Bolañismo

Two years ago I wrote an essay about correspondences between Roberto Bolaño’s two masterpieces, The Savage Detectives and 2666 and Roque Dalton’s only novel, the posthumous (and still untranslated) Pobrecito poeta que era yo... (1976). Since then, my essay (“Poor Poets: Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño”) continues to be the single most read post at Venepoetics, and I recently noticed someone cites it at Bolaño’s Wikipedia page. I not only compared their novels, but spoke of a possible friendship between the two, when they allegedly met in San Salvador in the mid 1970s. But I might have been mistaken about this encounter between Dalton and Bolaño.

As with much of my work, I now find my essay to be clumsy and repetitive, clouded by poor prose and vague arguments. I wrote the text after noticing a brief fragment in a 2005 feature about Bolaño in The New York Times by Larry Rohter, “A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career.” I was intrigued by Rohter’s suggestion that Bolaño had met Dalton in San Salvador in late 1973 or early 1974: “After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible [...].”

I spent two years seeking evidence about this alleged meeting, but Rohter’s article was the only thing I found that directly linked the two writers. I suppose I should have simply written him to ask where he’d gotten this piece of information. Bolaño himself mentioned having lived briefly in El Salvador where he befriended Dalton’s young killers (the most famous of which is the former FMLN commander Joaquín Villalobos, who is currently a scholar at Oxford). Back then, that hardcore band of Maoist guerrillas didn’t even call themselves the FMLN, they were an ultra-leftist group of kids barely out of their teens known as the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP).

Dalton eventually fell out of favor with this faction he was aligned with during his time living underground in a series of safe houses in San Salvador, from December of 1973 until his death in the spring of 1975. Because so much of his life depended on secrecy back then, it’s still not clear exactly who ordered his murder and why exactly he was killed. I’ve heard all sorts of reasons, including that they suspected him of being a CIA agent, that he had slept with one of their girlfriends, or that they mistrusted his advice about not rushing into revolutionary action before the time was right. It’s likely the truth about Dalton’s disappearance will never be known, as even his body was never recovered.

Two days ago, Rohter published another article about Bolaño, “A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past,” in which he quotes old friends in Mexico and Spain who claim he may have invented portions of his own life for public consumption. The most prominent of these possible inventions is the story that he was in Chile during the coup against Salvador Allende. I won’t go further into the article, as much of it seems like mere literary gossip. What matters about Bolaño is his magnificent work, not how he chose to portray his life or the stories he may have invented in order to become the writer he was destined to be. If anything, Bolaño’s possible distortions of his own life seem like a marvelous extension of his visionary work, further blurring the line between art and lived experience.

But reading the article has confirmed certain doubts I began to have soon after writing my essay on a possible friendship between Dalton and Bolaño. I have to admit that after four years of research and detective work, in El Salvador, the U.S. and Venezuela, I still have no idea if the two writers ever did meet. I’m pretty sure Bolaño could have befriended members of the ERP, but I have yet to find convincing evidence or testimony that he was in direct contact with Dalton. I don’t know what this means for my essay. However, I stand by the parallels I point out between their novels.

By the way, when will somebody finally translate Dalton’s Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., probably the only Latin American Boom masterpiece that hasn’t been published in English yet? I’d love to try it, but someone would have to provide the money I’d need to take on such a gargantuan task. Then again, Dalton’s book remains unread even in Latin America. It seems to have disappeared into a stack of the infinite library, a fact Bolaño & Borges would appreciate. When Pobrecito poeta que era yo... is finally read throughout Latin America, and once American readers finally get to know the novel, the one-sided perception of Dalton as being merely a “revolutionary” or “political” poet will seem like an antiquated misreading. I still have no doubt that Roberto Bolaño read Roque Dalton’s novel and was deeply influenced by its bohemian, revolutionary and psychedelic meanderings. Plus, the account of their friendship in San Salvador would make a great Bolaño story. Here’s to the secret books.

