Exchange: Pron vs. Gumucio
From December 2012 to January 2013, Rafael Gumucio and Patricio Pron exchanged emails. Among other things, they discussed the sad state of Spanish literature, Chilean aristocracy, and the looming shadow of Roberto Bolaño. Read their correspondence here.
From: Patricio Pron
Sent: Monday, 24 December 2012 8:52
To: Rafael Gumucio
Subject: Festivities / 01
I hope you and your family are well; everything’s fine here, apart from the usual difficulties with this time of year, when happiness is motiveless but obligatory. Giselle is annoyed with me because I gave her a pineapple corer, which is a tool that lets you cut the fruit up effortlessly (as seen on TV), but to her it seemed like a far from appropriate gift for this time of year. To my immense surprise, my suggestion of exchanging it for a new mop (or scourer) only made things worse. I suppose this is all because she’s Chilean, and the unfathomable soul of that people is completely unknown to me. Sleeping every night next to a woman the unfathomable soul of whose people, etc., doesn’t seem like the best idea, so I’m glad that, amongst all the problems that a person can have, you don’t have this one.
I never like Christmas (in fact, I don’t like celebrating any important dates) but this year I’m dealing with it particularly badly. A few months ago I underwent a stupid ophthalmic operation the doctor recommended, with the result that, now, what’s close to me seems far away, and what’s far away appears unexpectedly close. This problem with perspective must (I imagine) be having some kind of effect on my way of reading, since these days the most established ideas seem fragile to me, and the most fragile seem strangely established.
Amongst the second variety is the one saying that Latin American writers need to be in sad Spanish capitals in order to be recognised as writers in the language; you being one of the major Chilean writers (and having direct experience of publishing and also of daily life in Spain), I wonder whether you believe this too; whether you share the idea of literature in this language having a metropolis, which can be found in Barcelona or Madrid, and also a periphery, made up of cities like Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, as some of our colleagues and even a couple of intelligent people believe.
All the best,
P
From: Rafael Gumucio
Sent: Wednesday, 26 December 2012 15:23
To: 'Patricio Pron'
Subject: RE: Festivities / 01
Dear cousin,
When Matias Rivas and I announced to you that you had become our cousin, I don’t think you took in the seriousness of the task. Matias and I belong to a tribal society (the one Giselle comes from) where the only ties worth anything are blood ties. Everything else – friendship, comradeship, the avant-garde, schools, political parties – is more questionable. Here you’re either part of the clan or you’re not. We count you as part of it, which means surveillance of and extreme concern for every step you’re taking or not taking. Maybe you don’t see them, but a considerable quantity of spies and informers keep us up to date with the slightest cup of coffee or change in syntax. We graciously accept that you do the same with us.
So don’t be surprised that I should be there on Twitter, email, Facebook, sighing, where is Pron? A rhetorical question since the spies always tell me, but you can never have too many unnecessary displays of affection. In a way, this whole introduction answers your question. Constantino Bértolo, my first (in all senses of the word) editor in Spain looked at me sarcastically when I asked him about literature in Spain. “The thing about the centre and the periphery is fucked now. The centre is the periphery and the periphery is the centre.” Until I knew Spain and its literature better (and it should be noted that my affection for both borders on madness) I didn’t understand this verdict of Bértolo’s. Compared with Buenos Aires or Mexico City, Madrid is a provincial city. For better or for worse, Spanish literature from 1770 onwards is, like Chilean literature (with the exception of its poetry), a marginal literature. Maybe this is why writers who combine the double margin of being Basque, Galician or Catalan without being nationalists are the ones I enjoy the most and always have done. Strange voices like Pla, Cunqueiro, Baroja, Valle Inclán, Marsé, Gil de Biedma. This is the central literature in Spain, the periphery that doesn’t charge any subsidies for being so.
We are both part of the end of an era, that crazy era in which Madrid and Barcelona decided that what mattered were literatures much more alive, current or simply more refined than their own. Lost in the immensity of mestizaje, the Spanish – with the exception of Ignacio Echevarria and María Dolores Pradera – are condemned to understand nothing about Latin America, precisely because they enjoy the idea that they do understand it. Borges wasn’t being silly when he observed that the only thing that separates us from Spain is the language. The Spanish in which you and I write is not, as it usually is for a Spanish writer, a source either of pride or of shame. We don’t relish the words, and neither do we believe that they contain any kind of essential essence. We write in Spanish because it’s the language we happen to have. If the Italians, Jews, English and French from which many of us descend had disembarked in another port, they would have spoken English or Portuguese. The Mapuche, Aztecs, Mayas or Guaranís also living within us speak as well, although we may not know their language across the distance or the detachment of the word blue from the BLUE.
Spain, a peripheral literature, wasn’t called upon to fulfil the role of being the capital of anything. This produced monstrosities like the Planeta, Alfaguara, spring, autumn and summer prizes, a load of Colombian and Honduran novels where people “live by their looks alone” and drink gin (I made this mistake in one of my novels) or go to uninspiring hotels (I made this one as well). This produces Crack*, and the narcotrafficking novels of Pérez Reverte, but it also made space for Bolaño, who knew how to make this mutual ignorance, this mystification – Latin America for Catalans – into the substance of a work that had precisely the grace of speaking of the biggest provinces in the world: that of the exiled, the terrified, the transplanted, the travellers, the lost.
I was talking about exactly this, or something similar, with Bernardo Toro, a Chilean writer who writes about Chile in French. We talked about the nineteenth century and the bourgeois novel: is it dead? Is it alive? I was maintaining the latter: the bourgeois novel, that of Stendhal, of Tolstoy, of James, lives where it is still useful; that is, where a rising bourgeoisie is clashing with the values and memories of the tribe. It’s what I was telling you at the beginning of this email: every novel tells the story of the Leopard or the Godfather, the end of the tribal or feudal world at the hand of bourgeois values. Or it tells the story in reverse, the process of liberation from the myths of the tribe in order to buy a flat and a car and marry that pretty and inaccessible girl you like. In countries and cities where everyone is bourgeois, the essay form grows, or that mixture of essay and short story that is flourishing in Buenos Aires and in Paris. In tribal countries only poetry flourishes. Only when the son of the shepherd, or of the count, has to live in a flat does the novel make sense. Because of that, Pakistanis and Indians write in London, and Dominicans (and before that Jews) in New York, and because of that the moribund Latin American literature is more alive than ever in countries as unexpected as Guatemala, Honduras, the north of Mexico and the commune of Maipú (where Zambra comes from), Villa Alemana (where Bisama comes from), San Antonio (near where Marcelo Mellado lives). Because of this, in your case, being from Rosario in Argentina, and being a novelist are one and the same, and because of this too, in my case, being able to be French, Spanish and a journalist, I have decided to sink myself into Providencia, which, as you say, is the centre of the world. Excuse the length of this email, dear cousin, I hope it doesn’t overwhelm you, but I got carried away with the pleasure of writing such a letter.
I wish you all the very best, and look forward to hearing from you.
