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Reviews
of The Nature of Truth: A Novel
Troncoso, Sergio, The
Nature of Truth: A Novel, Northwestern University Press, June 2003, ISBN:
0-8101-1991-9 (cloth), $22.95.
"The Nature of Truth is the best psychological
drama I've read in a long time. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,
the main character descends into a ghost-plagued anxiety where he must discover
the nature of truth. He commits the most heinous act, for only by taking action
can he relieve his own existential crisis. Fascinating reading."
---Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima
and Zia Summer
"This unusually rich and finely crafted novel
compellingly explores the many different ways --both good and bad-- that the
desire for truth exerts its influence on us. A powerful and
philosophically informed novel."
---Michael
Della Rocca, Professor and Chair, Department of
Philosophy,
To write “the philosophic novel” is to risk both oversimplified
analysis and watered-down narrative in a single volume. To avoid either, the
balance between idea and drama must be perfect, the integration seamless. It’s
daunting work, long and precarious. But for those who care passionately about
rigorous argumentation and compelling, character-driven fiction—and Sergio
Troncoso is obviously such a man—the challenge to combine the two modes must
prove unbearable. . . .
As meta-fiction and the novel of information continue
to attract more and more of the literary spotlight, it’s refreshing to see a
writer like Troncoso put his ranging intellect to work fashioning a powerful,
old-fashioned story, complete with suspense, rising action, climax and a
denouement. No sooner does Troncoso establish his Yale setting with lyric,
razor-sharp detail—painting a campus of “pale yellow stone walls” —than does
his protagonist, Helmut Sanchez, start boldly down the road to crisis. This
occurs when Helmut, a handsome, morally scrupulous research assistant of
Mexican and German descent, identifies his employer Werner Hopfgartner as the
author of an inflammatory article some fifty years old. The handiwork of a
revered cultural critic, Professor Hopfgartner’s
rambling piece of pseudo-scholarship from post-war
None of this, in Troncoso’s hands, reads as the
tabloid fodder it might become. If we are shocked by the depths of Hopfgartner’s depravity, we are at least primed to accept
them. From the initial, work-obsessed exchanges rendered between this villain
and his assistant, to the revelation of Hopfgartner’s
near fascist diatribe from 1949, Troncoso swiftly conjures a Heidegger for the
21st century, an intellectual giant whose guilt extends outside the confines of
academia and into living history. . . . A sensitive, generous lover and
natural-born Samaritan who once saved the life of a suicidal undergraduate,
Helmut betrays an empathy more than capable of
reaching into the past, toward a little girl all but obliterated by history and
the brutality of her persecutors. Helmut’s dark, new knowledge—a knowledge of
rape, murder and Herr Professor’s one-time Nazi allegiance—is all the catalyst
needed for realistic tragedy. When Helmut does set out to assassinate
Hopfgartner, Troncoso delivers the scene in precise, evocative language that
renders the morally fantastic utterly believable: “He sprinted over snowbanks, sliding and slipping. His face glistened with
perspiration. His cotton shirt was soaked under his black leather jacket, which
gleamed like shiny plastic.”. . .