Un bolero llamado Caracas / Gustavo Valle

A Bolero Named Caracas


Ever since I’ve known her she hasn’t stopped cross-dressing again and again, always submerged in a frantic race toward metamorphosis and thrift store.

If Caracas were to see herself in a mirror she’d laugh. And she’d laugh with a smoker’s laugh, that cavernous but intimate laugh the most beloved sick people have. Facing a (distorting) mirror she’d stretch, she’d shrink, and in those ominous images would identify herself more clearly.

Caracas has grown but I don’t really know in what way, nor in what direction. One doesn’t see many new buildings, nor too many old buildings, the highways are the same, the streets packed with cars are jut as narrow and noisy. But something has grown, something spills over. The temperature, for example, has gone up in every corner. Even on balconies you can feel the blast of that warm air. The winds that entered the valley through Petare no longer blow, they’ve shifted to other corridors. I breathe a lazy air that seems to come from the subsoil, pass through the asphalt and dance with the motors.

Caracas is a pulmonary city. There are visual cities, like Paris; osseous ones, like Rome; intestinal ones, like Calcutta. But Caracas is alveolar and pneumatic. She has the consistency of smoke, and always seems to be immersed in a haze different from smog. That’s why it’s hard to define her, to limit her. Even her busiest avenues seem to lose themselves in a beyond of street vendors and automobile transit. This isn’t a Caribbean version of London – despite the fact that killers of blondes abound. It’s a mental haze, as though that ant-like effect of the scenery always remained in the eyes of whoever visits her. The same thing happens when we see her from afar, from the heights of Mount Ávila. Down there she seems irregular and mottled, settled amid trees, crawling up the nearby cliffs, expanding without order under a tenuous grey cloud.

And she exhibits herself, she disrobes, revealing everything. From the shiny glass buildings to the corners full of trash; from the dressed-up housewives of the East to its most scandalous murders. Shameless, she likes easy compliments, and make-up makes her delirious. She always wears new little dresses. She likes loud colors that will keep her happy, because if one thing is true it’s that Caracas is a happy city. She avoids melancholy at all costs, she flees sadness like the plague and all of us Caraqueños are willing to die (and to kill) before becoming sad.

I thought her rhythm was quick, vibrant, frenetic. I believed no other city was as lost as she was in her crazy, flustered movement, but I was wrong. Her speed is only an illusion, her vertiginous march is barely a simulacrum. She doesn’t move: she sways. A daughter of the Caribbean in the end, her speed is subdued. Her splendid traffic jams slow her down, the minimal resolution of her functionaries put the brakes on her. And it’s just that there’s no hurry – and this makes you desperate. Desperation got confused with speed and all of us Caraqueños convinced ourselves we live in a vibrant city, as if this were synonymous with something good, because Caracas, among other things, likes to compare herself.

At night, she has the face of a woman who’s visited many operation rooms. Like the cabaret stars who’ve invested their years between dance and whiskey, and at an old age regain time by giving themselves over to liposuction or applying enough silicone to their butts.

And Caracas is a city fragmented even in the possibility of its happiness. And if we think of an order, a logical structure we won’t be thinking of Caracas but rather of its dream. A dream that has been asleep for many years, hanging from a hammock at an altitude of one thousand meters.

Everyone tells me: “Don’t go downtown and if you go don’t dress like that, wear some old blue jeans, an old shirt, and no watch because it’ll get stolen, be careful with the esquina caliente,” and things like that. But I love to go downtown. I worked downtown for many years. I always liked downtown, its confusion, its thanatic energy, the periphery of downtown. And it’s just so chaotic that it’s charming to see how impossible it is for people to agree: street vendors, cars, pedestrians, they all mix together in an asphyxiating blend. It’s called downtown but it’s actually an outskirt. It’s a downtown at the margin of everything: of the law, of reason, of the city itself. Or better yet: it’s another city. The most real one of all. Once you’re downtown the rest seems like an incredible invention. The East: Fantasy Island. I love downtown Caracas because it’s so real it scares you. I love downtown because incomprehensible things happen there.

