Roberto Martínez Bachrich: Nos gusta quejarnos de la ausencia de Literatura / Eduardo Cobos

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: We like to complain about the absence of Literature

The poet, fiction writer and essayist doesn’t think there’s a boom going on in Venezuelan fiction or anything of the sort. “It’s simply one more chapter in a tradition that’s always been alive,” he affirms.

Photo by Williams Marrero

Martínez Bachrich (Valencia, 1977) is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. He was selected by the 2011 Guadalajara International Book Fair as one of the 25 Best Kept Secrets of Latin America. With his essay about the poet and novelist Antonia Palacios, Tiempo hendido, he received the prize for the Concurso Anual Transgenérico awarded by the Fundación para la Cultura Urbana. In this interview he talks about his recent short story collection, Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2012).

Books have been fundamental for Roberto Martínez Bachrich in his life. He began to read from a very young age and with literary maturity it became a career, he graduated with a degree in Literature from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, got a Master’s in Creative Writing from in Turin, Italy under the auspices of Alessandro Baricco, and managed to complete another Master’s in Literary Studies, also at UCV.

With these tools for study and a stubborn university teaching practice, he has been able to study Venezuelan literature. And perhaps from that experience surges “a passion that might seem forced though it’s actually not.” In any case, he assures he doesn’t have a deep relationship with the fiction of Venezuelan writers. What has actually caught his attention have been particular aspects.

“Maybe I have an ample taste in that regard. I mean, I get excited about formal aspects of fiction, that aren’t related to me, with what I do. Things that I might not ever explore but which, being well-made, interest me as a reader. One can always gain something from what’s read, because each book demands a different pact. We like to complain about the absence of literature, and also about “literature that’s no good.” It’s a matter of how we look at ourselves. We judge half a century by two or three names, two or three works. And we don’t investigate further to see what else we might find. In the 19th century there were already, without a doubt, great writers, even during the Colonial era.”

As for new Venezuelan fiction, the cohort to which he belongs, he points out: “I’m not very up to date. For professional reasons I’ve been reading “old stuff” for years. What I’ve read by Salvador Fleján, Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, Carlos Ávila and Miguel Hidalgo Prince, among others, seems very good to me. But I don’t think it’s a boom or anything of the sort. It’s simply one more chapter in a tradition that’s always been alive.”


The Rewritten Version

It’s interesting that so many years passed between your last book of stories, Vulgar, and Las guerras íntimas.
The first version was ready in 2001. Some of the stories I wrote alongside Vulgar, except in another tone, with different themes. There were sixteen more or less short texts. It wasn’t published and I was able to revise them a great deal. I kept cutting sections. Meanwhile, I was writing other things. In the end, only five were left in this final version. And others I made until 2007.

Was there a maturation?
I suppose so. That distance, those years allow you to think a great deal, to rewrite and reorganize. And I think that, as they’d say, a more or less decent collection of short stories emerged. Something much more meditated, processed more slowly. There’s a deeper effort of rewriting that none of the other books had. Well, and that thing that if a story interests you and you rewrite it and it doesn’t convince you then maybe you throw it out. And you end up with the ones that produce in you a sensation that makes you think they work. Though I don’t know exactly when it happens. I read them and say “this works.”

When would you stop revising?
The reader inside you tells you: “This story’s ready.” If more years had passed, maybe it wouldn’t be this book anymore. But I feel less insecure with Las guerras íntimas. Precisely because of that extensive work of redefinition and rewriting. Maybe they’re not extraordinary stories. But I think, let’s say, that they’re ten stories with which I’m satisfied up to a certain point.

What would be the formal difference of Las guerras íntimas?
They’re stories that live on their own. Maybe a writer dedicated to his anecdote, without distracting himself as happened in the fiction within fiction of the previous books. Besides, there’s a change in self-awareness of the characters who think they’re literary or are a farce or a fiction. That, which was often in Vulgar, is now gone.