It is with this trio [Helmut Sanchez, Ariane Sassolini, and Detective
Jack Rosselli] that the author excels as both
fictionist and moral epistemologist. When Helmut ventures beyond good and evil,
Troncoso refuses to leave his reader behind. It is more than a liberating
world, Troncoso suggests. It’s also nightmarish one, inducing the worst
symptoms of psychosis even in its most well-meaning inhabitants. In conveying
this, Troncoso’s powers of characterization and description are equal to his
analytic ones: “The blade in his hand glimmered in the moonlight. He sliced
into the fatty tissue of his forearm. He felt exquisite pain. Blood, hot blood,
ran out of his arm. Helmut clenched his fist, and the red stream became fuller,
warmer, quicker.” With Ariane
Sassolini, Troncoso gives us a hero for the story
playing out in the novel’s subtext. A scholar every bit as inquisitive as
Helmut, Ariane yet comes to embody the truth that
Helmut has forsaken: that conventional taboos, though conventional, serve a
grand ethical purpose. When her crisis arrives, again in the form of knowledge,
she must make a life-altering decision, and her one of compassion and
forgiveness for Helmut betrays a moral fortitude far exceeding that of her
beloved. Rosselli, on the other hand, lacks the
imagination required for compassion that large. He’s too mired in the data of
criminology to ever truly understand the criminal. Unable to identify the real
killer, motivated not by vengeance but by idealism, Rosselli
allows an innocent man,
Clearly, then, The
Nature of Truth is no allegory. All three of the characters come to embody
more than a philosophic agenda. But operating within the minds of each is a set
of epistemic practices that Troncoso deftly contrasts. When juxtaposed, the Nietzschean valor of Sanchez, the Christian pragmatism of Sassolini and the blind inductivism
of Rosselli make for a sustained, intellectual
tension that perfectly complements the narrative one. If Troncoso occasionally
tips his hand, as he does when Helmut self-consciously asks “What was morality
anyway?”, or when the street-wise Rosselli puts forth
a rather academic-sounding theory of racial division, the author is careful
never to make the conflict between his characters’ “truths” too explicit. The
subtlety, and fairness, with which Troncoso presents these conflicting frameworks stand as the novel’s crowning intellectual
achievement, side by side with the artistic one: a convincing tale of murder
and ruminating guilt. . . .
---Janus Head, an interdisciplinary journal of Philosophy,
Literature and Psychology
I hope it isn't the kiss of
death to invoke the name of Dostoyevsky in praise of Sergio Troncoso's
impressively lucid first thriller, published as part of
---The
When research assistant Helmut Sanchez reviews
material in a German publication for renowned Yale University Professor Werner
Hopfgartner, he unexpectedly finds a letter to the editor written by his
employer in a response to an old magazine article. The letter urged the new
generation of Germans and Austrians to "rid themselves
of guilt to be capable of soaring back to previous splendor." As he
embarks on a search for the "truth," Sanchez also explores his New
Mexico/German heritage and his feelings of being set adrift in his own country.
A sense of rigid self-righteousness and curiosity leads him to question whether
Hopfgartner "was a part of the Nazi war machine or among the architects of
ethnic cleansing." At Yale, the married professor's secret life
included sexual exploits with attractive students, a love affair with a
colleague, and a long-term homosexual relationship. When Hopfgartner is murdered,
his broad field of victims raises the ancient question of who is justified to
wreak vengeance. In a town against gown investigation, New Haven Detective Rosselli confronts the college community and the brooding
protagonist Sanchez.
The Nature of
Truth is a thriller that explores the philosophy of truth and whether one
truth is more important than another. This well-written, fast-paced,
introspective novel raises many questions about truth and evil, and wonders if
eventually "murder even defeats the murderer."
---Multicultural
Review
"With an acute eye for detail, Sergio Troncoso
tells the story of how one man's search for truth turns into a nightmare,
involving an entire community. Fast-paced and chilling, The Nature of Truth
explores the outermost limit of moral certitude."
---Anne
Landsman, author of The Devil's Chimney
"The real
detectives are those who are after truth. By keeping the sex and violence
yet inserting philosophy, history and ethics into the mix, Sergio Troncoso has
taken the literary mystery novel further than it's ever been taken."
---Ernesto Quiñonez, author of Bodega Dreams
Engaging the complex issues
of race and identity into the battle of ideologies regarding crime and
punishment, Sergio Troncoso's The Nature of Truth single-handedly redefines
the Chicano novel and the literary thriller.
Born to a German father and
a Chicana mother and raised in Germany, 20-something outsider Helmut Hirsch
adopts his mother's maiden name and moves to New England, where his ability
with languages and his scholarly temperament lead him to the musty library
stacks of Yale.
As a researcher for the
reputable Werner Hopfgartner, Helmut Sanchez carves a complacent niche for
himself. Feeling "neither American nor German nor Mexican," he is
more interested with the struggles of philosophy and the abstract tenets that
stimulate thought not action. But his comfort zone is threatened when he
uncovers his employer's sordid past as a Nazi sympathizer and, quite possibly,
a Nazi soldier.
