Turing’s Delirium – Bolivian novel

Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan, a Bolivian author, is the story of a cryptographer Miguel Saenz, nicknamed Turing. The inspiration is Alan Turing, the famous British crypto analyst and mathematician. Miguel works for the Bolivian government secret service. He has taken to cryptography inspired by his girl friend Ruth who was a child prodigy in mathematics and codes. After marriage, she gets a job for Miguel in the intelligence department of the Interior Ministry which intercepts communications of opposition political parties and dissident groups. She teaches crypto analysis in the university. The couple live and breathe cryptography seeing secrets behind words, numbers and patterns even in the simple and mundane things of daily life. Everything is a symbol, a metaphor, enigma or a code, inviting to be deciphered. Eventually they become enigmas to themselves overtaken by a delirium of their obsession. Miguel is totally lost in the labyrinth of codes that he does not realize the consequences of his work which is used and misused by the intelligence agency to eliminate dissident intellectuals and student rebels. The couple’s rebellious teenage daughter Flavia is into hacking and follows the hackers’s world in online chat rooms and games played with various avatars.

The story is absorbing with lots of twists and turns with some unforgettable characters. There are elaborate descriptions of the techniques, events and history of communication codes especially during the world wars. 

Soldan gives a vivid portrayal of Bolivia which is one of the most politically volatile countries in Latin America with numerous military coups and dictatorship. The corrupt oligarchic governments had privatised utility services and let foreign multinational companies to make huge profit margins, as part of the neoliberalistic policies. The indigenous poor and the urban middle class rose against the political oppression and economic misery. The farmers protested against eradication of coca leaf farms. The millennials of the digital age joined the protests by hacking and attacking the sites of the governments and corporations. In Soldano’s words,” In Bolivia one faces problems that are premodern, modern and postmodern”.

The theme of the novel is a familiar one. It is yet another Latin American story of dictatorship, oppression and revolt. But for me, this is the first Bolivian novel and this is my introduction to Soldan, the Bolivian author. Soldan teaches Latin American literature in Cornell University, US. He belongs to the new generation of post-Boom Macondo writers who are part of the MacOndo movement. He has written more than a dozen novels and short story collections. Rio Fugitivo is the fictional Bolivian town in his novels, like Macondo in the novels of Garcia Marquez.

In the story, Miguel’s old boss Alberto turns out to be originally a German cryptologist, captured and used by CIA before being sent to Bolivia. His new boss Ramirez-Graham had worked in the NSA in US. The reality of today’s Bolivia trumps this fiction. Erick Foronda, who had worked as consultant to the US embassy in Bolivia for 25 years as a CIA agent, is now the private secretary to the interim President of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez. He was in Washington DC during the first two years of Trumps' presidency. It is alleged that he was part of the internal and external conspiracy which has overthrown the leftist President Evo Morales and has brought back to power a right wing pro-US oligarchic regime. Morales made history by becoming the first native Indian to be elected as president in South America in 2006. Till then, the native Indians who form sixty percent of the population, were kept marginalized and poor in the last five hundred years by the oligarchic regimes of European origin. The American ambassador had campaigned against Morales in Bolivian presidential elections in 2005. President Morales expelled the US ambassador and DEA in 2008 accusing them of conspiring to destabilize his government. He also recalled the Bolivian ambassador to US. There were no ambassadors for eleven years. It is only in 2020 that the two countries have appointed ambassadors. And it is back to business as usual, as in the bad old days. 

In the Latin American world of Magical Realism, the line between fiction and reality becomes blurred. Bolivia is back to the bad old days of Turing’s Delirium.