{"id":5689,"date":"2024-01-05T11:34:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-05T11:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/?p=5689"},"modified":"2024-08-02T13:35:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T13:35:52","slug":"ricardo-romero-the-presidents-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/05\/ricardo-romero-the-presidents-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Ricardo Romero: The President’s Room"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In an unnamed country, after an ambiguous event, there\u2019s an anonymous narrator living in a nondescript house in an undisclosed neighbourhood. After whatever happened in the past houses no longer have basements. What they do have is a room for the unknowable president on the longshot expectation that he may visit. This is The President\u2019s Room<\/em> (2015, tr: Charlotte Coombe, 2017) by Ricardo Romero and it\u2019s a puzzling work that keeps its secrets close while inviting all manner of interpretations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In vignettes we see a family home through a child\u2019s eyes. With no sense of the adult world his account reveals little and we have to pick at his phrasings to glean any information. When he talks of \u201chouses owned by people like us\u201d there\u2019s classism without further elaboration. He knows he has privileges, because others do not. But he doesn\u2019t know what these are and wonders if anyone who enjoys them does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The family life is full of hinted history, odd fevers and is dogged by the frequent disappearances of the narrator\u2019s younger brother. A mysterious stranger\u2019s visit suggests shady political intrigue. Indeed, at school the only referenced person is \u201cthe boy the president visited\u201d (\u201cafterwards he had a fearful look about him\u201d), which it follows, when the president visits our narrator, becomes an act of baton passing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The needs of the president are just as abstruse. Why does he need a private room in every house? Should we assume he\u2019s the president of the country? Given what he\u2019s witnessed him doing there, what purpose does his unheralded visit serve? Potentially his room could representative how a dictator occupies the heads of his citizens, but it could just as well be anything else, such is the book\u2019s deliberate looseness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a strange but toothsome blend of body and abode that explores the space and dimensions in both. \u201cHouses shouldn\u2019t be touching all the time\u201d, he says, alongside \u201cmy body is always touching something\u201d. At night he says the house\u2019s only heat is from his body. And: \u201cmy skin is a wall and I don\u2019t know what\u2019s on one side and what\u2019s on the other\u201d, which is what it\u2019s like to approach this oblique book with pages on one side and a story on the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an unnamed country, after an ambiguous event, there\u2019s an anonymous narrator living in a nondescript house in an undisclosed neighbourhood. After whatever happened in the past houses no longer have basements. What they do have is a room for the unknowable president on the longshot expectation that he may visit. This is The President\u2019s Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[267],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-romero-ricardo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/the-presidents-room-2.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pon-1tL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5689"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5761,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions\/5761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booklit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}