The Green Gnomes of Cajamarca
By Alex Zizman
Magazine ‘’Qué Pasa’’ from Toronto
Summer 1998

os Enanos Verdes is one of the most ambitious novels ever written by a Spanish-speaking writer living in Canada. It is also the most hermetic and demanding. A social novel about Peru, it follows the lives of five generations of a family and has as its main setting the town of Cajamarca, where Carlos Quiroz was born in 1941.

Cajamarca, an Arden town in northern Peru, is best remembered as the site where Atahualpa, the last Inca, was defeated by the Spanish conquerors of the Inca Empire. Four and a half centuries later the prevailing atmosphere is still very much of defeat, but this time the town becomes the epicentre of a very contemporary existentialist saga. Its protagonist is Juan Paulo Rios Gutierrez (variously known as Paulo or Paulito as a young kid, el Comba as an adolescent, and Juan as adult), a member of the fifth generation, arguably the author’s alter ego. He is a budding artist prone to violent outbursts: a true rebel without much cause.

What Quiroz attempts to do is quite remarkable. In a country as centralized as Peru, where all political decisions still emanate from Lima, its capital city, the author of Los Enanos Verdes chooses an original approach from the periphery. His setting is provincial but urban, Andean but predominantly Spanish-speaking. Unlike Mario Vergas Llosa, who was never very comfortable with Andean settings (Cajamarca is barely described in passing during a presidential visit in his Conversation in the Cathedral) or Jose Maria Arguedas, so keen to bridge the gap between the Quecha and Spanish cultures, Quiroz has no problems in capturing and addressing the social dilemmas facing his country from his unique provincial perspective.

This does not mean that Los Enanos Verdes is a strictly regionalist novel, oppressively limited to experiences in Cajamarca. A good part of the action actually takes place in Lima, as Quiroz depicts, among other things, the sorry attempts of the protagonist to come to terms with his life and vocation. But the point of view is always that a provinciano, of somebody from the provinces.

Los Enanos verdes is not an easy work to follow. It is a complex, fragmented if not kaleidoscopic novel which has a vaguely omniscient narrator, but likes to rely on various screens, be it informants, thinkers (such as the old painter Arthème Banante, the protagonist’s teacher) and third party testimonials, letters or specific cinematographic devices (at one point Quiroz even captures a brawl in slow motion) as means to probe and cut into the souls of its characters. To help the readers the author provides at the beginning of the novel a genealogy and an alphabetical list of characters.

Los Enanos Verdes covers with entomological zeal the wasteful bohemian experiences of the protagonist and his friends, but also endearing testimonies about his mother’s and grandmother’ s memorable lives. These brief, straightforward recollections stand out. In fact, Nina, the grandmother, is arguably the most remarkable female in the novel; a most tragic figure and also a great informant. She came from Lima to Cajamarca to search for the father of her children only to end up living there as a single mother. A lucid commentator about her extended family, she serves Quiroz as a source of some of the most touching events in the novel, particularly when depicting her final moments.

Throughout most of its course Los Enanos Verdes appears to have no real winners. It even chronicles the slow decline of the lawyer and former detective Aristides Rivera Rios, the protagonist’s uncle and by all accounts the most successful member of the family. But, as the family comes to reflect the state of malaise of the country, and the novel slowly moves to pass judgement on both Shining Path and the authoritarian rule of Alberto Fujimori, success does not elude everyone, albeit if coming to terms with it means giving up a sense of rebelliousness, engaging perhaps in illicit activities or leaving the country to find an elusive source of comfort. The protagonist for example, finally finds fulfillment and stability as an artist in Canada. This final display of accomplishment may seem surprising in an otherwise highly fatalistic novel, but it may also be a way the author has of acknowledging his own success and paying tribute to the conditions that enabled him to distance himself sufficiently from his past in his adopted country in order to meditate, address his literary obsessions and ultimately bring Los Enanos Verdes to fruition.