What does
Jack Dempsey falling out of the ring during the 1923 world heavyweight boxing
championship in New York have to do with Richard Strauss conducting Gustav
Mahler's First Symphony? Or with the suicide of an Austrian cellist from
the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra found hanged in his room in the City Hotel?
Or, for that matter, with the building of the Palacio Barolo, a 22-story
monument to the Divine Comedy in downtown Buenos Aires? Quite a lot,
suggests Argentinean writer Martin Kohan in his delightfully daring maze of a
novel, Seconds Out.
In part, the novel is an historic re-creation of Jack Dempsey's notorious fall through the ropes of the boxing ring into the audience, as immortalized in the famous George Bellows painting, which publisher Serpent's Tail has smartly made the cover of the book.
But the novel is also part murder mystery--on the same day as the fight in New York, a cellist is found hanged in a Buenos Aires hotel roomand part continuing argument between two old friends on a small-town newspaper, realist Verani and idealist Ledesma, one of whom is about to die.
To inform the people of Argentina of the results of the fight before the age of television, a blue beacon will shine from the top of the Palacio Barolo if the Argentinean champion Luis Angel Firpo is victorious, and a red beacon will mean that Dempsey is still the champ. In one of the cruelties of fate, the wrong beacon is lit.
Don't look here for complex characters or emotional involvement--it's not that kind of novel. Instead of a plot, it has a mosaic of fragments that continue from chapter to chapter, with the architecture of a maze in which certain doors connect in unexpected ways.
It's a layered maze. The actual story at the newspaper celebrating its 50th anniversary takes place in 1973. The boxing match takes place 50 years earlier, and is researched for a special supplement commemorating the newspaper's foundation. But the whole account is being written down 17 years after the supplement, by narrator Roque, who isn't even 20 when fellow newsmen Verani and Ledesma begin their research into the past.
The novel's 17 chapters represent the 17 seconds on the referee's stopwatch, from the moment Dempsey falls backward through the ropes until he climbs back into the boxing ring. These 17 seconds are significant. Captured on blurry archival film footage of vintage 1920 stock, those 17 seconds are seven seconds longer than the count of 10 seconds that records a technical knockout. They are Kohan's proof in this literary puzzle that Dempsey was officially defeated, that the boxing championship of the world was awarded to the wrong man.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A dazzling maze of a novel involving the 1923 Dempsey-Firpo fight, Argentine newspapermen and the murder of a cellist.