Turing's Delirium Review

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Turing's Delirium ReviewTake a Third World, South American country modeled on Bolivia, toss in a democratically elected former dictator, mix in a neoliberal privatization of the country's electric utility in the hands of an Italian/American energy conglomerate that immediately doubles or triples electricity rates, add in an incipient local Internet characterized by a virtual reality world called the Playground, a healthy handful of hackers, and a resistance movement, stir everything up with a secret government code-breaking organization called the Black Chamber, and you have the ingredients for a thriller, a cyberpunk novel, and a commentary on the tragedy of IMF-backed globalization in developing countries. Such are the elements and themes of Edmundo Paz Soldan's powerful and captivating new novel, TURING'S DELIRIUM.
The title, of course, refers to the infamous code-breaker and father of modern computing, Alan Turing. In this case, Turing is the nickname given to the cryptanalyst Miguel Saenz by his boss, the mysterious Albert, founder of the country's Black Chamber. Miguel earns this name by virtue of his seemingly magical ability to break the secret codes of anti-government messages and help the government of President Montenegro sustain its ruling power. When we meet Turing/Miguel Saenz, he is nearing retirement age, a relic of past days when code-breaking was as much intuitive as intellectual, holistic rather than strictly mathematical. His former boss, a man of mysterious origins named Albert, exists in a delirious, nearly comatose state. He imagines himself as the immortal spirit of cryptography, having lived multiple lives as the code-maker or code-breaker for most of history's greatest moments. Miguel's wife, Ruth, teaches the history of cryptography at the local university, while their daughter Flavia writes about hackers and discovers that she has surprising talents in the cyberworld of the Playground and beyond.
A host of supporting characters orbit around Turing, Ruth, and Flavia in the city of Rio Fugitivo. The most important one is Kandinsky, a hacker extraordinaire who establishes a resistance movement within the virtual world of Playground as a dry run for creating the real thing in the real world of President Montenegro's government. Through his experiences in the Playground, Kandinsky recruits a small group of like-minded hackers who use the Internet for attacks on the government and on multinational conglomerates through Internet graffiti, hacking into secured files to release the information, and "denial of service" assaults on selected websites. Turing's current boss, a former NSA operative named Ramirez-Graham, sees the capture or elimination of Kandinsky as his crowning accomplishment, after which he can return to the United States with head held high. Ramirez-Graham charges his subordinates with identifying and stopping Kandinsky's resistance movement, even going so far as to recruit the teen-aged Flavia (Saenz/Turing's daughter) to help. Along the way, Flavia witnesses the shooting death of Rafael Corso, a Rat (informant) with whom she was quickly moving from teen-aged infatuation toward full-scale romance. Mixed in among these various characters and sub-plots is Judge Cardona, the horribly liver-spotted, drug-addicted former Minister of Justice. Cardona is bent on revenging the death of his cousin and Platonic first love, Mirtha, by killing Albert and Turing for their roles in decoding and unveiling her role in a Marxist-Leninist movement many years before.
TURING'S DELIRIUM alternates its views from chapter to chapter, giving us a peak inside the heads of each character as the story progresses and occasionally even bending its chronology with jump-forwards. Yet despite this omniscience, the story unfolds gradually into an increasingly complex web of lies, deceits, misdirections, and misunderstandings as some truths are (at least partially) revealed. In Paz Soldan's Rio Fugitivo, nothing is as it first appears, and everyone's notion of reality is warped by their own, sometimes willfully limited, view. Thus, Turing is preparing to tell his wife Ruth he wants to divorce, not knowing that Ruth in turn has decided to divorce him while also revealing everything she knows about Turing's secret work for the government and the harm he has caused to others' lives. Flavia is certain she can catch Kandinsky, Albert believes he will be reincarnated in another cryptologist, and Turing basks in the laurels of his accomplishments unaware of their true nature until it is too late.
Edmundo Paz Soldan renders these twists and turns masterfully, presenting a book that reads both as a thriller and a critique of globalization's negative impact on the Third World. As well, he suggests that we are all living a sort of delirium. Cardona's and Flavia's infatuation-induced deliria and Albert's death-bed hallucinations are only the most obvious, while Turing's is a product of self-deception. Another character's nearly insane desire for iconic fame leads to the book's climax and sets the stage for Kandinsky's own future.
In ancient times, a philosopher suggested that perhaps he was a butterfly who was just dreaming of being a man. In the Internet age, Paz Soldan hypothesizes that perhaps we are just avatars, characters in a virtual reality game being played by beings at another level of reality while we are busy creating avatars of our own. Perhaps that is the intended message of Paz Soldan's television personality, Lana Nova, who delivers the country's nightly news even though she is herself an avatar, a virtual being programmed with just enough range of emotion to recite the government-approved version of the day's "reality." TURING'S DELIRIUM is an outstanding read, fast paced and filled with surprises as well as offering a biting commentary on globalization and America's role therein.
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