I’ve read novels that destroy themselves before, but rarely have they done so with the gleeful abandon of Dengue Boy. This book demands the reader trusts that author Michel Nieva knows where he’s going. He absolutely does know, but you should strap yourself in for the journey.
In a reshaped Argentina of 2272, we meet Dengue Boy, a young human-mosquito hybrid. He doesn’t know exactly how he came to be, but he is certain that no one likes him. A series of comparisons underlines that even his own mother—who nevertheless works all hours to support him—can’t bear him:
Where his mother would like to have seen some pudgy arms, his wings sprouted out, their nerve endings like the varicose veins of a disgusting old man, and where his mother would like to have heard chuckles and adorable yelps, there was only a constant, maddening buzz that would drive even the most tranquil soul to despair. (p. 10)
The cumulative rhythm of this sequence suggests that Dengue Boy is straining against the confines of the narration as much as of the world he lives in. What can help him break free?
The turning point is a trip to a summer camp, where the pressure from being taunted by the other boys triggers some spontaneous realizations. One is that the group of boys is effectively “a delicious meat sorbet” (p. 20). Another is that only female mosquitoes bite. Therefore, Dengue Boy reasons, his urge to feed must mean she is actually Dengue Girl (and so, in an appropriate move for such a restless text, the novel’s English title becomes redundant in the first chapter). Empowered by her ability to destroy the obstacles in her path, Dengue Girl sets out to find the truth about her origins and take revenge where she sees fit.
In Dengue Girl’s time, Buenos Aires and New York have long disappeared beneath the sea, Patagonia is an archipelago, and La Pampa has gone from being a central Argentinian province to an ocean gateway, its canal a vital trade route. Elsewhere, capitalism saw a way to make a profit, and so geoengineering has turned the Antarctic into a balmy playground. Meanwhile, those who can afford it may indulge in recreations such as a cruise themed on the lost season of winter:
[...] on the floors dedicated to general entertainment there were ski slopes, cold chambers in which the auroras borealis and australis were recreated using lasers, and others in which you could experience all different kinds of wintry precipitation, including snow, hail, and sleet. (p. 148)
Nieva’s novel is full of striking imaginative set pieces like this, which inspire horror as much as wonder. For example, there’s the grim concept of “virofinance,” the business of speculating on and investing in unknown viruses in order to maximize profit from future pandemics. Indeed, Dengue Girl herself may be a by-product of science driven by that very business.
Whatever, Dengue Girl blames the rich for her and her mother’s hardships, so she goes to the stock exchange to confront the world of finance. There, she finds an overwhelming crowd of people exulting in the profit to be made from disease. Dengue Girl’s instinctive reaction is to lash out, and the result is a massacre. The feeling that results from this is something new to her:
[...] henceforth, human vehicles for expression would be insufficient for communicating her experience. Bzzz, bzzzz, bzzzzzz: to unfeeling humankind, the gluttonous buzzing of her antennae after the banquet of sword-water […] which had just been carried out was nothing more than monotonous onomatopoeia, or just irritating noise. (p. 73)
This illustrates some of the ways in which Nieva turns his novel back on itself. More than once, when it seems as though narrative momentum is being built in a particular direction, Dengue Girl’s capacity for destruction will simply close off that path. The quotation above also illustrates that its protagonist’s state of mind is ultimately a closed book to the novel’s readers. This means that we can’t rely on the conventional narrative psychological aspects of the novel that we might be expecting to bridge the gap between us and the protagonist.
Aside from Dengue Girl, the novel’s other main character is a boy known as El Dulce, who has a sideline in helping with the trafficking of illicit substances along the canal. His main pastime is playing a video game called Christians vs Indians, which recreates the earlier history of Argentina in bloody detail (another example of how human life has become trivialized in the world of this book). El Dulce’s great ambition is to have a Pampatronics, a computer system so powerful it can render the game practically indistinguishable from reality.
Did I mention that El Dulce is the leader of the group of boys who taunt Dengue Girl in the first chapter and end up dead for it? The fact that he loses his life in the first chapter doesn’t stop him playing a full part in the novel thanks to the way in which Nieva twists reality beyond the bounds of strict science fiction. Before that summer camp, El Dulce comes across a fossil which has been exposed through drilling in the Antarctic, and which gives him a telepathic connection to a primordial god. Plug that stone into the Pampatronics and its alternative reality, and you have a means to break time down completely:
El Dulce witnessed, without differentiation, events from the most ancient epochs, from a time when a soup of formless pre-life flourished and ruled over everything, to the far distant future, when Earth would be reconquered by the great primordial anarchy in an epic geological struggle that he did not understand […] He witnessed, in short, the natural history of living and nonliving things, in which humanity is not even a sigh, and for that reason reconstructs things using vague conjecture […] (pp. 161-2).
Nieva’s novel feels larger than reality throughout, not least thanks to the figure of Dengue Girl herself, but it retains a chilling plausibility in its treatment of the future, at least to begin with. When its supernatural elements come more to the fore towards the end, the book is torn free of conventional narrative plausibility, destroyed and remade anew. It’s exhilarating, but the echo of reality lingers. “You might have had fun,” Dengue Boy seems to ask, “but is that really the world you wanted?”