Someone once said Caracas didn’t exist, didn’t have a memory, that because she was continuously changing she never ended up being anything, and that her landscape was a sum of temporary buildings, ruined houses that are rebuilt, businesses that change branches, names, go bankrupt, close their doors and then open under another name with new merchandise. That’s why it’s hard to recognize her, she lives in a carnival of new situations and always takes one mask off to put on another: she dresses up like New York with its knife-like buildings, or wears Bogota’s aristocratic ceramics, or invents the malls of Miami, or lifts up Los Angeles-style asphalt tongues, or crowds herself with street vendors like the markets in Cairo and reproduces Calcutta’s abundant street kids.

Caracas is an emotional city. But it’s not a romantic geography, nor a postcard where two hands clasp each other over a background of renovated streets, nor is it the landscape of urban passion that Robert Doisneau has magnetized onto our pupils. Caracas is emotional because she isn’t able to control herself, and she’s given herself over to the capricious game of her mortal contradictions. Caribbean, but at one thousand meters above sea level; modern and provincial; frenetic and simultaneously slow in a combination that drives people mad; seductive and violent. Like a perplexed and also desperate lover, she ceases to be herself so as to always be another, a little more cowardly and attractive, enchantingly pathetic, and in that transit she vanishes and becomes something strange, even to herself.




* Fragment from the homonymous text published in La paradoja de Ítaca: De ciudades y de viajes (Caracas: Ministerio de la Cultura/Consejo Nacional de la Cultura, 2005).

http://thecuatreros.blogspot.com




{ Gustavo Valle, Los Hermanos Chang, No. 27, Anno 2, November 2008 }

“Nunca me he preocupado por que mis libros...” / Dolores Dorantes

“I’ve never worried about my books...”

I’ve never worried about my books crossing borders. I’ve never thought my work has to cross borders. It would be an exhausting and disappointing task. If I can’t even manage to get a book published in my own country, how am I going to make an effort toward having my work appear somewhere else. The path one’s work takes is unpredictable, and the writer can do nothing to direct its course. It’s likely a writer will make an effort to get his work out to the entire world, so that he gets published throughout the Americas and nothing will guarantee that “something will happen.” Can anyone imagine Antonio Lobo Antunez making an effort to have his books reach Spain, for instance? And yet someone read Lobo Antunez and liked him and gave him a contract and edited him and translated his work and, now, thanks to that good taste I can read him. All Antonio had to do was write his books. It’s the only thing a writer should do. Any poet can get his work out all over the world before it advances on its own, but it’s absurd to think that by means of that simple action we will be Neruda, or Vallejo, or Julio Cortázar. If Gorostiza and Velarde are barely known in our own country. Trying to move ahead of one’s own work is useless, boys, you’re wasting your time. Those things, just like poetry, happen naturally.




{ Dolores Dorantes, Tabla sin asidero, January 2009 }

Temptation

Today

“A person who worries about previous or future lives is not really enjoying the present one. I would say: Live this one well. Take care of today and you have taken care of tomorrow, because what you sow today, you will reap tomorrow. Keeping a nice fruit in the hand, you are wondering, ‘Suppose I eat this and plant the seed, it will grow into a nice tree. It will bring forth fruits. But what if I die, who will water it?’ No. Don’t worry about the past or the future. Don’t worry about reincarnation. Simply remain in the golden present.

God bless you. OM Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”

– Sri Swami Satchidananda

Alejandro Oliveros en la blogósfera / Carmen Victoria Méndez

Alejandro Oliveros in the Blogosphere

The author will try to conquer the limitations of paper with an online literary diary, which he’ll begin posting on Monday.

[Photo by Saúl Uzcátegui for Tal Cual]


Alejandro Oliveros would never change his fountain pen for a computer, since he’s not willing to renounce the smell of ink that accompanies him every morning. However, the author will begin writing his next literary project online, at the Venezuelan blog Prodavinci (http://www.pro­davinci.com ).

