Kris Van der Bijl

The Angel of Santa Sofia is a short novella by Josep M. Argemí. The English translation is by Tiago Miller. It tells the story of unnamed narrators attending an academic convention on the devil in Turin. The dream-like, fragmented narrative poses loose philosophical questions about the devil’s work.

The narrative breaks into numerous forking paths. The text itself is structured into 61 short parts. The reader follows, unsure of the narrator’s reliability. Ungrounded and laughing in the face of that novelistic tendency to explain, the narrator can be read as an antihero. He, much like the devil, is at war with the traditional God’s view, all-knowing eye.

Doctor Mefisto speaks for a significant chunk of the text. The narrator calls his name from “that individual who’d seemingly escaped from a Fra Angelico painting.” He tells the story of The Student, a criminal the narrator claims to see. Doctor Mefisto or the Student repeatedly namedrops classic texts, like the Latin Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam and Petronius’ Satyricon. Knowledge of these texts is assumed.  

Only some real allusions exist in The Angel of Santa Sofia. The textual references work more to show that the Student, Doctor Mefisto, and the convention members can, and already do, understand them. They are part of the academic community. They show this by aligning themselves with traditional authority—the pact, so to speak, of academic traditional authority between the Doctor and a Student. The text’s surface-level namedropping shows the surface-levelness of conventions.

The narrator attempts to break these conventions by refusing to explain the allusions fully. By doing so, they show the limitations of the old-school pact that both the speaker and the listener—or the narrator and the reader—share an innate and implicit common understanding.

The slight destruction of the narrative pact places the reader in a confused and precarious position. They must work to piece together the narrator’s complex world. The narrator of The Angel of Santa Sofia is an elusive trickster who tears apart conventions. Much like the devil in traditional Western literature, he is the primal antihero at war with tradition and God.

The Angel of Santa Sofia, written by Josep M. Argemí, translated from Spanish by Tiago Miller, and published by Fum d’Estampa Press Limited, 2023.