From: Patricio Pron
Sent: Thursday, 27 December 2012 18:46
To: Rafael Gumucio
Subject: Festivities / 02
totally agree with you (and also, i see, with Constantino Bértolo) about the insularity of contemporary Spanish literature. I admit that my question was the result of a certain estrangement from it on my part, and of a very real desire to be mistaken and for Spanish literature really to deserve (in spite of everything) the central place that its authors are striving for. Madrid isn’t exactly a Central European forest, but (every time I go outside, and I should point out that I do that very little) my impression is that that forest (which is also the forest of Spanish literature) doesn’t allow us to see the trees, which are actually quite scrawny. Naturally, there are exceptions (marvellous and essential ones), but they only do what all exceptions do all the time: prove the rule. From there comes my estrangement when faced with the prevailing idea that passing through Spain is necessary or inevitable for the Latin American writer. Apparently, it isn’t enough that a large quantity of Spanish publishers have spent the last decade publishing bargain articles from the Latin American literary scene in order to make it clear that their interest (primarily commercial, of course) is oriented more towards there than here, these sad Spanish capitals devastated by moral misery and economic depression, where very few people still have any interest in reading books.
This disinterest (of course) only increases when the selfless and patient readers who still remain in this country come to what is sold to them as literature in Spanish only to discover that its authors can be divided into just a handful of categories: a) the serious young people for whom the only possible subject matter is PURE EVIL (Oh! The murderer was the official stamp-licker at Auschwitz!), b) writers of little detective novels who aspire to win prizes, c) the ones who think that TV series are the new literature (which is equivalent to saying that veal fillets are the new vegetable soup), d) the old who want to write like the young, e) the young who want to write like the old, f) the ones who don’t know who Thomas Bernhard was, g) the ones who, since they know nothing, don’t even know who Jorge Luis Borges was (and he was the one who gave birth to us all), h) the ones who write novels about the crisis or high-up politicians, with all the depth of a Reader’s Digest article, i) the women whose only literary merit is being women, j) the homosexuals whose only literary merit is being homosexuals, k) the men whose only literary merit is being men, l) the ones who are alcoholics and sleep in their cars, where they continue writing their great novel, m) the ones who only write so that their city council puts them in charge of a writing workshop, n) the ones who in these workshops intend to teach well what they themselves do poorly, o) the ones who believe that they know everything about literature because they flick through the Sunday supplements every so often, p) the ones who sign their work with their name, q) the ones who don’t sign their work with their name, r) the ones who make trailers for books, s) the ones who think they’re “from the same stable as Cervantes, Borges and Nabokov” (ridiculous phrase of 2010), t) the ones who boast about their independence whilst working for the Cervantes Institute, u) the ones who boast about supporting small presses once their novel has been rejected by six major ones, etc.
In this context, the bad thing isn’t (as everything seems to suggest) that Spanish literature is disappearing; the bad thing is that it didn’t disappear a long time ago and save us all these horrors.
That said, however, it doesn’t seem to me that the Latin American panorama is much better, excepting the honourable exceptions that, like all exceptions, etc. etc. Of course, good literature is written wherever Alejandro Zambra and Marcelo Mellado are (just as it is in places such as Coahuila, some parts of Buenos Aires and the incommensurable Santiago barrio of Providencia, the surroundings of Barcelona, and in dozens of other similar places, each of which is the centre of its own periphery), but I get the impression that the majority of that literature (with the aforementioned exceptions, etc.) is ruled by its authors’ ambitions to earn money, to obtain something like “fame” or to receive a conspiratorial wink from (another) Spanish editor ready to invent Latin American writers (“Who knows, maybe this is the next Bolaño” – as if there were going to be another Bolaño).
That a lot of the authors I know on both shores of the Atlantic share this view of literature as a means and not an end is (in my opinion) one of the most solid arguments (or perhaps the only one) for proposing the existence of this thing that people call “hispanoamerican” literature, but I wonder whether this impression of mine isn’t the result of the education I received, which I talk about in El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (The Spirit of my Parents Keeps Rising in the Rain). Aware (thanks to Memorias prematuras (Premature Memoirs)) that your education has been very similar (although the differences between us are also very clear: your parents were exiled, mine were not; my parents stayed together, yours didn’t; your parents were militant Christians, my parents hated Christians, etc.), I wanted to ask you whether you think that the politicised nature of the education we received is the origin of our discontent with what is produced around us, just as the reason why we write our own books (which are what they are, despite how for so many years they tried to make us believe that the Latin American novel should happen in a rich suburb of Miami, or that its main character should be the by now famous stamp-licker, in this case the one working for the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner).
All the best (cousin),
Postscript: I have finally resolved the problem with Giselle by exchanging the corer for a humidifier. Needless to say, I have no idea what a humidifier is: Giselle made it work and what it gives off is smoke rather than humidity. The cat has decided to sleep in the living room to avoid respiratory intoxication and I fear I will soon be following in his footsteps. I’ll keep you posted.
From: Rafael Gumucio
Sent: Wednesday, 28 December 2012 18:27
To: 'Patricio Pron'
Subject: RE: Festivities / 02
I laughed a lot reading your systematisation of the motives and obsessions of the current writer in Spanish. I think however that the grace, talent and genius don’t lie in avoiding these temptations, but rather in combining as many of them as possible. Bolaño fell into almost all of the categories. In the Nazi novel in America he was a serious young man who writes about PURE EVIL; in The Savage Detectives he was an old man writing like a young man and in 2666 he was a young man writing like an old man; he was a writer of little detective novels; he wrote leftist-narco-homosexual novels and he was from the stable of Cervantes, Borges and Nabokov, whatever that might mean.
I, and I think you, don’t have that versatility largely because of what you mention, politics, cursed politics, my parents’ Marxism that lives again in me and that doesn’t let me forget that when our young moleskinites talk about Borges and Nabokov they’re not talking about Nuevas Inquisiciones (New Inquisitions) or Lolita but rather about the idea of a great postmodern disbeliever who cleans all of the mulato off their skin. I understand and share the distance of Borges and Nabokov from the revolution and the revolutionaries, although not their reasoning, because they detested Bolshevism and Peronism for their lies and also for their few truths. These truths, the idea that man is not condemned to be what he was, the idea that literature is not, as Nabokov thought, a sport that consists of flexing the imagination, do not seem entirely foreign to me. The most absurd book I have read recently collects Nabokov’s classes on Russian literature, which are obsessed with explaining how Tolstoy didn’t write about the Napoleonic War, or Chekhov about provincial Russia, and all of them had nothing to do with the revolution that was brought about by a few (and not so many) enlightened people who grew up reading those books. Neither does Nabokov understand (not because he can’t but because he doesn’t want to) the humour of Cervantes, which lies precisely in his lack of good taste, his torn suit that we readers finish for him, the misery of his characters which enriches them in another way. This is what Borges, on the other hand, did understand in Cervantes: his uncharitable charity, the desire to make a caricature that clashes with the excess of weakness and involuntary sympathy which his characters display. A joke that never makes people guffaw out loud the way it wants to because it steps back, it fills itself with details, with secondary characters, which turn it into something other than what it wanted to be. It is in this lack of control, this amateur touch, professionally amateur, that the genius of Cervantes resides. He was able to write like that because he was convinced that he wasn’t writing a masterpiece, that this was an excuse, a fall, a digression in his work. What allowed him to write the Quixote was the ambition to write an important book and the renunciation of this ambition, combined, who knows how, when you least expect it. It is the Zen paradox, the archer that can only hit the target when his eyes are covered and he no longer aims. This is what makes me write: the final prize which is nothing other than the prestige that can only be reached when you renounce prestige. When you renounce even the prestige of being insane, drunk, or a cult writer. How the character in search of lost time understands everything at a party he goes to out of pure desperation at not being able to reject a mundane invitation and stay at home writing.