Oliveros will post an entry from his 2009 literary diary to the blog each morning. The task begins next Monday. “At the end of the year I hope to have a 365-page book,” he comments.

The poet and academic has cultivated this strategy for decades, but always in an analog manner. The entries in his diary – a regular notebook – have taken the form of verses, novels and essays. Oliveros is possibly the only Venezuelan writer who publishes his diaries on a regular basis, a habit he maintains since 1995.

– Now that you’re about to enter the blogosphere, what do you intend to do with your pen?
– I don’t plan on relinquishing paper. I’ll continue to write my notebooks by hand and with a fountain pen. That’s the only way I know how to write. The only change will be that now I’ll choose a fragment and transcribe it onto a computer in order to publish it on the blog.

– Will the dissemination of literature through non-printed means end up conquering readers?
– At the moment there’s a tendency toward displacing printed means. Now people lean more toward electronic communication because they place more trust in the speed of non-printed means. At the end of the day these means will perhaps have a wider reach than books, which we must recognize have many limitations: they’re expensive, they get lost, they get stolen and they weigh a lot (especially if they’re bad). Conventional books take up a lot of space and they can even be dangerous. They’re considered flammable material.

– Who says that, politicians or insurance agents?
– Well, with the computer all that can happen is your screen might melt down. The fact is we’re living through a dramatic moment for the book and for printed matter. Now we have a little pocket apparatus with seven thousand titles.

It’s a cold and unpleasant thing, without the smell of ink, but it will work for younger generations.

– Will style change along with the format?
– The play of black on white in handwritten work forces you to be more careful with your style. The allure of this Internet project is that it will be written on a daily basis. For good or ill, people will read me almost instantaneously. It’s almost as if the reader were looking over my shoulder.

– Doesn’t that frighten you?
– A little bit. Blogs represent a new experience that will modify the attitude of writers toward their writing, since now they’re receiving immediate opinions from their readers. Criticism or praise will have an effect on style, because one no longer thinks of anonymous people but rather of readers with full names.

– How does that change things?
– Whoever writes a blog is tacitly obliged to read those who write to him. On the other hand, writing on paper one tends to not receive love or hate letters from anyone. But on a blog, whoever reads you and writes to you feels that you should respond. That’s the essence of this format: the interaction and democratization of opinion. I find it interesting but I feel a certain amount of fear because I don’t tend to be very communicative about what I write, it seems like something secret, almost private. That’s why I don’t know if this project will last.




{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, Tal Cual, 23 January 2009 }

Poesía Fuera de tiesto / Madelen Simó Sulbarán

Poetry Beyond the Flowerpot

Over thirty years are reflected in the new book by Armando Rojas Guardia, which constitutes a revision of several stages of his poetry.

[Photo: Ilich Otero for Tal Cual]

A “poetic meditation” on the country’s social and political situation is revealed in Armando Rojas Guardia’s poem “Patria,” which forms part of this author’s latest book, titled Fuera de tiesto [Beyond the Flowerpot], an anthology prepared for the publishing house Bid & Co. Editor by Harry Almela.

Since the first days of January, the new publication can be found on the bookshelves of the country’s main bookstores. Fuera de tiesto includes poems extracted from seven of the poet’s books, ranging from the 1970s until 2008: Del mismo amor ardiendo, Yo que supe de la vieja herida, El Dios de la intemperie, Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen, Hacia la noche viva, El esplendor y la espera, Patria y otros poemas.

According to Armando Rojas Guardia’s explanation, the selection emerged from an idea by the publisher to promote Venezuelan literature, which included funding from Ediciones de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela (EBUC-UCV) and which contains poems from his latest collection published in 2008 Patria y otros poemas, including the extensive verses of “La desnudez del loco.” Regarding the latter, the poet himself has said the text is dedicated to Jean Marc Tauszik, his therapist, who in 2004 told him that just as Rafael Cadenas dedicated a poem to the idea of defeat and another one to failure, he should dedicate one to madness, since it has “not only been source of inner conflict and suffering” for the author, “but also a psychic and spiritual impulse toward consciousness and freedom.”