Feeling "a personal
connection" to the war crimes, Helmut develops a moral righteousness and
becomes determined to punish Hopfgartner if indeed his suspicions prove true.
But justice is not served easily, and Helmut is plunged into a tormenting
debate about right and wrong, responsibility and accountability.
Helmut, the academic turned
sleuth, embarks on a journey through Italy and Austria to learn the truth about
Hopfgartner, but this search becomes a process of self-discovery also as Helmut
seeks out a community to make sense of his findings. By the end, not much will
make sense, as evidenced by a series of subversions in the novel that mock
givens and truths.
Under scrutiny, Ivy League
professors, pillars of integrity and decorum, are as flawed as anyone else,
except they banter "like one book talking to another" to disguise
their insecurities. Hopfgartner, the philandering chaser of "young
Yalies," turns out to be less of a monster when his true love, another
man, resurfaces. And Helmut, the self-proclaimed hero, begins to adopt the instincts
of a villain as he complies with his girlfriend's proclamation that "you
need to be dishonest to function in this world. You need to lie to
yourself."
Indeed the name of the game
is survival, and in the world of letters, the rhetoric of deceit is both
pervasive and a necessary power. But Helmut is forced to turn that logic upside
down as he enters the metaphorical war with literal weapons, because
"truth is the practical understanding of the human spirit."
For his psychological
complexity, Troncoso's Helmut Sanchez is in good company with the likes of
Leslie Marmon Silko's estranged Tayo and Dostoyevsky's guilt-ridden
Raskolnikov. And The Nature of Truth
is a unique meditation on redemption and retribution that tackles racism,
homophobia, and anti-Semitism with sensitivity and skill. Troncoso's legacy is
in having expanded the social and geographical terrain of the Chicano narrative
with enviable aplomb.
---Rigoberto González for The
El Paso Times
"The Nature
of Truth … was received with gratitude and has since been read with
pleasure. The generic components of the quest story in its modern mode of
suspense and novel of ideas seemed to me to be integrated in an exemplary way,
and the version of pragmatism underlying the book's own construction of human
agency is strongly held. Helmut is no Raskolnikov of course, and his implicit
anxiety that he might be legitimates him in several ways for me. It's rare to
find a novel with a university setting in which the substantive academic
matters --institutional mores, politics, etc.-- are well handled, or even
plausible. The particularities of Yale and New Haven were of course appealing
to a reader like me, but they didn't blind me to the book's other virtues,
which were Ausgezeichnet."
---John
Hollander, author of Harp Lake, In Time and Place, Tesserae & Other Poems, and Figurehead
"Are Chicanos limited to rewriting that same
story over and over again about where we came from and who we are? Sergio
Troncoso has widened the field for all of us, writing a novel with a range and
depth that is fearlessly consumed with issues of the mind. What a gutsy
book!"
---Dagoberto
Gilb, author of The Magic of Blood and Woodcuts of Women
Sergio Troncoso is the son of Mexican immigrants who
grew up in Ysleta, TX, in the El Paso-Juárez border region. A Harvard graduate
and former Fulbright scholar, he now lives in New York. Troncoso is one of the
brightest of new Latino literary voices. His first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, won the coveted Premio Aztlán
in 1999 as well as the Southwest Book Award of the Border Regional Library
Association in 2000.
Troncoso's main character is Helmut Sanchez, a
research assistant to Yale professor Werner Hopfgartner. The professor, Sanchez
discovers, is living the good life, enjoying a
reputation built on the labors of his lowly assistants and awarding high grades
to attractive coeds in exchange for sexual favors while colleagues are
oblivious to his secret past as a Nazi operative who took part in the
Holocaust. Helmut's accidental discovery leads to a deepening obsession with
the truth of Hopfgartner's involvement in the Nazi
movement and wartime Germany. Driven in his quest for the facts, Sanchez
pursues a trail through dusty library stacks in America and Europe, and along
the way crosses an invisible boundary between the domains of the investigator
and the judge. His girlfriend and only confidante in the matter, Ariane Sassolini, provides
essential balance for Helmut as he reels in disgust with the professor's past
sins and present deceit.