I liked, and continue to like, that about literature: that it imposes its rules, which look a lot like the rules of power, politics, the economy or sex, but are not exactly the same. This narrow gap is what saved my life just when sex, politics, the economy, all failed me. One metre, or less, further or nearer than that defeat I could see all of it, my parents, the cruelty of good people, exile, fear, my fear, theirs, them, united in a single great peninsula that it was up to me to draw on the map to make sure that nobody else got lost after, or so that if they did, they did so with an understanding of the cause.
Bad writers are the ones that renounce this gap: the ones that believe that literature is a branch of the economy, of politics, or of sex, and the people who have nothing to do with sex, or politics, or the economy believe them. The writers that matter to me are the ones that neither widen nor deny the gap but rather use it to see through, to be seen through, to see everything through: politics as a metaphor for sex as a metaphor for the economy, and all that as a metaphor for literature and like that over and over again until infinity.
Defining this precise distance is very difficult. I think it is related to necessity. There are people who have nothing else: this is your case, Bolaño’s case, and the case of Castellano Moya (three people who have nothing to do with each other) or Aira or Rey Rosa or a long and narrow list of writers who I more or less like but in whom I sense the roar of an impatience. As for the others, the patient ones, let them wait.
P.S. How can you imagine a Venezuelan in Madrid without a humidifier? New Year’s Eve is coming, the saddest holiday of them all. I’m lucky enough to be able to say I did nothing of any importance in 2012, which must be a record.
From: Patricio Pron
Sent: Monday, 30 December 2012 20:58
To: Rafael Gumucio
Subject: Festivities / 03
Dear Rafael Gumucio (cousin),
It’s good that you laughed; the catalogue in the last email was (of course) a joke, though a very serious one (as jokes always are).
I personally don’t really agree with your idea that Bolaño was everything you ascribe to him; rather, I think that he seems it because some of the tendencies I catalogue in the last email are dérives of his work. “Epigonal dérives,” we could call them, that come from authors without Bolaño’s talent and grace and conviction, but covetous of his position and his prestige: each one of them does badly one part of the totality of the work that Bolaño did well, as if they were apprentices of a magnificent painter (but terrible teacher) who has only been able to teach one to draw a hand, another to sketch a face and the third to outline a torso (and not very well, at that). This week, a couple of extraordinarily generous people through no fault of their own invited me to speak with two of those authors. One knows how to draw a foot and the other a head; that is, one writes stories that try to seem like Bolaño’s (he doesn’t manage it, but he´s young and we should give him some credit) and the other writes detective novels about PURE EVIL in the country in Latin America which he left some time ago in order to enjoy his connections with an important institution for the representation of Spanish culture abroad. I declined out of pity for the eventual listeners of the conversation, who were going to end up believing that Latin American literature is a ragdoll made up of one foot, one head and, let’s say, one twisted hand. No one deserves that.
Now that I think about it, by the way (and thanks to you), I think that the ragdoll would have been very Cervantine; in fact, I think I should go back and accept the invitation to that talk simply because it seems to me to be a magnificent error, and good literature is made (as you very well say) of gargantuan errors, or at least of the beauty and dignity that are sometimes found there where the author abandons everything, even himself, and follows the inertia of what demands to be written and not of what the market or its readers require (and thus I understand, as well, the editors and directors of literary supplements, who need the writer to remain still, to detain himself in a simple and flat version of himself, which is what is best retained in photographs. As for me, my favourite photos of writers are the ones that come out blurred.)
Going back to the topic of the talk that never was (and going back even further, to the beginning of this dialogue), I now think that it would have been difficult for the conversation I had with those colleagues to alter the image of Latin American literature that the audience had, since (at the end of the day, and as if all of us had been victims of the ophthalmic operation that I was talking about) the idea of a Latin American literature is simply a problem of perspective; even better, it is the result of the territory that Latin American literature comes from being located far enough away from its Spanish readers that (distance having smudged the regional differences somewhat) these people can imagine a unified, stable and plausible territory to be summed up in commercial lists, “best of” selections or covers of supplements. At the same time, Spanish literature seems to be the result of a misunderstood product, since we’re too far away to be able to appreciate the differences that characterise it.
Let’s not be so solipsistic, let’s not talk about literature in Spanish: let’s think about German literature, or better still, let’s ask ourselves what German literature is. If we’re far away, we know: if we get closer, the evidence that literature produced in Austria is different to that which is written in Germany (not to mention the fact that what is produced in Frankfurt is singularly different to what is produced in Berlin or in Leipzig) means that we do not know it after all. It is, I mean, a problem of perspective, almost an optical illusion: from a distance, everything looks bigger.
It isn’t a gratuitous example that I give here, since I’m writing to you from Vienna, where Giselle and I have come to start the new year away from the familial strife. Maybe you can let me know in your next email whether there’s any kind of aristocracy of Chilean origin that I’m unaware of: if there is, I think my wife belongs to it, since today she took me to the most elegant of restaurants, which she insisted on going to and which I left struck by the extravagance of the place and even poorer than when I went in. Before this, she took me to the café where Thomas Bernhard used to write when he was in Vienna: now the café is full of tourists taking photos of the cakes and people who have never read a Thomas Bernhard novel, though they have read in the El País Aguilar guidebook that Thomas Bernhard used to write in this café when he was in Vienna (ah, the País Aguilar guidebook, the only literary essay that many of our colleagues have read). Bernhard (of course) wouldn’t like to know that his workplace had become another mass tourism attraction, but it’s unlikely that he’s going to find out by now: he’s in El Salvador, if I haven’t misunderstood, which is further evidence that national borders have no importance in literature.
I don’t believe that you didn’t do anything significant in 2012 – you must have new books coming out this coming year, and articles: I remember one particularly brilliant one about a madman who tore up Neruda’s speech before his very eyes and then wrote an ode to Pinochet; I don’t remember his name (you already know that my memory isn’t what it was. “And what was it?” “I don’t remember!”), but the article was extraordinary and the character enchanting. I will never support writing an ode to Pinochet, but tearing up Neruda’s speech before his very eyes is something that we should all do at some point in our lives. Let’s keep that in mind.