The anthology takes its name from one of its poems, which reflects, according to its editor Harry Almela, the “self-marginalized” vision that Armando Rojas Guardia declares in his writing. “He considers himself a marginalized poet, with love and faith in man.”

Regarding the book’s title, the critic and poet Patricia Guzmán comented that “we attend the renovation of the poet’s vows of fervent love for the naked God that shelters him, as well as the impassioned dialogue with the tacit and explicit “you” (…) that has distinguished his poetics.”

The criteria for selection was in a manner “more or less aligned with time,” points out Almela.

The man responsible for the anthology adds that within the themes there prevails a proposal for reading that reveals the Christian vision of the world and the manner of assuming Rojas Guardia’s sexuality. “With a very musical poetry, the most difficult aspect was distinguishing the sense of rhythm of his poetics, but it was definitely a challenge and a pleasure to embark on this study.”




{ Madelen Simó Sulbarán, Tal Cual, 20 January 2009 }

Tiempo y poesía / Ludovico Silva

Time and Poetry

The End of the Year is indefinable.

The stars have wanted, obeying an infinite poetics, for earthly time, human time, to be divided into hours, months, years. Men have gathered that celestial requirement and in this way they provide a magical category, ritual, to the end of the month, the end of the year. Apart from the, let us say it this way, financial interest of these human rituals, there is the no less defined ritual of the Celebration, latent in all earthly beings. Dionysian, Farious, Nefarious, Idus, Christmas, New Year, Carnavals, etc. are all celebrations dedicated to the exaltation of time. Of Time itself, as a basic ingredient of cells. In sum, everything that in a part of history has been called religion and which is perhaps better called the political condition of matter. Because regardless of how attached we might be to the practical, within our mysterious matter boils the thirst of the unknown, the intense desire to create, the poetic condition that propels us towards everything magic, ritualistic, fantastic and miraculous. I can already hear a multitude of fanatics saying: “Miracles don’t exist! Miracles don’t exist!” But those fanatics remind me of the anecdote according to which Baudelaire, when a friend asked him why he had abandoned a certain discussion at a café in anger, responded: “Of course I’m leaving! How can you discuss anything with a person who doesn’t believe in miracles?” That is: how can we consider an individual fully human if within his matter there doesn’t exist even an atom of poetic force, an atom of absurdity, a portion of magic?

Poetry has cracked the skulls of many philosophers. From Plato to Heidegger, philosophers have tried to arrive at a definition of poetry. But despite their brilliant speculations (brilliant, the majority of the time, in the same measure in which they are genuinely poetic) they’ve almost always incurred in a contradiction: Trying to give an atemporal definition – definitive!– for something that is temporal. We could argue that, no matter what differences exist between Homeric poetry, for example, and that written in the space age, it will always be an atemporal essence: poetry. The argument is of rank Socratic lineage; but Socrates, as Nietzsche said in The Birth of Tragedy, despite having provided great services to humanity, had injected it with his worst intellectual vices. Poetry, like man himself, is time, but it is also the word in time (A. Machado); and being the word in time, it is impossible to define it by any means other than the poetic word itself. But not words ad usum poetarum (this expression is from professor García Bacca) nor words for technical use in philosophy, but words: poetry.

With this I wanted to say that the poetic condition of human matter is indefinable, or better yet, its only definition is men themselves, flesh and bone definitions, and thus it is useless or impossible to try and define celebrations such as the end of the year, because they belong to the poetic-temporal movements of human life.

Poetry is something perpetually perfectible; its goal is always that: beyond poetry itself. We can always imagine a poem being better, more perfect. And that’s why we can’t bind it in a definition, without risking its assassination. Just as we can’t stop time.




Translator’s note: The original Spanish version of this essay can be read online at the January 2009 issue (#42) of El Cautivo.




{ Ludovico Silva, Teoría poética, Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, 2008 }

“He querido ser flexible...”

