Book Review: "The Truce" by Mario Benedetti

When I first heard about this book I was very surprised I had not read it and this was because a few months ago, I took it upon myself to read all the books written by Mario Benedetti and somehow I missed this one. “The Truce” is about a man who falls in love with a woman - so that’s pretty simple isn’t it? No, it isn’t. A man sees his life falling apart and falls in love with this woman who he has been crushing on for a while, clearly. When they get together, the book gets incredibly happier and happier. Their lives are on the up, but then the climactic point of the book comes and changes the entire situation. It is something that I do not want to actually say but it is really, really upsetting and it is literally something I did not see coming. But the book itself is as well written as the last book I read by him which was “Springtime in a Broken Mirror” and his writing always has this tone of a mix between romanticising life and being brutally honest about opinions. When he wrote this into “The Truce”, he used the voices of the main characters as the narrators through diary entries and, by doing this, has heightened the experience of love, romanticisms of life and brutally honest reflections to the point of no return. It is pure brilliance.

Let’s now have a look at some passages that I like:

“He is Catholic and I’m not religious at all. He is a womaniser, and I limit myself to the essential. He is active, creative, emphatic; and I’m unimaginative and indecisive. The truth is, often, he pushes me to make a decision; and at other times, it is I who curbs him with my doubts. When my mother died - it will be fifteen years in August - I was a wreck. Only a fervent hatred of God, relatives and fellow man sustained me during that period. Every time I remember the interminable wake, I feel disgust. Those who attended were divided into two classes; those who started to cry as soon as they walked through the door and then grasped me in a quivering embrace, and those who came out to courtesy, shook my hand with wearying regret and ten minutes later were telling dirty jokes…”

This is obviously one of those things that shows us not only the duplicity of the real world and how people are one thing and the exact opposite all at the same time. It has exposed the complexity of human beings and yet, how simple they are to interact with and understand through body language - not even verbal communication. Just interaction through body language.

“It’s obvious that God granted me a dark destiny. Not even cruel. Simply dark. It’s obvious that He granted me a truce. In the beginning, I was unwilling to believe that this could be happiness, I resisted with all my might, but I eventually gave in, and I believed. But it wasn’t happiness, it was only a truce. Now I’m inside my destiny against. And it’s much darker than before, much darker…From March, I will no longer write in this diary. The world is no longer interesting. But it won’t be me who will record that fact. There’s only one subject I could write about. But I don’t want to.”

This quotation is a beautiful quotation about how religion is some sort of force in which if someone does not believe but wants to conform, it can feel like a drag. I am not going to lie, there is a great amount of humanity about this. There is something brutally honest about the self here and it has nothing to do with religion. Instead it has to do with self-belief and you can tell by just this quotation that this person’s is wearing thin.

“My last day of work. But I didn’t do anything, of course. I spent the day shaking hands, and receiving embraces. I think the manager was bursting with satisfaction and Muñoz was really touched. My desk remained there. I never though it would matter so little to me to have to give up my routine.…”

This quotation makes us realise the reality of the self-belief that this person actually has is so low that they seem to have zero emotional connection to their routine in which they have been working for so long.

I’m not going to lie, by the end of this book I was shivering. Humanity has never looked so raw and brutal, yet brutally beautiful.