In any case, one perceives the constancy of your previous themes.
There are those who say one is always writing the same work. And if you look at these stories they’re also vulgar miscommunications, or the previous ones were already intimate wars. Because they’re battles in a closed environment, amidst a few characters. Very minor, domestic, private, intimate battles. And they revolve around family relationships that have come undone, fractured couples, crises at work, within friendships, of the heart, in the end.


The Disappearance of the Narrator

Does the need for expression reside in hiding the narrator?
It could be. Because how do you tell these stories, the one about a paranoid man who fears tables, the one about mythomaniacs who murder over the phone, the one about the ghost of a decapitated nurse, the one about a family that escapes a war, the one about painter who goes hunting and doesn’t come back, the one about the girl who goes from one boyfriend to the next within one circle of friends; how do you narrate these intimate wars while trying to not participate, letting the story live on its own. What can you do, as a narrator, so that will work. Maybe it’s to disappear.

There’s also evidence of different registers. For instance, the treatment of the atmosphere that’s present in “Aguas perdidas, aguas encontradas” and “Densidad de las mesas.”
Something about the work of the atmosphere, which I was obsessed with a while ago, must have remained there. And yet, they’re very different stories. “Aguas perdidas...” is a morose tale, with a situation that’s more tense than it is intense (but tension, Cortázar says, is another way of building intensity), which is the boy’s battle against death in the water. And that struggle between the character and the sea is seen by no one and no one cares about it. It becomes intimate again. But it’s reached by accumulating apparently unconnected situations that, nevertheless, are preparing that moment in the story: the final battle. While in the other story you mention, “Densidad...”, the rhythm is much faster. There are no detours. We follow the single narrative thread that goes straight toward consummation, toward tragedy.

Are you working on something else?
I’m writing new stories, but I’m not thinking about a book yet. What I’m working on needs a lot more before it can close. Things are emerging little by little, very slowly. I’m also writing quite a few essays. What I’ve definitely finished is poetry. But publishing poetry in this country has become very difficult: each day there are fewer publishing houses that might contemplate a collection of poetry. Poetry doesn’t sell, they say. An important reason, then, to listen to it and pay attention to it. A fortunate genre, poetry, that manages to escape and happily sidestep the market’s iron bars.




{ Eduardo Cobos, El Nacional, 28 April 2012 }

“Donde se acaba el misterio, se acaba también el impulso de la escritura” / Carmen Victoria Vivas

“Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends”


[Photo by Marcel Cifuentes]


Whether it’s a rigorous essay, a vulgarly provocative short story, or a poem, Roberto Martínez Bachrich always displays his devotion for the precise and unsettling word. Winner of the X Concurso Anual Transgenérico, for his book Tiempo hendido, a study of the life and work of Antonia Palacios, he anticipates that publication with the awaited release of his book Las guerras íntimas (published by Lugar Común), a collection of short stories fine-tuned in their structure, with unpredictable anecdotes and characters vitiated by their emotions.

Valéry sustained that the conclusion of a work is something accidental. In the presentation for your book Las guerras íntimas you commented that you would have been able to continue, for years even, your process of correction. What is it you achieved in those short stories that moved you to decide on their publication?
More than achievement, it’s always a matter, I think, of abandoning. That abandonment is, perhaps, the heart of the accident Valéry mentions. When I felt there existed a more or less closed book, that made sense, in some way, as a totality, that was when I decided to abandon it. If I hadn’t done that, as I mentioned on that day, I could have kept on polishing it for another decade, rewriting it, eliminating or adding stories; but the ten that were left, I’d like to think, are stories that can function, that lasted, remaining in the continuous selections and rewrites, that resisted and fought back, finally, against my manias. I’d like to think they were the strongest, the survivors of the debacle of rewriting, of the perpetual intimate war that is all writing. And, as Alfonso Reyes noted, we abandon what’s written, we publish so as to not spend our lives rewriting. So as to be able to, hopefully, turn the page, move on to something else.