“[...] He querido ser flexible, desenamorarme de la marginalidad y, a la vez, del mainstream, porque ambos ya son caducos, no responden a una situación más compleja. No me identifico con ningún espacio o tiempo que ocupo porque cada uno es estrecho, limitante y, todo esto, es una rara combinación de sentirme feliz y descontento, porque hay mucho más todavía por hacer, falta demasiado. A todos nosotros nos falta radicalidad, algo que no sea monólogo, o sentirse ofendido por lo que dice el otro, amor a la diferencia y menos, muchas menos, amistades micropolíticas, respeto a los caciques sobrevivientes de las épocas paceanas. [...]”


“[...] I’ve wanted to be flexible, to disengage from marginality and, at the same time, from the mainstream, because they’re both worn-out today and don’t respond to a more complex situation. I don’t identify with any space or time I inhabit because they’re all too narrow, limiting, and all of this is a strange combination of being happy and unsatisfied, because there’s still so much to do, so much is needed. All of us need more radicalism, something that isn’t a monologue or being offended by what the other says, loving difference and having fewer, much fewer, micro-political friendships, and less respect for the surviving chieftans of the Paz eras. [...]”

(Heriberto Yépez)

Todo sobre tu bolañomanía (Oprah incluida) / Heriberto Yépez

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bolañomania (Including Oprah)

Bolañomania continues. 2666 – his mammoth posthumous tome – keeps appearing on all the lists of the best books of 2008 in the U.S.A., where madness reaches the lowest depths.

Recently, O, The Oprah Magazine – the pre-Obama of the self-help talk shows – indirectly explained the inexplicable boom to us. I say it’s inexplicable because if Oprah is feminism transformed into a yo-yo diet, Bolaño was Mr. Misogyny 1975. It seems her Book Club hasn’t found out yet. Much less that the dead girls from Juárez came from the book Huesos en el desierto by Sergio González Rodríguez.

If I were Sergio I’d sue Bolaño’s editors for plagiarism just to get some of the royalties. Bob Bolaño would also suggest he do that.

The review from Oprah says: “Holding a reviewer's copy of 2666 in public was like brandishing the newest Harry Potter at the playground three months before the on-sale date.” It’s so cool to be seen reading Bolaño! Who would have guessed it? The dead women of Juárez (refried) are perfect for making friends in the park!

“Bolaño has particularly captured the imaginations of younger readers because his work is rather like a video game or a set of nested webpages…” WHAT? Some reviews smell like weed. That explains the allusion to Harry Potter.

“Stories within stories with many apparent authors, and little sense of predetermined purpose.” Translation: 2666 isn’t as good as The Savage Detectives, but it is more impressive; Bolaño died before he was able to revise it and it’s a brick you have to praise so as to not seem like a beast. Though you won’t stop being a kiss ass because 2666 isn’t fleshed out, even though The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and Time all say it is.

But the best part comes next, what finished knocking down the fence: “His work evokes American pulp…” Ha! I don’t think so, but OK, go on, “…Gabriel García Márquez…” It’s so obvious that One Hundred Years is the only Latin American book they’ve read! Bolaño would have shit his pants if he found out he’d been declared as Gabolaño of the Year, “… and Mexican surrealist…” – Mexican surrealism? Oh boy, I didn’t even realize it existed – “…and Mexican surrealist Juan Rulfo.” No fucking way! Rulfo a surrealist? In his realism, but not in mine, baby. Oprah is so ludicrous.

“The book is long and intense… and so will repay every moment of attention you can give it.” In other words, we know that no one will read even 25% of it but what a perfect book to give as a gift or for lifting weights with your eyelids.

Bolaño’s success in the United States illustrates the misunderstandings of transnational techno-marketing wherein a work becomes merchandise and in order to recommend it one has to list it alongside previous sales or suggestions that the hybrid is hypnotic, now that the remix is the New Neutral, the New Black (AKA, the New White!).

Bolaño couldn’t have imagined it. But Bolañomania was inevitable.