Please confirm for me about the native Chilean aristocracy so I can find out if there’s any kind of fiscal benefit or economic compensation for having married one of its members, and receive the warmest of wishes from your friend (who hopes for all the very best in 2013 for you, your family, and all the other Chilean friends: Diego Zúñiga, Paz Balmaceda, Alejandro Zambra, Álvaro Bisama, Matías Rivas, Daniella González, Cecilia Huidobro, Andrea Jeftanovic, Cynthia Rimsky, Marcelo Mellado, Paula Ilabaca Núñez, Nona Fernández, Melanie Josch, Alejandra Costamagna; all magnificent, in alphabetical order and in all of the other orders),
P
From: Rafael Gumucio
Sent: Wednesday, 2 January 2013 17:13
To: 'Patricio Pron'
Subject: RE: Festivities / 03
The New Year turned out to be pretty lively. My daughters and wife came back from New York (this is all sounding very Norman Mailer) and they dragged me far away from the temptation to think about meaningless nonsense (or crap), and indeed to think about anything other than My Little Pony and Monster High. Kristina and I made Russian food for an army that was then reduced to my brother and his wife. At midnight, we all embraced without me really knowing what to wish for, since I have both everything and nothing. Yesterday I was able to read again. I devoured fifty pages of the book Los Decimonónicos (Nineteenth Century People) by Domínguez Michael. I live in a nineteenth-century country where people talk over lunch about how the servant “turned out”, whether from a good or bad harvest, and if another one like her could be snapped up in the south. Domínguez Michael talks about Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis, two writers who I also like a lot (more the second than the first), two writers who had the disadvantageous advantage of writing in a language apart, Portuguese, and nourishing themselves, for that very reason, on Sterne and Fielding while they played at copying Zola or Flaubert. This is what I was saying about not avoiding temptation. The novels of Eça and Machado have as subject matter the most common and well-stocked topics of their time: infidelity, the breakdown of the family, sentimental education, the useless man. Like Bolaño with Nazi literature (written at precisely the time when Volpi was writing his Nazi novel) or his narco novels (written at the same time as Pérez Reverte was writing his) or his novels about unknown writers (at the same time as Vila-Matas writing his), the originality of the writer doesn’t lie in avoiding the tics and obsessions of their time, but rather in inventing for themselves a Portugal or a Brazil that manages to be at once just next door from the first and on the other side from it completely, in order to cross the matter diagonally to get to the bottom of it or, even better, to move above it and denounce what little depth it has, which is what Bolaño does supremely well: that way of involving yourself in a story, obliging yourself to care about it in order to remove yourself from it and smile at your – at our – naiveté.
Isaac Dinesen, who never wrote anything that resembled anyone else, used to talk about his lion-hunter lover (the unbearable Robert Redford in that film) who had as a motto “Je respondrait”. “I will answer” in old Norman. It seems to me that there is no more aristocratic (in the best sense of the term) motto than that. The obligation to respond, not to evade, to say, here I am. Your novel has this, and it is an obsessive and often terrible answer that no one else in that moral sense of responding was obliging you to give. Like my book, Memorias Prematuras (Premature Memoirs), (and like Guadalupe Nettel and Julián Herbert and Zambra) is part of a tendency or fashion that cultural journalists can easily identify (personal memoirs, the political landscape seen through the eyes of some adults remembering their childhood). They respond to a call, though everyone does so in their own way. The problem there is with cultural journalists, a species that we should order to be hanged without giving the matter any more thought, who spent all last month releasing lists of the year’s unmissable things. Pieces ten lines long with words like “revealing” and “revelation” and lots of books from China because little by little China is replacing central Europe (goodbye Vienna), and an etc. that turns out to be embarrassing.
As for the thread of the debate, young Latin American literature: you’re right, Latin America looks more united and coherent from a distance. This doesn’t imply that that vision is wrong. Yesterday I was reading an interview with Valeria Luisini where she was congratulating herself on belonging to a generation in which everyone is different and nobody writes like anyone else. A generation that is joined together only by friendship. A generation that is not recognised as a generation. From the modest distance of the years I think that there are few generations that have more things in common than hers (Bolaño, the epigrammatic tone, cosmopolitanism, hybridity of forms, the innocence of its protagonists). Her two books could fit perfectly at the centre of this cannon, and the title of the second, Los ingrávidos (The Weightless), could be the title of the manifesto.
There are plenty of things that I like in her books, and Zambra’s and Zúñiga’s, Costamagna’s and Celedón’s (insert here whichever Argentinian names you want), but what I don’t like is perfectly represented in the title: weightlessness. I like it when things turn out like that, but I’m suspicious when it turns into a programme, a way of being in the world, modestly depressed, pleasantly eclectic, sentimentally leftist, existentially gringo. Anyone who rejects bad taste ends up as ice, said Neruda (who rejected nothing, it has to be said). The idea that this generation, the “Granta boys” (the readable ones from the group, I mean), isn’t a generation, obeys precisely the most pernicious obsession of the continent’s young writers: the obsession with not upsetting anyone.
It isn’t only a literary question: among the young people who protest in the streets of Santiago demanding a decent education, there is the same contempt for power, the same distrust for the part of it that stains. It is the exact opposite of the McOndo** and Crack kids, who love power and couldn’t permit themselves any kind of weightlessness (although they wrote books seriously sick with pedantry, deafness, blindness and vanity). It was an utterly exhausting idea that each generation had to hang the previous one, and that it was necessary to rewrite the continent’s literature from zero, but I consider all of these excesses to be better than those lists of revelatory new releases and short books with lots of white space that timidly say little or nothing. It’s strange: while the educated, the habitual readers, are more and more inclined to prefer short books with lots of white space and big print, the non-habitual readers, the readers of bestsellers, read books that are thicker and thicker, with smaller and smaller print. This is maybe a topic for somebody wiser than me, the economy of words that has become synonymous with culture, the book with no words that will soon become the book par excellence while thick books of six hundred pages that functioning illiterates read in one sitting on the bus because they have magic or the man might be loving the young lady under the covers whilst counting his millions.
You have achieved, Patricio, what we were after: me saying bad things about the friends I admire and spilling a little of the venom that I’m never lacking into their sleeping ears. As far as the Chilean aristocracy goes, without further ado I can tell you that Giselle undoubtedly belongs to it. Although I fear that her fondness for fine restaurants and excursions comes to her from Venezuela. We Chileans, when we’re not austere, are morbid (morbid and obese).
P.S. The poet who tore up Neruda’s speech and wrote the speeches to Pinochet was Braulio Arenas, surrealist poet (leader of the Mandrágora, the local section of French surrealism) who, strapped for cash, tried to stick close to all the governments until Pinochet accepted him as one of his own. After spending forty years dreaming of going to Paris and meeting André Breton he managed, after a lot of effort, to get hold of enough money for the journey and the phone number of Breton (whose wife was Chilean). He telephoned and asked for Monsieur Breton.
“He died yesterday,” came the answer. “The funeral is tomorrow.”
*Crack: A 1990s Mexican literary movement which aimed to break with the aesthetics of the so-called Latin American Boom.
** McOndo: A 1990s Latin American literary movement which considered Magical Realism to be a reductive and exoticised portrayal of Latin America, and aimed instead to show the realities of contemporary urban life.