In “Los colores oscuros” you narrate the execution of a perfect crime, despite the absence of weapons or a detective. Do you think this story responds to the structure of the crime genre, in that it, as Borges specified, “lives off the continuous and delicate infraction of its laws”?
It’s possible, but I wasn’t conscious of what you mention when I wrote it. Maybe it’s a crime story in reverse, speaking from Borges. Not the attempt to respond to the who, what, where, when and why of a determined crime, according to the classic credo of the genre, but rather a steady approach at the hands of the characters and following a meticulous chain of lies to perpetuate a crime. That story, actually, emerged after reading Cortázar’s “The Health of the Sick.” I tried to revert the structure of that masterful story. At its heart it’s nothing more than a humble and almost invisible tribute to a monster of the short story to whom everyone, I think, owes so much.

In “Blanco” you dare to employ an obscure aesthetic, in a certain way the image of a type of cinema that delights in kitsch terror, but it’s a gesture that isn’t repeated in the rest of the book. Is this exception due to the fact that you wager in favor of a literature that disassociates itself from delighting in bad taste?
In general terms I’d say no.Although I’m not sure if this “no” sustains itself in Las guerras íntimas. I mean, I think bad taste is very important. At one time I tried, from the form of the short story, to draw a fierce praise of the vulgar, to travel the sinuosity of its landscape, bordering, naturally, alongside the “powers of bad taste.” I don’t know if at that time I achieved it or not, but I think in this book I separated myself a bit from that. Regarding “Blanco,” from a very young age I’ve been an impenitent reader of supernatural horror literature. Stories like those of Poe or Lovecraft were fundamental in my formation as a reader. And I always wanted to write a story like that, a Lovecraftian story whose center would be a terrifying scene beyond the order of rational logic. The central moment of that tale came out of an image, the decapitated nurse, which recalls those types of films you’re talking about, movies that, I confess, entertain me a great deal. From that scene and the sinister one that it unleashed came the totality of the story. I think that more than achieving a story of supernatural horror, I was barely able to reach the texture of a fantastical tale. But if we consider that it’s a fantastical tale, it wouldn’t be so alone in the book. When I reached the final version of Las guerras íntimas, I wanted to make sure that, despite the apparent variety of themes and narrative registers, each story had a type of pair, a sibling story, mirror story. In that sense, the twin figure of “Blanco” would be “Densidad de las mesas,” which is very removed from supernatural horror, but does sympathize with the fantastic and the absurd.

“Sifilíticos e integrados” tells the story of a search for revenge after a heartbreak that emerges during the contagion of a venereal disease. An admirable plan whose execution depends on the complexities of those involved. Is that what interests you: an ingenious anecdote that will allow you to rummage around in damaged subjects?
I’d have to disagree a bit with you in such a reading. I don’t feel like ingenious anecdotes are my strength. I feel like in my stories these are, in general, pretty simple, very common. Maybe something in the events of “Sifilíticos e integrados” might seem obscure, but if we think about how the majority of youthful love dramas and, when the case fits, how bitterness and plans for revenge revolve around that orbit and are tinted, almost always, with those shades, the narrative loses all its strangeness or it’s not so unfaithful to the mirror of the real and the apparent. I don’t think that story and many of the others are concentrated exclusively on damaged subjects and in the evil? perverse? taste for rummaging in those wounds. I think that in the plot of the revenge, all that has failed and defeat are fundamental. And that implies and reveals a certain degree of tenderness, of human warmth in these characters. I was looking, in one way or another, to endear them to the reader. The end, as well as the rigorous choice of certain words, point in that direction: it is, in its own way, a happy ending, right? Maybe it’s true that an author is the worst reader of his own texts. But that’s also the beauty of the act, the gesture of writing. The what and why of the written turns out to be a mystery for one. Darkness, the nebulous, these always have a great weight. And I think that’s fortunate. Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends. The “kingdom of the known,” I like to think, is fatal for a fiction writer.