In the 70s, Bolaño thought he was untamable; today, Herralde exports him, Obama loves him and, best of all, Oprah is an Infrarrealist.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 10 January 2009 }

Un caudillo literario / Manuel Caballero

A Literary Caudillo

[Photo by Tal Cual]

One of our favorite jokes for annoying Adriano González León was to attribute his short temper to the blood of the caudillos we assumed must run in his veins, as it does among all those who come from the same region as General Juan Araujo, the Lion of the Mountain Range.

Except Adriano wasn’t a man to “take up arms,” if one were to use that phrase literally. But on the other hand he would do so in the intellectual field. Ever since we met we noticed how two conditions that are generally divergent, if not contradictory, coincided in him: his fierce individualism and the attraction felt towards him by those dedicated to literature and the arts , and which in certain cases (especially in the very young) would go beyond simple friendship and became an unconditional devotion similar to the one caudillos tend to enjoy. Gathering, group or just a simple get-together with Adriano present, these all tended to place him at the front, without votes or ministries.

This was the case from the beginning of that conjunction of brilliant literary talents that was the Grupo Sardio, where his condition of Primus inter pares was evident; even during the irresponsible ethyl camaraderie of the “República del Este,” where a good portion of those who gathered near him did so, by their own confession, just to see if some of his talent or fame “rubbed off on them.”

Since neither of those things are contagious, and since the writer wasn’t one to buy fidelity (he didn’t have much money and besides, he was from Trujillo, in other words pragmatic) one can’t stop wondering about the source of what we might call, for lack of a better phrase, Adriano’s charisma.

His secret is the fusion of the written and spoken word. Adriano wasn’t satisfied with writing, with creating false worlds like so many artists. Instead he sought to transform those lies into truths, when he would debate, when he would theorize about his writing. And above all that condition of his as a master of the language that our eyes perceived, and which was complete when our ears testified his enviable genius as an expositor and conversationalist. Today marks a year since his departure.




{ Manuel Caballero, Tal Cual, 12 January 2009 }

Calletania

Israel Centeno’s first book is the novel Calletania, originally published in Caracas in 1992 by Monte Ávila Editores. That same year it won the CONAC (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura) prize for best novel. The story concerns various friends in the neighborhood of Catia (Western Caracas) in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Berlin wall, former communist revolutionaries, some transformed into gangsters, others disenchanted and wrapped in solitary obsessions. Such as Coronel, whose marriage to the intellectual, revolutionary Marta is falling apart, though his lover the actress Raiza visits him at the beach, where he goes to escape for a night, a house left to him by his father, whose presence as a ghost among many that inhabit the beach cottage makes the novel a Shakespearean globe, self-enclosed and insular. A third lover, Tania of the book’s title, serves as a muse/hallucination that Coronel maintains in his semi-detached breakdown. Caracas is portrayed through a single city block in Catia, the possibility of revolution, socialism and its theories are lived, discussed and predicted by various characters, a single impulse over two days in the universal city.

The Spanish publishing house Editorial Periférica (scroll down) has just published a new edition of Calletania, making the book available again (though mainly in Europe). This is the third in their republications of Centeno’s earlier work. The contrast between the novel’s particular universe and Venezuela’s current political labyrinth isn’t coincidental, as much of Centeno’s Calletania carries a prophetic tone when read from our present situation. Socialism is the central idea enacted and debated in these pages, without losing literature’s sense of play and didactic purpose. Though, finally, it’s the book’s language that enchants with its routine elegance:


“Nights in the neighborhood are yellow. They’re illuminated by tall iron streetlights lost in the early afternoon light, in the density of midnight, in dawn’s lightness. The slow voices of drunkards have remained bundled in the corners. The storefront doors make noise, automobile engines, the rain of bathrooms, cocks crowing, the echo of a few steps and the shadow of the man who steps. Washed, clean like this day that breathes, still undefined, because it’s too dark to see the sun, even though we’ve left behind the night’s dense world.” (101)