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[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
Translated by Annie McDermott
Photo of Pron by Lisbeth Salas, Gumucio by Fernando Villalobos.
Photo of Pron by Lisbeth Salas, Gumucio by Fernando Villalobos.
From: Patricio Pron
Sent: Monday, 24 December 2012 8:52
To: Rafael Gumucio
Subject: Festivities / 01
I hope you and your family are well; everything’s fine here, apart from the usual difficulties with this time of year, when happiness is motiveless but obligatory. Giselle is annoyed with me because I gave her a pineapple corer, which is a tool that lets you cut the fruit up effortlessly (as seen on TV), but to her it seemed like a far from appropriate gift for this time of year. To my immense surprise, my suggestion of exchanging it for a new mop (or scourer) only made things worse. I suppose this is all because she’s Chilean, and the unfathomable soul of that people is completely unknown to me. Sleeping every night next to a woman the unfathomable soul of whose people, etc., doesn’t seem like the best idea, so I’m glad that, amongst all the problems that a person can have, you don’t have this one.
I never like Christmas (in fact, I don’t like celebrating any important dates) but this year I’m dealing with it particularly badly. A few months ago I underwent a stupid ophthalmic operation the doctor recommended, with the result that, now, what’s close to me seems far away, and what’s far away appears unexpectedly close. This problem with perspective must (I imagine) be having some kind of effect on my way of reading, since these days the most established ideas seem fragile to me, and the most fragile seem strangely established.
Amongst the second variety is the one saying that Latin American writers need to be in sad Spanish capitals in order to be recognised as writers in the language; you being one of the major Chilean writers (and having direct experience of publishing and also of daily life in Spain), I wonder whether you believe this too; whether you share the idea of literature in this language having a metropolis, which can be found in Barcelona or Madrid, and also a periphery, made up of cities like Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile, as some of our colleagues and even a couple of intelligent people believe.
All the best,
P
From: Rafael Gumucio
Sent: Wednesday, 26 December 2012 15:23
To: 'Patricio Pron'
Subject: RE: Festivities / 01
Dear cousin,
When Matias Rivas and I announced to you that you had become our cousin, I don’t think you took in the seriousness of the task. Matias and I belong to a tribal society (the one Giselle comes from) where the only ties worth anything are blood ties. Everything else – friendship, comradeship, the avant-garde, schools, political parties – is more questionable. Here you’re either part of the clan or you’re not. We count you as part of it, which means surveillance of and extreme concern for every step you’re taking or not taking. Maybe you don’t see them, but a considerable quantity of spies and informers keep us up to date with the slightest cup of coffee or change in syntax. We graciously accept that you do the same with us.
So don’t be surprised that I should be there on Twitter, email, Facebook, sighing, where is Pron? A rhetorical question since the spies always tell me, but you can never have too many unnecessary displays of affection. In a way, this whole introduction answers your question. Constantino Bértolo, my first (in all senses of the word) editor in Spain looked at me sarcastically when I asked him about literature in Spain. “The thing about the centre and the periphery is fucked now. The centre is the periphery and the periphery is the centre.” Until I knew Spain and its literature better (and it should be noted that my affection for both borders on madness) I didn’t understand this verdict of Bértolo’s. Compared with Buenos Aires or Mexico City, Madrid is a provincial city. For better or for worse, Spanish literature from 1770 onwards is, like Chilean literature (with the exception of its poetry), a marginal literature. Maybe this is why writers who combine the double margin of being Basque, Galician or Catalan without being nationalists are the ones I enjoy the most and always have done. Strange voices like Pla, Cunqueiro, Baroja, Valle Inclán, Marsé, Gil de Biedma. This is the central literature in Spain, the periphery that doesn’t charge any subsidies for being so.
We are both part of the end of an era, that crazy era in which Madrid and Barcelona decided that what mattered were literatures much more alive, current or simply more refined than their own. Lost in the immensity of mestizaje, the Spanish – with the exception of Ignacio Echevarria and María Dolores Pradera – are condemned to understand nothing about Latin America, precisely because they enjoy the idea that they do understand it. Borges wasn’t being silly when he observed that the only thing that separates us from Spain is the language. The Spanish in which you and I write is not, as it usually is for a Spanish writer, a source either of pride or of shame. We don’t relish the words, and neither do we believe that they contain any kind of essential essence. We write in Spanish because it’s the language we happen to have. If the Italians, Jews, English and French from which many of us descend had disembarked in another port, they would have spoken English or Portuguese. The Mapuche, Aztecs, Mayas or Guaranís also living within us speak as well, although we may not know their language across the distance or the detachment of the word blue from the BLUE.
Spain, a peripheral literature, wasn’t called upon to fulfil the role of being the capital of anything. This produced monstrosities like the Planeta, Alfaguara, spring, autumn and summer prizes, a load of Colombian and Honduran novels where people “live by their looks alone” and drink gin (I made this mistake in one of my novels) or go to uninspiring hotels (I made this one as well). This produces Crack*, and the narcotrafficking novels of Pérez Reverte, but it also made space for Bolaño, who knew how to make this mutual ignorance, this mystification – Latin America for Catalans – into the substance of a work that had precisely the grace of speaking of the biggest provinces in the world: that of the exiled, the terrified, the transplanted, the travellers, the lost.
I was talking about exactly this, or something similar, with Bernardo Toro, a Chilean writer who writes about Chile in French. We talked about the nineteenth century and the bourgeois novel: is it dead? Is it alive? I was maintaining the latter: the bourgeois novel, that of Stendhal, of Tolstoy, of James, lives where it is still useful; that is, where a rising bourgeoisie is clashing with the values and memories of the tribe. It’s what I was telling you at the beginning of this email: every novel tells the story of the Leopard or the Godfather, the end of the tribal or feudal world at the hand of bourgeois values. Or it tells the story in reverse, the process of liberation from the myths of the tribe in order to buy a flat and a car and marry that pretty and inaccessible girl you like. In countries and cities where everyone is bourgeois, the essay form grows, or that mixture of essay and short story that is flourishing in Buenos Aires and in Paris. In tribal countries only poetry flourishes. Only when the son of the shepherd, or of the count, has to live in a flat does the novel make sense. Because of that, Pakistanis and Indians write in London, and Dominicans (and before that Jews) in New York, and because of that the moribund Latin American literature is more alive than ever in countries as unexpected as Guatemala, Honduras, the north of Mexico and the commune of Maipú (where Zambra comes from), Villa Alemana (where Bisama comes from), San Antonio (near where Marcelo Mellado lives). Because of this, in your case, being from Rosario in Argentina, and being a novelist are one and the same, and because of this too, in my case, being able to be French, Spanish and a journalist, I have decided to sink myself into Providencia, which, as you say, is the centre of the world. Excuse the length of this email, dear cousin, I hope it doesn’t overwhelm you, but I got carried away with the pleasure of writing such a letter.
I wish you all the very best, and look forward to hearing from you.