Troncoso excels as a narrator, a storyteller, and a
creator of vivid characters and images, as demonstrated in his earlier story
collection and again here….Troncoso himself remains a man to watch as his
exceptional talent seems certain to produce works of great interest in years to
come.
---Southwest
Book Views
"No absolute assumptions, no
easy judgments, The Nature of Truth is an investigation into
culpability and transgression. The crimes? --moral, physical, philosophical, historical-- just to start.
Troncoso has rendered a novel that is wide-ranging, challenging, and genuinely
satisfying."
---Victoria
Redel, author of Loverboy
and Where the Road Bottoms Out
"I found The Nature of Truth hard hitting.
The professor's characterization is on target: a troubled mind who finds not
only satisfaction in sex but in continuing his penchant for control which he
enjoyed in World War II. The characters are real, weak, generous, guilt-ridden,
and thus, human."
---Rolando
Hinojosa, author of Ask a Policeman, Becky and Her Friends, and The
Useless Servants
Troncoso's The Nature of Truth
focuses on Werner Hopfgartner, professor of German literature at Yale, and the havoc
he wreaks on the lives of an insecure female graduate student from
Despite Helmut's revulsion for Hopfgartner,
he manages to work overtime on his "Compilation"—some kind of
ghostwritten treatise that will cap off an illustrious career— but as the novel
goes on, his researches fail to help him make sense of the dilemma he faces,
and his thirst grows for swift justice. "Yes, justice!
Real action! Real morality!" Helmut
seethes. "What was not wanted was another philosophical seminar of
nothing, from nothing, for the purpose of nothing." He plans a drastic act
that will connect the present and the past with a trail of blood….
Whatever you think of [Paul] de Man, you
will be comforted to know that the accessible and enjoyable novels reviewed
here do not derive from his knotty theorems. A more likely influence is Stephen
Greenblatt, University Professor of the Humanities at
Harvard and founder of the so-called New Historicism. "My deep, ongoing
interest," Greenblatt has said, "is in the
relation between literature and history, the process through which certain
remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world
and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the
strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to
me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago."…
In the same spirit, [the five novels
reviewed here, including The Nature of
Truth] aren't just for graduate students but for anybody who still cares
about getting to the truth in a world that seems to prize subterfuge, anyone
who longs to discover how to make graduate work or any old day job into
something relevant. That is, anybody with a brain.
---The
Believer Magazine
[T]he issues of
identity, the connection between Helmut’s own identity and his sense of guilt
concerning the professor’s sympathies, and the political and philosophical
issues…make the story itself so rich…. [T]he
Nature of Truth is an interesting and provocative read.
---The Review of Contemporary Fiction
In "Fresh Challah," an essay published in Hadassah Magazine in
1999, Sergio Troncoso described sitting in an
It would have
been natural for Troncoso to follow the usual conventions of the category,
carving out a predictable career portraying life in the barrio, in boisterous
bilingual families and in encounters with the Anglophone outside world. His
first novel defies that expectation. The
Nature of Truth is an academic thriller set among the kind of migrant
workers who never grace the stage of Luis Valdez's Teatro
Campesino: the students and faculty assembled from
many countries for cerebral labor at Yale University.
Helmut Sanchez,
the novel's protagonist, is a Chicano who has never even visited the American
Southwest. He grew up in Germany, the son of a soldier who brought the bride he
met at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, back home to Europe with him. After
Helmut's father died, his mother returned to her own people in New Mexico, but
--though he adopted her maiden name as his own-- Helmut did not accompany her.
When readers are introduced to him, at age 26, he is working as the research
assistant to Werner Hopfgartner, a distinguished professor in the Department of
German at Yale. The younger man's task is to prepare drafts of scholarly
articles that Hopfgartner, nearing retirement, will publish under his own
illustrious name.
