The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far
March 28, 2023 7:54 PM   Subscribe

 
Huh. Gonna need to contemplate this one for a while.

Thanks for posting!
posted by Not A Thing at 9:20 PM on March 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


Obligatory: Aha! I always suspected George Santos was also a novelist!
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 9:38 PM on March 28, 2023 [5 favorites]


Christ, these fucking people! And what a terrible thing to foist upon your spouse.

It is interesting how widely unread he seemed to be. His audience was necessarily limited to people who wouldn't be able detect the masquerade. Being able to impress lots of people... who aren't well versed in the topics he wrote about, is an accomplishment of sorts. The few Cuban-descent readers who did read him seemed to sense the bullshit and irrelevance, but awareness about him seems to have been largely absent from those circles. Probably to his relief.

There seems to be a never ending supply of whack jobs who do this sort of thing. The disenchantment among lives these people manage to touch is horrible and usually impossible to comprehend. Even sadder the instances when there are people too invested in the lies to even contemplate the deception.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:44 PM on March 28, 2023 [3 favorites]


It is interesting how widely unread he seemed to be. His audience was necessarily limited to people who wouldn't be able detect the masquerade.

This reminds me of something I once heard about Nigerian Prince scammers - sometimes/often the awkward language and errors in the messages are intended to weed out people too perceptive to be scammed.

The sheer number of other instances where this (to a lesser degree) has happened is pretty eye popping. The hard part for me is that while his entire existence did seem to prove his point that identity is performed and not innate, by giving him attention and money and jobs on the basis of his created identity, he was literally closing out real Cuban/Afro-Latin voices. I’d love to live in a non zero sum world but we don’t
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:57 PM on March 28, 2023 [8 favorites]


As somebody with below average skills at reading and understanding the cues of human interaction, pathological liars are just deeply upsetting to me, even when their deceptions are relatively modest on the scale of say, politicians and televangelists.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:45 AM on March 29, 2023 [10 favorites]


Great read. Thanks for posting.
posted by fruitslinger at 5:17 AM on March 29, 2023


no paywall.
posted by Ideefixe at 6:32 AM on March 29, 2023 [2 favorites]


His audience was necessarily limited to people who wouldn't be able detect the masquerade.

Not necessarily, I was listening to an interview with (I believe) the author of this piece who noted that for many people in that particular diaspora hearing Carillo misuse, for example, a Mexican Spanish term in place of a Cuban one was less remarkable and did not immediately raise questions. Only in consideration of the facts later did it add up to a bigger fiction.

There was also a great bit about his younger sister describing him as a child constantly competing with and one upping her on everything from musical instruments to school.

In the interview at least, although the persona is now punctured and tells a rough story, there was more of a sense of amusement and being almost impressed with how he stuck to and elaborated upon his fiction. Sure, there's pathology there, but I guess it's not unmitigated nastiness or at least not perceived that way universally.
posted by abulafa at 6:54 AM on March 29, 2023 [4 favorites]


for many people in that particular diaspora hearing Carillo misuse, for example, a Mexican Spanish term in place of a Cuban one was less remarkable and did not immediately raise questions

I mean, how many Americans sometimes use an English slang term just because words are fun? I think it's important not to imagine there can be a clearly and cleanly authentic [ethnic] subjectivity in a diaspora. From the outside, it feels easier to have nice tidy objective rules so that we don't end up mistakenly supporting fraudsters, etc., but history often makes the situation much messier. (Obviously, Carrillo was not Cuban. I'm just speaking generally.)
posted by praemunire at 7:18 AM on March 29, 2023 [5 favorites]


FPP on Dan Malloy.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:20 AM on March 29, 2023 [1 favorite]


I may be over sensitive. One of my pet peeves with hollywood movies for decades has been with the depiction of Mexican Americans. Even when they bothered to cast a Latino, it wasn't unusual to completely neglected accent and vocabulary. You'd have characters saying words in ways that broke the illusion. It's like hiring Bill Burr to be the voice of Hank Hill, and waving away the discrepancy by claiming they're both white American males. It's only fairly recently that I'm noticing movies and tv shows making an effort regarding Latin American accent and dialect.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:45 AM on March 29, 2023 [4 favorites]


The Bad Gays episode 6.1 on George Santos talks about the gay male experience in the US and how reinventing yourself is part of that and what happens when that reinvention slides into delusion or fabulism. See also Andrew Cunanan.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:10 AM on March 29, 2023 [6 favorites]


One of my pet peeves with hollywood movies for decades has been with the depiction of Mexican Americans. Even when they bothered to cast a Latino, it wasn't unusual to completely neglected accent and vocabulary.

