Sharp satire

Flames' fantastic fiction

by Bill Rodriguez

The comic novel Black Flames (by Daniel Pearlman, White Pine Press, 191 pages, paperback, $14) makes a hard task seem easy. How does a writer fashion a buffoonish protagonist, a miserable, self-aggrandizing wretch we'd flee from at a cocktail party, and give us a book we don't want to hurl across the room? Especially since we are seeing everything from this anti-hero's point of view. How? Skillfully or else, is the short answer.

The elderly Prof. Hector Dinara Favallone is the epitome of academic arrogance, at a backwater liberal arts college in Maine. Not just pretentious and inflated with self-importance but a flat-out barking paranoid. He sees people conspiring against him as readily as Hoover saw commies.

The satire starts out with his suspicions racing to full boil as he finds an assignation note in his wife's purse. When they'd first met, he was 50 and the beautiful Isabel was a 21-year-old adoring student. Now she is pushing 40 and he is pushing her to her limits. He begins to unhinge. He hides in her trunk to follow her to her lover Armando, whom he suspects of being a KGB agent out to ruin him. Isabel fumes, adolescent son Victor plans to run away to the army and docile daughter Lucia, 11, practices cowering and doting.

Black Flames is a wonderful, deafening fugue, playing hilarious variations on the theme of self-justification. Picaresque chapter titles such as "A Lesson in Courage" and "Cherchez le Verbe" remind us of the playful mood. The professor is convinced that his life is a construct of others' treacheries, whether beset by imagined Basque commandos or his wife's frozen TV dinners. Favallone is incapable of seeing himself as the source of even the pettiest of his problems. (When he runs into a faculty rival literally he is found at fault because his enemy has paid off the witnesses, he believes.)

Favallone teaches Italian and claims 27 languages that he has "more or less mastered." His life's work has been his revolutionary thesis that both the Basque and the Georgian languages stem from the same linguistic root. But when his department chairman presses him for some evidence of his research, or even a complete résumé, what happens to the poor man? His office is broken into, papers stolen.

The time is difficult for another reason. Approaching is the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Guadalajara, when he fought on the losing fascist side in the Spanish Civil War among a battalion of Italians sent by Mussolini. Favallone is never more heated than when he thinks about this campaign, even though he was captured before he could fight. Could the good professor have something to hide?

There are some very funny set pieces, such as an outrageous but plausible series of letters he mistranslates between the Russian POW camp commandant and his Spanish mistress. And delightful turns of phrase decorate the path. As Favallone seethes over his wife's credit card binges, "The mouth of Cornucopia spat fruit pits in Hector's face."

Unfortunately, in this novel we sometimes find ourselves as disoriented as the simpering professor. This can be fine for empathy but, the trouble is, in Black Flames we're following a character who is always delusional when he is not out-and-out hallucinating. We eventually get cues and even explanations about Favallone lunging at fantasy affronts or even objects and persons. But the basic set-up brings into doubt virtually everything we know about him, since everything we know has filtered through his untrustworthy perspective.

However out-of-focus our ultimate view of the clownish protagonist is, the funhouse image that Black Flames presents us is delightful indeed.

---

A talk with Daniel Pearlman

---