{ Carmen Victoria Vivas, Tal Cual, 24 September 2011 }

Los 25 secretos mejor guardados de América Latina: Roberto Martínez Bachrich

The 25 Best Kept Secrets in Latin America: Roberto Martínez Bachrich



“I work tirelessly because I have so many doubts: I rewrite each text in an obsessive, maniacal manner. And I publish very little, out of respect for the readers.
I’m interested in domestic, intimate universes, rummaging and imagining how in unexpected corners of the quotidian an extreme, overwhelming situation can emerge, suddenly. The monstrous dimension of certain minor, private epics is what most attracts me about writing a story.”


Biography

I was born in a warm and tranquil city. Beside a river and an hour from the sea. Affectionate parents, great siblings and multiple dogs, cats, fish and turtles, surrounded my initial voyage.

Since childhood I was an impenitent reader. And without knowing it, maybe as a natural consequence of reading so much, I got sick with writing. Today I make my living teaching literature classes and editing books or magazines. It’s the only way, up to now, of doing something related to what one likes and being able to live off it. And, meanwhile, of course, I read, imagine, write. From that work, delicious and hard, my books have emerged; three short story collections, Desencuentros (1998), Vulgar (2000) and Las guerras íntimas (2011); a collection of poems, Las noches de cobalto (2002) and an essay, Tiempo hendido (2011).

People ask me why anyone should read me. I don’t have the slightest idea. I suppose the world, in a strict sense, doesn’t need to read me. I can’t offer anything that others, with better tools, haven’t already offered to literary space. They should read Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Melville and Camus. Conrad and Flaubert, Poe and Chekhov. Reyes, Paz and Picón Salas, Cortázar, Bolaño and Ribeyro. Ramos Sucre and Gerbasi, Cadenas and Gramcko.

But from reading them so much, one ends up writing. And maybe a reader can find tributes, clues, roads plowed for the re-encounter with great voices, in what one, humbly, scribbles. Or better said, wanting to establish the fact that they’ve always accompanied me. Literature, Borges said already, hasn’t done anything new for centuries. Since the Bible, Homer and Dante, we always tell the same three or four stories. But I feel that it’s important to tell them again. Over and over. It’s an exercise in resistance and continuity: a silent tribute. Maybe, just like it’s important to keep telling these stories, it’s also important that we keep reading them. Renewed, from other angles, other visions of the world. It’s what little I can say to whomever might want, graciously, to read my papers. I wish my short stories could accompany any reader, just as so many works by others have accompanied me. The dialogue is endless. The axe keeps coming down, as Kafka requested, on the frozen sea. And that’s the happiness, the beauty, I think, of continuing to write, continuing to read.


Literary Fragment

Fragment from “Aguas perdidas, aguas encontradas.” Taken from Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).