From: Patricio Pron
Sent: Thursday, 27 December 2012 18:46
To: Rafael Gumucio
Subject: Festivities / 02
totally agree with you (and also, i see, with Constantino Bértolo) about the insularity of contemporary Spanish literature. I admit that my question was the result of a certain estrangement from it on my part, and of a very real desire to be mistaken and for Spanish literature really to deserve (in spite of everything) the central place that its authors are striving for. Madrid isn’t exactly a Central European forest, but (every time I go outside, and I should point out that I do that very little) my impression is that that forest (which is also the forest of Spanish literature) doesn’t allow us to see the trees, which are actually quite scrawny. Naturally, there are exceptions (marvellous and essential ones), but they only do what all exceptions do all the time: prove the rule. From there comes my estrangement when faced with the prevailing idea that passing through Spain is necessary or inevitable for the Latin American writer. Apparently, it isn’t enough that a large quantity of Spanish publishers have spent the last decade publishing bargain articles from the Latin American literary scene in order to make it clear that their interest (primarily commercial, of course) is oriented more towards there than here, these sad Spanish capitals devastated by moral misery and economic depression, where very few people still have any interest in reading books.
This disinterest (of course) only increases when the selfless and patient readers who still remain in this country come to what is sold to them as literature in Spanish only to discover that its authors can be divided into just a handful of categories: a) the serious young people for whom the only possible subject matter is PURE EVIL (Oh! The murderer was the official stamp-licker at Auschwitz!), b) writers of little detective novels who aspire to win prizes, c) the ones who think that TV series are the new literature (which is equivalent to saying that veal fillets are the new vegetable soup), d) the old who want to write like the young, e) the young who want to write like the old, f) the ones who don’t know who Thomas Bernhard was, g) the ones who, since they know nothing, don’t even know who Jorge Luis Borges was (and he was the one who gave birth to us all), h) the ones who write novels about the crisis or high-up politicians, with all the depth of a Reader’s Digest article, i) the women whose only literary merit is being women, j) the homosexuals whose only literary merit is being homosexuals, k) the men whose only literary merit is being men, l) the ones who are alcoholics and sleep in their cars, where they continue writing their great novel, m) the ones who only write so that their city council puts them in charge of a writing workshop, n) the ones who in these workshops intend to teach well what they themselves do poorly, o) the ones who believe that they know everything about literature because they flick through the Sunday supplements every so often, p) the ones who sign their work with their name, q) the ones who don’t sign their work with their name, r) the ones who make trailers for books, s) the ones who think they’re “from the same stable as Cervantes, Borges and Nabokov” (ridiculous phrase of 2010), t) the ones who boast about their independence whilst working for the Cervantes Institute, u) the ones who boast about supporting small presses once their novel has been rejected by six major ones, etc.
In this context, the bad thing isn’t (as everything seems to suggest) that Spanish literature is disappearing; the bad thing is that it didn’t disappear a long time ago and save us all these horrors.
That said, however, it doesn’t seem to me that the Latin American panorama is much better, excepting the honourable exceptions that, like all exceptions, etc. etc. Of course, good literature is written wherever Alejandro Zambra and Marcelo Mellado are (just as it is in places such as Coahuila, some parts of Buenos Aires and the incommensurable Santiago barrio of Providencia, the surroundings of Barcelona, and in dozens of other similar places, each of which is the centre of its own periphery), but I get the impression that the majority of that literature (with the aforementioned exceptions, etc.) is ruled by its authors’ ambitions to earn money, to obtain something like “fame” or to receive a conspiratorial wink from (another) Spanish editor ready to invent Latin American writers (“Who knows, maybe this is the next Bolaño” – as if there were going to be another Bolaño).
That a lot of the authors I know on both shores of the Atlantic share this view of literature as a means and not an end is (in my opinion) one of the most solid arguments (or perhaps the only one) for proposing the existence of this thing that people call “hispanoamerican” literature, but I wonder whether this impression of mine isn’t the result of the education I received, which I talk about in El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (The Spirit of my Parents Keeps Rising in the Rain). Aware (thanks to Memorias prematuras (Premature Memoirs)) that your education has been very similar (although the differences between us are also very clear: your parents were exiled, mine were not; my parents stayed together, yours didn’t; your parents were militant Christians, my parents hated Christians, etc.), I wanted to ask you whether you think that the politicised nature of the education we received is the origin of our discontent with what is produced around us, just as the reason why we write our own books (which are what they are, despite how for so many years they tried to make us believe that the Latin American novel should happen in a rich suburb of Miami, or that its main character should be the by now famous stamp-licker, in this case the one working for the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner).
All the best (cousin),
Postscript: I have finally resolved the problem with Giselle by exchanging the corer for a humidifier. Needless to say, I have no idea what a humidifier is: Giselle made it work and what it gives off is smoke rather than humidity. The cat has decided to sleep in the living room to avoid respiratory intoxication and I fear I will soon be following in his footsteps. I’ll keep you posted.
From: Rafael Gumucio
Sent: Wednesday, 28 December 2012 18:27
To: 'Patricio Pron'
Subject: RE: Festivities / 02
I laughed a lot reading your systematisation of the motives and obsessions of the current writer in Spanish. I think however that the grace, talent and genius don’t lie in avoiding these temptations, but rather in combining as many of them as possible. Bolaño fell into almost all of the categories. In the Nazi novel in America he was a serious young man who writes about PURE EVIL; in The Savage Detectives he was an old man writing like a young man and in 2666 he was a young man writing like an old man; he was a writer of little detective novels; he wrote leftist-narco-homosexual novels and he was from the stable of Cervantes, Borges and Nabokov, whatever that might mean.
I, and I think you, don’t have that versatility largely because of what you mention, politics, cursed politics, my parents’ Marxism that lives again in me and that doesn’t let me forget that when our young moleskinites talk about Borges and Nabokov they’re not talking about Nuevas Inquisiciones (New Inquisitions) or Lolita but rather about the idea of a great postmodern disbeliever who cleans all of the mulato off their skin. I understand and share the distance of Borges and Nabokov from the revolution and the revolutionaries, although not their reasoning, because they detested Bolshevism and Peronism for their lies and also for their few truths. These truths, the idea that man is not condemned to be what he was, the idea that literature is not, as Nabokov thought, a sport that consists of flexing the imagination, do not seem entirely foreign to me. The most absurd book I have read recently collects Nabokov’s classes on Russian literature, which are obsessed with explaining how Tolstoy didn’t write about the Napoleonic War, or Chekhov about provincial Russia, and all of them had nothing to do with the revolution that was brought about by a few (and not so many) enlightened people who grew up reading those books. Neither does Nabokov understand (not because he can’t but because he doesn’t want to) the humour of Cervantes, which lies precisely in his lack of good taste, his torn suit that we readers finish for him, the misery of his characters which enriches them in another way. This is what Borges, on the other hand, did understand in Cervantes: his uncharitable charity, the desire to make a caricature that clashes with the excess of weakness and involuntary sympathy which his characters display. A joke that never makes people guffaw out loud the way it wants to because it steps back, it fills itself with details, with secondary characters, which turn it into something other than what it wanted to be. It is in this lack of control, this amateur touch, professionally amateur, that the genius of Cervantes resides. He was able to write like that because he was convinced that he wasn’t writing a masterpiece, that this was an excuse, a fall, a digression in his work. What allowed him to write the Quixote was the ambition to write an important book and the renunciation of this ambition, combined, who knows how, when you least expect it. It is the Zen paradox, the archer that can only hit the target when his eyes are covered and he no longer aims. This is what makes me write: the final prize which is nothing other than the prestige that can only be reached when you renounce prestige. When you renounce even the prestige of being insane, drunk, or a cult writer. How the character in search of lost time understands everything at a party he goes to out of pure desperation at not being able to reject a mundane invitation and stay at home writing.