Completely legitimate beef, but I think it's a little separate from what I was talking about. In the cases of both Carrillo and "Hollywood Mexicans," the inaccuracies result from ignorance and the confidence of the imperial imagination, but I don't think it's safe to say those/impersonation are the only possible sources of such inaccuracies. Family histories and culture handed down in a diaspora or immigration context are bound to drift in the way any orally-transmitted knowledge does. To choose a hopefully harmless and unfraught example, I literally just found out about a year ago that my maternal grandmother (daughter of Polish immigrants) had a different first name than the one we, and my mom, had always known her by. Slang, favored dishes, religious practices...all subject to time and displacement's blur brush, you know?
posted by praemunire at 12:30 PM on March 29, 2023 [3 favorites]


Good points, but I still think it's unlikely this guy could have survived the scrutiny that wider readership would have brought. It seemed to have niche appeal among a group of mostly non Cuban Americans. The notion that he was playing with language or relating a unique cultural family dynamic would have invited even more interest in his story had it gained wider appeal. Who knows how far he would have been willing to ride it out. Maybe he would have ended up on Oprah. His death, as tragic as it was, feels almost an act of cosmic mercy.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:49 PM on March 29, 2023 [2 favorites]


I still think it's unlikely this guy could have survived the scrutiny that wider readership would have brought.

This is very probably right.
posted by praemunire at 2:21 PM on March 29, 2023


Since there’s no such thing biologically as race, it has to be a cultural construct, and if it’s cultural then it’s performance.

Well intended and understandable but it’s depressing to see an argument meant to undercut racism being so easily repurposed to validate the appropriation of other people’s culture and identity.
posted by Phanx at 10:46 PM on March 29, 2023 [2 favorites]


Look, the man has to deal with the tissue of lies his decade long marriage was constructed on, I think the trauma of that experience in the midst of the grief of losing your life partner is an important part of the context for judging him in terms of how he needs to understand race at this time.
posted by chiquitita at 5:48 AM on March 30, 2023


I think he was talking about how Carrillo viewed it, too, though it's not completely clear.
posted by praemunire at 6:46 AM on March 30, 2023


I wonder how much of his internal life was consumed with fear of being found out, or some combination of fear and deep avoidance of the truth. To think about his marriage, what many would consider to be a deeply emotionally intimate relationship being one that was not truthful is difficult. Or did it only matter that he loved him honestly? I can't figure it out but reading about the husband after his death is an exercise in watching someone trying to make the best of a bad situation.
posted by rene_billingsworth at 9:06 AM on March 30, 2023


From an anonymous user:

"His audience was necessarily limited to people who wouldn't be able detect the masquerade.

My partner and I knew Hache well for several years in graduate school and know a number of the people quoted in the article. We hung out with him in settings where almost everyone was Latin American, Latino/a/x, or were Americans or Europeans who had spent a lot of time in Latin America and the Caribbean and knew the literature. Neither of us ever once heard anyone express even a hint of doubt, including from professors and students who were from Cuba.

As the article suggests, Hache was incredibly warm and personable, and extremely smart. (He had no need to fake, his abilities were very good and he could have succeeded without the performance, but the article make it sound like it was a lifeline compulsion.) We were very saddened by his death, then surprised when the news came out, and are honestly tickled that he got away with it for so long. It's hard to sustain that level of performance day in and day out and he mostly pulled it off, including around people who were in a position to notice the clues that it was actually a performance."
posted by travelingthyme at 7:56 PM on March 30, 2023 [6 favorites]


The thing is that most people, including myself, have no reason to doubt someone when they say who they say they are. If I hear a Cuban say 'vato' that would strike me as sort of odd since it is a very Mexican-American phrase. But that's about it. He probably picked it up from a Mexican friend or something, I'd think. It would not be grounds to start doubting their entire identity!

Someone in our circle of friends was introduced to me as someone who went to the same College as me so we had something in common. Except when I talked to him, bringing up things any alum would know as a form of bonding, not to challenge him in any way, he got a bit strange and evasive. Later, I looked him up and there was no record of him in our alum database. That got us to (deep) googling him a bit and, well, lying about where he went to college was the least of it. This guy had an entire double identity and it wasn't clear his friends knew anything about it. They thought he was some sort of prestigious Doctor, flying around the world helping the needy, but in truth he worked at some finance job. Discovering this sort of thing has a way of pushing a bit at your sense of reality and leaves you a bit dizzy.

We never followed up or called anyone out. I found it admirable but frightening and its probably best to stay away from people like this lest you get caught up in their tornado of lies.
posted by vacapinta at 2:02 AM on March 31, 2023 [4 favorites]


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