back and making less of it than he had set the stage for.
Turing's Delirium is quite well written, and, chapter for chapter, is an entertaining and appealing read, but it doesn't all add up to enough. More -- or less -- is needed, this middle-ground ultimately feeling just a bit unsatisfactory.
2.5 Mary Whipple
Reviews by Mary Whipple
Edmundo Paz Soldan–TURING’S DELIRIUM
Jan 18th, 2011 by mary
“If the program that runs the universe were mathematical, there would be a primary algorithm from which the rest would be derived. If the program were computational, there would be three or four lines of code that could explain the tides and the leopard’s spots and the wide variety of languages and the movements of your right hand…[Eventually], you ponder the question and ask yourself, ‘What is the meaning of wondering about meaning?’”
Dense with ideas and complex in its plots, Turing’s Delirium confronts the issues of globalization and the conflicts generated by a perpetual underclass. Within a thriller set in Rio Fugitivo, Bolovia, author Edmundo Paz Soldan, described by Mario Vargas Llosa as “one of the most important Latin American writers of the new generation,” brings social unrest to life in this Third World country. Though young intellectuals have always relied on strikes, demonstrations, and indigenous riots by miners, coca growers, and other laborers to emphasize their grievances—and do so in this novel, too—they now have a new weapon, the computer. Now it is possible for the resistance and revolution to be conducted in cyberspace, and hackers are the front line in the waging of the new war.
Several plot lines develop simultaneously here: The main character, Miguel Saenz, also known as Turing, was nationally famous in the 1970s as a code-breaker, but he is now in charge of the archives of the Black Chamber, the Bolivian security agency. He has recently received a coded message which was hacked into his own computer, “Murderer, your hands are stained with blood.”
Turing now works for Ramirez-Graham, an American-born Bolivian recruited by the vice-president of Bolivia to modernize the Black Chamber. The President of Bolivia, Montenegro, a former dictator, has recently been democratically elected, but he is in trouble politically. Tremendous unrest has resulted from the President’s decision to give the national contract for electricity to Globalux, an Italian and American consortium, which has raised prices and angered the general population.
The chief hacker into the governments systems is Kandinsky, a young expert increating viruses. Like many of the young people involved in the resistance, Kandinsky participates in the virtual “game” of Playground, in which young hackers try out techniques for conquering the enemy, recruit others who share their ideas, and try on other identities, always careful to keep their real identities secret. The fact that virtual reality is “virtually” identical to “real” reality is one of the keystones of the novel.
As the various characters are developed and their backgrounds and relationships are shared with the reader, the several plot lines begin to swirl together and become increasingly complex. Simultaneously, the author also explores more complex metaphysical ideas–the nature of reality as opposed to virtual reality, the mechanisms of thought, concepts governing identity, and guiding principles of the universe.
Stylistically, Paz Soldan is a magician, keeping at least three or four different plot lines going at the same time, developing characters and their relationships, and exploring philosophical ideas. Turing, for whom the author uses the second person point of view to reveal thoughts, proves to be a different character depending on who is considering him, and whether or not he is a reliable focus for the novel is always an open question for the reader. As murders mount in number, questions arise about all the main characters–is Kandinsky a “good” person or not, are Turing’s motives are “pure,” is Judge Cardona an avenging angel or a vengeful criminal, and can the problems of the country ever be solved? The novel is dense and philosophical, but Paz Soldan provides a vibrant picture of life in Rio Fugitivo.
Notes: An acclaimed member of the McOndo Movement, which is Latin America’s pragmatic answer to the magic realists, Edmundo Paz Soldan raises questions about the universal meaning of “progress” and its particular meaning in places like Rio Fugitivo.
Edmundo Paz Soldan–TURING’S DELIRIUM
Jan 18th, 2011 by mary
“If the program that runs the universe were mathematical, there would be a primary algorithm from which the rest would be derived. If the program were computational, there would be three or four lines of code that could explain the tides and the leopard’s spots and the wide variety of languages and the movements of your right hand…[Eventually], you ponder the question and ask yourself, ‘What is the meaning of wondering about meaning?’”
Dense with ideas and complex in its plots, Turing’s Delirium confronts the issues of globalization and the conflicts generated by a perpetual underclass. Within a thriller set in Rio Fugitivo, Bolovia, author Edmundo Paz Soldan, described by Mario Vargas Llosa as “one of the most important Latin American writers of the new generation,” brings social unrest to life in this Third World country. Though young intellectuals have always relied on strikes, demonstrations, and indigenous riots by miners, coca growers, and other laborers to emphasize their grievances—and do so in this novel, too—they now have a new weapon, the computer. Now it is possible for the resistance and revolution to be conducted in cyberspace, and hackers are the front line in the waging of the new war.
Several plot lines develop simultaneously here: The main character, Miguel Saenz, also known as Turing, was nationally famous in the 1970s as a code-breaker, but he is now in charge of the archives of the Black Chamber, the Bolivian security agency. He has recently received a coded message which was hacked into his own computer, “Murderer, your hands are stained with blood.”
Turing now works for Ramirez-Graham, an American-born Bolivian recruited by the vice-president of Bolivia to modernize the Black Chamber. The President of Bolivia, Montenegro, a former dictator, has recently been democratically elected, but he is in trouble politically. Tremendous unrest has resulted from the President’s decision to give the national contract for electricity to Globalux, an Italian and American consortium, which has raised prices and angered the general population.
The chief hacker into the governments systems is Kandinsky, a young expert increating viruses. Like many of the young people involved in the resistance, Kandinsky participates in the virtual “game” of Playground, in which young hackers try out techniques for conquering the enemy, recruit others who share their ideas, and try on other identities, always careful to keep their real identities secret. The fact that virtual reality is “virtually” identical to “real” reality is one of the keystones of the novel.
As the various characters are developed and their backgrounds and relationships are shared with the reader, the several plot lines begin to swirl together and become increasingly complex. Simultaneously, the author also explores more complex metaphysical ideas–the nature of reality as opposed to virtual reality, the mechanisms of thought, concepts governing identity, and guiding principles of the universe.
Stylistically, Paz Soldan is a magician, keeping at least three or four different plot lines going at the same time, developing characters and their relationships, and exploring philosophical ideas. Turing, for whom the author uses the second person point of view to reveal thoughts, proves to be a different character depending on who is considering him, and whether or not he is a reliable focus for the novel is always an open question for the reader. As murders mount in number, questions arise about all the main characters–is Kandinsky a “good” person or not, are Turing’s motives are “pure,” is Judge Cardona an avenging angel or a vengeful criminal, and can the problems of the country ever be solved? The novel is dense and philosophical, but Paz Soldan provides a vibrant picture of life in Rio Fugitivo.
Notes: An acclaimed member of the McOndo Movement, which is Latin America’s pragmatic answer to the magic realists, Edmundo Paz Soldan raises questions about the universal meaning of “progress” and its particular meaning in places like Rio Fugitivo.