When Helmut
discovers an article from the 1950s in which Hopfgartner defends the Nazis, he
is appalled and aroused, determined to discover whether the famous German
scholar, who argues against severing thought from action, actually participated
in the atrocities of the Third Reich. (Hopfgartner conceals essential truths
not only about his complicity with atrocity, and not only about the authorship
of articles signed by him but written by his assistant: Behind the door of his
office at Yale, the lecherous professor is a sexual predator who exploits the
vulnerability of young women in his classes.) With help from his girlfriend, Ariane Sassolini, an immigrant
from Italy, Helmut tracks down disturbing truths about Hopfgartner's
life before his immigration to the United States. During a trip through Europe
with Ariane, Helmut pilfers papers from a
900-year-old Austrian monastery that seem to implicate Hopfgartner in the rape
and murder of a young Jewish woman. Identifying with the victims of the
Holocaust, Helmut plots Hopfgartner's execution, in
retribution for his crimes against the Jews.
In Vienna, Helmut
is disgusted by the antisemitic graffiti scrawled on
a Holocaust memorial, and he shares the reaction expressed by an old friend,
Anton Schmidtz: "When they attack that statue,
they attack us. We are all Jews now. Every last one of us.
We should never forget that." Helmut's inability to forget what he learns
of Hopfgartner's genocidal past turns him into a
fanatical avenger, less quixotic than psychotic.
A sentimental
tale of love triumphant over bigotry and zealotry, The Nature of Truth enables its philosemitic
author to wear his heart on his sleeve, right beside an imaginary yellow star.
Troncoso, who has studied and taught at Yale, portrays the campus as an
intellectual enclave that tries to remain oblivious to the ambient urban
blight. About the strained relationship between
As its ponderous
title suggests, The Nature of Truth
is an exploration of the ways in which lies can skew our lives. Over dinner at
the end of the novel, Jonathan Atwater --a gay librarian who, like a Jew
victimized by Nazi storm troopers, was assaulted by homophobic thugs-- presents
his theory about the decline of civilization. "Two important things have
gone by the wayside, in my opinion," he says, "and I believe they've
affected each other in a miserable manner. Family and
truth." According to
---The Forward
Sergio Troncoso's new novel, The Nature of Truth, contains all the essential ingredients of a
well-written mystery and murder tale without becoming formulaic. The book
pushes the reader beyond the crimes at hand into a philosophical consideration
of the concepts of truth, redemption, and revenge. Troncoso's first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories,
which won the Premio Aztlán
for best book by a new Chicano writer and the Southwest Book Award from the
Border Regional Library Association, is a collection of short stories filled
with characters trapped in situations where the right path is unclear. Troncoso
explores this dilemma further in The
Nature of Truth through the main character, Helmut Sanchez. His name says
it all. The son of a German father and a Hispanic mother who fell in love at
Fort Bliss ("Fort Bliss?" one of the characters exclaims, "What
a name! How romantic."), Sanchez works as a research assistant in the
German Department at Yale yet chooses to go by his mother's Latino surname.
It's tempting to wonder if the difficulties Sanchez
faces with Ivy League culture stem from Troncoso's own experiences --an
---
"At the heart of this intricate novel is the
story of a young man's unraveling as he resolves to avenge an atrocity. The
philosophical subtleties and moral ambiguities of vengeance are not easily
dramatized but Troncoso handles them with assurance. An
ambitious and penetrating book."
---Alec
Wilkinson, author of A Violent Act, The Riverkeeper,
and Big Sugar
Read The Nature of Truth: The First Three Chapters,
and click here for discussion
questions. Listen to Sergio Troncoso
talk about his novel on National Public Radio: 
NPR Interview on
Latino USA.
Short stories: Angie Luna, The Snake, A Rock Trying to be a
Stone, and Espíritu Santo.
Essays: Imagine
Ysleta, A Day
Without Ideas, Fresh
Challah, and Why Should Latinos
Write Their Own Stories?