I liked, and continue to like, that about literature: that it imposes its rules, which look a lot like the rules of power, politics, the economy or sex, but are not exactly the same. This narrow gap is what saved my life just when sex, politics, the economy, all failed me. One metre, or less, further or nearer than that defeat I could see all of it, my parents, the cruelty of good people, exile, fear, my fear, theirs, them, united in a single great peninsula that it was up to me to draw on the map to make sure that nobody else got lost after, or so that if they did, they did so with an understanding of the cause.
Bad writers are the ones that renounce this gap: the ones that believe that literature is a branch of the economy, of politics, or of sex, and the people who have nothing to do with sex, or politics, or the economy believe them. The writers that matter to me are the ones that neither widen nor deny the gap but rather use it to see through, to be seen through, to see everything through: politics as a metaphor for sex as a metaphor for the economy, and all that as a metaphor for literature and like that over and over again until infinity.
Defining this precise distance is very difficult. I think it is related to necessity. There are people who have nothing else: this is your case, Bolaño’s case, and the case of Castellano Moya (three people who have nothing to do with each other) or Aira or Rey Rosa or a long and narrow list of writers who I more or less like but in whom I sense the roar of an impatience. As for the others, the patient ones, let them wait.
P.S. How can you imagine a Venezuelan in Madrid without a humidifier? New Year’s Eve is coming, the saddest holiday of them all. I’m lucky enough to be able to say I did nothing of any importance in 2012, which must be a record.
From: Patricio Pron
Sent: Monday, 30 December 2012 20:58
To: Rafael Gumucio
Subject: Festivities / 03
Dear Rafael Gumucio (cousin),
It’s good that you laughed; the catalogue in the last email was (of course) a joke, though a very serious one (as jokes always are).
I personally don’t really agree with your idea that Bolaño was everything you ascribe to him; rather, I think that he seems it because some of the tendencies I catalogue in the last email are dérives of his work. “Epigonal dérives,” we could call them, that come from authors without Bolaño’s talent and grace and conviction, but covetous of his position and his prestige: each one of them does badly one part of the totality of the work that Bolaño did well, as if they were apprentices of a magnificent painter (but terrible teacher) who has only been able to teach one to draw a hand, another to sketch a face and the third to outline a torso (and not very well, at that). This week, a couple of extraordinarily generous people through no fault of their own invited me to speak with two of those authors. One knows how to draw a foot and the other a head; that is, one writes stories that try to seem like Bolaño’s (he doesn’t manage it, but he´s young and we should give him some credit) and the other writes detective novels about PURE EVIL in the country in Latin America which he left some time ago in order to enjoy his connections with an important institution for the representation of Spanish culture abroad. I declined out of pity for the eventual listeners of the conversation, who were going to end up believing that Latin American literature is a ragdoll made up of one foot, one head and, let’s say, one twisted hand. No one deserves that.
Now that I think about it, by the way (and thanks to you), I think that the ragdoll would have been very Cervantine; in fact, I think I should go back and accept the invitation to that talk simply because it seems to me to be a magnificent error, and good literature is made (as you very well say) of gargantuan errors, or at least of the beauty and dignity that are sometimes found there where the author abandons everything, even himself, and follows the inertia of what demands to be written and not of what the market or its readers require (and thus I understand, as well, the editors and directors of literary supplements, who need the writer to remain still, to detain himself in a simple and flat version of himself, which is what is best retained in photographs. As for me, my favourite photos of writers are the ones that come out blurred.)
Going back to the topic of the talk that never was (and going back even further, to the beginning of this dialogue), I now think that it would have been difficult for the conversation I had with those colleagues to alter the image of Latin American literature that the audience had, since (at the end of the day, and as if all of us had been victims of the ophthalmic operation that I was talking about) the idea of a Latin American literature is simply a problem of perspective; even better, it is the result of the territory that Latin American literature comes from being located far enough away from its Spanish readers that (distance having smudged the regional differences somewhat) these people can imagine a unified, stable and plausible territory to be summed up in commercial lists, “best of” selections or covers of supplements. At the same time, Spanish literature seems to be the result of a misunderstood product, since we’re too far away to be able to appreciate the differences that characterise it.
Let’s not be so solipsistic, let’s not talk about literature in Spanish: let’s think about German literature, or better still, let’s ask ourselves what German literature is. If we’re far away, we know: if we get closer, the evidence that literature produced in Austria is different to that which is written in Germany (not to mention the fact that what is produced in Frankfurt is singularly different to what is produced in Berlin or in Leipzig) means that we do not know it after all. It is, I mean, a problem of perspective, almost an optical illusion: from a distance, everything looks bigger.
It isn’t a gratuitous example that I give here, since I’m writing to you from Vienna, where Giselle and I have come to start the new year away from the familial strife. Maybe you can let me know in your next email whether there’s any kind of aristocracy of Chilean origin that I’m unaware of: if there is, I think my wife belongs to it, since today she took me to the most elegant of restaurants, which she insisted on going to and which I left struck by the extravagance of the place and even poorer than when I went in. Before this, she took me to the café where Thomas Bernhard used to write when he was in Vienna: now the café is full of tourists taking photos of the cakes and people who have never read a Thomas Bernhard novel, though they have read in the El País Aguilar guidebook that Thomas Bernhard used to write in this café when he was in Vienna (ah, the País Aguilar guidebook, the only literary essay that many of our colleagues have read). Bernhard (of course) wouldn’t like to know that his workplace had become another mass tourism attraction, but it’s unlikely that he’s going to find out by now: he’s in El Salvador, if I haven’t misunderstood, which is further evidence that national borders have no importance in literature.
I don’t believe that you didn’t do anything significant in 2012 – you must have new books coming out this coming year, and articles: I remember one particularly brilliant one about a madman who tore up Neruda’s speech before his very eyes and then wrote an ode to Pinochet; I don’t remember his name (you already know that my memory isn’t what it was. “And what was it?” “I don’t remember!”), but the article was extraordinary and the character enchanting. I will never support writing an ode to Pinochet, but tearing up Neruda’s speech before his very eyes is something that we should all do at some point in our lives. Let’s keep that in mind.