“Ricardo and Luisiana enter the vortex fearlessly. I go more slowly: I think, doubt, wait. I swim a few feet backwards and forwards. At times you can catch a glimpse of a foot or a head in the jumble. Something stops me from the other side. I take a deep breath, submerge myself, come out again. I watch the passage to the other shore slightly horrified. It would be fantastic if the sea were to calm down a bit. To go on swimming without setbacks: with no shame, no glory. But it won’t happen. I turn my back to the uneven ground. I stare at the horizon. The sea isn’t as beautiful when you’re inside, absolutely alone, separated from the shore by a swarm of furious waves. I tell myself, enough fucking around, and dive into the water, deep down, foam and shoving. Just before going in again I take another deep breath: my lungs swell and my heart accelerates. A wave passes, another one returns. One comes, another goes. I embark on that one and move my feet and hands at full speed. I need to slide from one wave to another before they break in the crash. An impossible endeavor. I feel the scream underwater. A thousandth of a second before I feel it with my whole body, I feel the scream of two waves crashing against each other. And there’s no time to assimilate the sound. My body already belongs to the wave: it’s already pushing me from one side to another, it’s already turning me into a miserable rubber doll, turns me around like a rotisserie barbecue, it makes me lose my hearing, stuns me, scares me. I’ve heard many times that you have to let yourself be dragged a while before getting out onto shore. It’s a well-processed fact, it’s almost a reflex. But I let myself be kneaded by the waves a few seconds without understanding which one’s the precise moment for escape. And my breathing starts to fail me. Then I forget my body’s flaccidity and become rigid, I start to kick the waves, to swim, seeking the surface. The sea beats me down and my race is useless. I lose all sense of orientation and swim without knowing where I’m headed. I look for the light and I think I see it to my left. I accelerate and swim, but another wave crashes over my head. I swallow salt, my mouth fills with sand. I can’t open my eyes anymore. I make another effort and start to swim desperately in any direction. And my hands suddenly touch ground, preceding my head which crashes against the bottom. That’s where I understand what fear is. I turn around and push upwards with my feet. It’s a brief ray of hope knowing that now there’s an up and a down: maybe you always have to touch bottom before being saved. I swim toward the light dazed, it seems like the surface is approaching. And right there, when the episode seems to have ended, a new wave massacres me from above. All hope drowns within me. My body loses the sky again and twirls underwater at the whim of each wave. That’s where I understand what horror is. But suddenly the noise ends. It’s a matter of seconds, but the stupefying murmur of the waves crashing one after another stops. The sea grows quiet and plunges me into the silence. It’s a thick silence, a perfect symphony of quiet. I open my eyes and the earth that mixes with the waves seems to have disappeared: the sea has become completely blue. It’s a clean, whole, brilliant, transparent blue. It’s the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. It’s a veracious, absolute blue. At that point I lose my fear and say to myself, almost with certainty, almost aloud though my mouth is sealed by the water, that I’ve died. And I understand it like you understand one plus one is two. Without fear. Without desperation. I’ve died. Like that, in past perfect. Like a real, finite, certain fact. I’ve died. And it’ll be a real shame, I think, because I’m young and stupid and I still wanted to do so many things in life. But I’ve died.”




(Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, 2011)

Wave / Roberto Martínez Bachrich

Wave


Agora eu já sei
da onda que se ergueu no mar
e das estrelas que esquecemos de contar
o amor se deixa surpreender
enquanto a noite vem nos envolver.

Antonio Carlos Jobim


We’re young and thoughtless, Verónica and I, and we’ve always been proud of it. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t too hard for us to lie to our parents. Verónica assured my mom we wouldn’t go to the beach, that not for anything in the world would it occur to us –with the signs of that horrible storm approaching the coast– to go to the sea, no way, we’d stay at her aunt Carmelina’s house in Coro, and spend the weekend visiting the colonial center and getting to know the city. Likewise, I promised Verónica’s dad he didn’t need to worry, we’d stay with my aunt Dulce and my cousins, no beach for us, because the truth is I hate the sun and the sticky sand, besides, those beaches there are full of jellyfish that time of year and I can’t stand those slimy things, but more than anything the possibility of hurricane Sabrina hitting the coasts of Falcón terrifies me too much (I often have nightmares about that). So, we said, Vero and I have our whole lives in front of us and don’t plan on taking stupid risks and ruining our future with any old carelessness. Our parents were absolutely convinced and relieved, so Verónica and I hit the road.