Please confirm for me about the native Chilean aristocracy so I can find out if there’s any kind of fiscal benefit or economic compensation for having married one of its members, and receive the warmest of wishes from your friend (who hopes for all the very best in 2013 for you, your family, and all the other Chilean friends: Diego Zúñiga, Paz Balmaceda, Alejandro Zambra, Álvaro Bisama, Matías Rivas, Daniella González, Cecilia Huidobro, Andrea Jeftanovic, Cynthia Rimsky, Marcelo Mellado, Paula Ilabaca Núñez, Nona Fernández, Melanie Josch, Alejandra Costamagna; all magnificent, in alphabetical order and in all of the other orders),
P
From: Rafael Gumucio
Sent: Wednesday, 2 January 2013 17:13
To: 'Patricio Pron'
Subject: RE: Festivities / 03
The New Year turned out to be pretty lively. My daughters and wife came back from New York (this is all sounding very Norman Mailer) and they dragged me far away from the temptation to think about meaningless nonsense (or crap), and indeed to think about anything other than My Little Pony and Monster High. Kristina and I made Russian food for an army that was then reduced to my brother and his wife. At midnight, we all embraced without me really knowing what to wish for, since I have both everything and nothing. Yesterday I was able to read again. I devoured fifty pages of the book Los Decimonónicos (Nineteenth Century People) by Domínguez Michael. I live in a nineteenth-century country where people talk over lunch about how the servant “turned out”, whether from a good or bad harvest, and if another one like her could be snapped up in the south. Domínguez Michael talks about Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis, two writers who I also like a lot (more the second than the first), two writers who had the disadvantageous advantage of writing in a language apart, Portuguese, and nourishing themselves, for that very reason, on Sterne and Fielding while they played at copying Zola or Flaubert. This is what I was saying about not avoiding temptation. The novels of Eça and Machado have as subject matter the most common and well-stocked topics of their time: infidelity, the breakdown of the family, sentimental education, the useless man. Like Bolaño with Nazi literature (written at precisely the time when Volpi was writing his Nazi novel) or his narco novels (written at the same time as Pérez Reverte was writing his) or his novels about unknown writers (at the same time as Vila-Matas writing his), the originality of the writer doesn’t lie in avoiding the tics and obsessions of their time, but rather in inventing for themselves a Portugal or a Brazil that manages to be at once just next door from the first and on the other side from it completely, in order to cross the matter diagonally to get to the bottom of it or, even better, to move above it and denounce what little depth it has, which is what Bolaño does supremely well: that way of involving yourself in a story, obliging yourself to care about it in order to remove yourself from it and smile at your – at our – naiveté.
Isaac Dinesen, who never wrote anything that resembled anyone else, used to talk about his lion-hunter lover (the unbearable Robert Redford in that film) who had as a motto “Je respondrait”. “I will answer” in old Norman. It seems to me that there is no more aristocratic (in the best sense of the term) motto than that. The obligation to respond, not to evade, to say, here I am. Your novel has this, and it is an obsessive and often terrible answer that no one else in that moral sense of responding was obliging you to give. Like my book, Memorias Prematuras (Premature Memoirs), (and like Guadalupe Nettel and Julián Herbert and Zambra) is part of a tendency or fashion that cultural journalists can easily identify (personal memoirs, the political landscape seen through the eyes of some adults remembering their childhood). They respond to a call, though everyone does so in their own way. The problem there is with cultural journalists, a species that we should order to be hanged without giving the matter any more thought, who spent all last month releasing lists of the year’s unmissable things. Pieces ten lines long with words like “revealing” and “revelation” and lots of books from China because little by little China is replacing central Europe (goodbye Vienna), and an etc. that turns out to be embarrassing.
As for the thread of the debate, young Latin American literature: you’re right, Latin America looks more united and coherent from a distance. This doesn’t imply that that vision is wrong. Yesterday I was reading an interview with Valeria Luisini where she was congratulating herself on belonging to a generation in which everyone is different and nobody writes like anyone else. A generation that is joined together only by friendship. A generation that is not recognised as a generation. From the modest distance of the years I think that there are few generations that have more things in common than hers (Bolaño, the epigrammatic tone, cosmopolitanism, hybridity of forms, the innocence of its protagonists). Her two books could fit perfectly at the centre of this cannon, and the title of the second, Los ingrávidos (The Weightless), could be the title of the manifesto.
There are plenty of things that I like in her books, and Zambra’s and Zúñiga’s, Costamagna’s and Celedón’s (insert here whichever Argentinian names you want), but what I don’t like is perfectly represented in the title: weightlessness. I like it when things turn out like that, but I’m suspicious when it turns into a programme, a way of being in the world, modestly depressed, pleasantly eclectic, sentimentally leftist, existentially gringo. Anyone who rejects bad taste ends up as ice, said Neruda (who rejected nothing, it has to be said). The idea that this generation, the “Granta boys” (the readable ones from the group, I mean), isn’t a generation, obeys precisely the most pernicious obsession of the continent’s young writers: the obsession with not upsetting anyone.
It isn’t only a literary question: among the young people who protest in the streets of Santiago demanding a decent education, there is the same contempt for power, the same distrust for the part of it that stains. It is the exact opposite of the McOndo** and Crack kids, who love power and couldn’t permit themselves any kind of weightlessness (although they wrote books seriously sick with pedantry, deafness, blindness and vanity). It was an utterly exhausting idea that each generation had to hang the previous one, and that it was necessary to rewrite the continent’s literature from zero, but I consider all of these excesses to be better than those lists of revelatory new releases and short books with lots of white space that timidly say little or nothing. It’s strange: while the educated, the habitual readers, are more and more inclined to prefer short books with lots of white space and big print, the non-habitual readers, the readers of bestsellers, read books that are thicker and thicker, with smaller and smaller print. This is maybe a topic for somebody wiser than me, the economy of words that has become synonymous with culture, the book with no words that will soon become the book par excellence while thick books of six hundred pages that functioning illiterates read in one sitting on the bus because they have magic or the man might be loving the young lady under the covers whilst counting his millions.
You have achieved, Patricio, what we were after: me saying bad things about the friends I admire and spilling a little of the venom that I’m never lacking into their sleeping ears. As far as the Chilean aristocracy goes, without further ado I can tell you that Giselle undoubtedly belongs to it. Although I fear that her fondness for fine restaurants and excursions comes to her from Venezuela. We Chileans, when we’re not austere, are morbid (morbid and obese).
P.S. The poet who tore up Neruda’s speech and wrote the speeches to Pinochet was Braulio Arenas, surrealist poet (leader of the Mandrágora, the local section of French surrealism) who, strapped for cash, tried to stick close to all the governments until Pinochet accepted him as one of his own. After spending forty years dreaming of going to Paris and meeting André Breton he managed, after a lot of effort, to get hold of enough money for the journey and the phone number of Breton (whose wife was Chilean). He telephoned and asked for Monsieur Breton.
“He died yesterday,” came the answer. “The funeral is tomorrow.”
*Crack: A 1990s Mexican literary movement which aimed to break with the aesthetics of the so-called Latin American Boom.
** McOndo: A 1990s Latin American literary movement which considered Magical Realism to be a reductive and exoticised portrayal of Latin America, and aimed instead to show the realities of contemporary urban life.
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