As soon as we arrive at the guest house in Adícora, and after dropping off our things, we put on our bathing suits and take the road to the beaches on the north end of the peninsula. The weather seems perfectly normal: the same thick heat as always and the salty breeze typical of any coastal zone. I ask Verónica whether Playa Blanca or Saledales, it’s her turn to decide, because I chose the guest house. Vero checks me out from head to toe and decides Playa Blanca, arguing that sand dunes ending in the sea are profoundly romantic and beautiful. It seems perfect to me, but not only because of Vero’s reasons, but also because Saledales always has too many people and that means submitting ourselves to prudence and chastity, such undesirable things when considering Verónica’s erect and recently operated breasts. I blush foolishly and quickly return to my color. I know it: desire is duplicated at the sea. There’s something in the sea breeze that tears off all the layers of habit: the salt water seems to irremediably induce the games of the body, the sea makes us sensual. And this becomes pure delight when things go just beyond a pair of perfect breasts: it’s love, ardent as a Guadalajara blood sausage sea urchin, sweet as a Viennese pastry cream dolphin, tasty as a piña colada octopus, big as a eucalyptus whale. Yes, the marine air duplicates the endlessly reformed and cloying syntax of silly love.

We stop at a liquor store to stock up on drinks. It’s my turn to decide, so I choose gin and orange juice, though I know Vero would have preferred vodka with lemon, but everyone knows that lemon on the beach stains and I imagine the corners of Verónica’s lips darkened can’t be too appetizing. Then we keep going and she discovers, along the way, a little restaurant she finds very picturesque. She suggests we have lunch there and I tell her it’s better on the beach, in any kiosk by the shore, but she looks at me severely and says it’s her turn to decide the fate of our next lunch. I accept, slightly annoyed, because honestly I’m dying to lay her down on the beach immediately and kiss her, caress her whole body, lick every single bit of her and make love to her until night falls to finish counting the stars in her eyes; but following the interpolated decisions has always been the single law of our relationship and, besides, that gives me the power to decide exactly what we’ll do when the beach is finally in front of us.

We eat lunch without too much appetite because the food isn’t that good and the buzzing of a noisy radio whose signal comes and goes keeps the only waiter in the place occupied, completely lost in the news of the storm. Afterward we continue with our route and, just up ahead, some National Guardsmen stop us trying to make us turn back and wanting to warn us about the hurricane. I tell them we’re headed to find my poor aunt Dulce, who lives alone in the next village and is probably really scared –she’s an elderly woman, you understand– about the approach of Sabrina. So they let us go through and a couple miles up the road, Playa Blanca appears in front of our eyes completely solitary and paradisiacal. I park the jeep at the edge of the road and we cross the dunes that separate us from the sea on foot. The salty storm has grown slightly and the sun seems too drowsy for it to be midday. Verónica starts to say that maybe it really is dangerous, wondering if it might not be better to turn back and leave the beach for another day, since anyways we have our room at the guest house where we can have fun together in the sweetest way, but I plant a long, warm kiss on her mouth and assure her there’s not the slightest reason to worry, she’s with me, nothing’s gonna happen to us and the sand on Playa Blanca is much more comfortable than our sad cot in the guest house. My effervescent animal desire, however, won’t last very long. As soon as we’re facing the sea the sun seems to hide completely in a thick, dark cloud. The sea is choppy and the storm has become a gale. We stop and Vero holds on to me scared. The wind keeps gathering strength and in a matter of seconds the last dune before the water starts to move toward the point where we’re standing. Verónica sinks into a strange trembling and I’m invaded by a deep and paralyzing confusion. The water stirs furiously and each minute a new immense wave is born that crashes a few feet from our paralysis. Vero demands that we leave and a few tears the dust clouds make disappear within milliseconds flow from her eyes. We try to go back, get to the jeep, but the effort is useless. The dunes have decided to merge into the sea and run in the opposite direction of our escape. We advance three steps and a great shapeless dune in perpetual movement returns us to the same spot. Verónica starts to cry in panic as her glance is disfigured. We keep trying, panting, and it’s all useless. The sea convulses ferociously, the waves –each time more voluminous– crash into each other and produce a horrific din. My car, which can barely be seen through the sand in the air, suddenly disappears buried by a dune. Verónica holds on to me with that superhuman strength despair grants us. And we stand there, amid the slaps from the sand and the terrible rumor of the waves. The chorus is now joined by dozens of thunderclaps that tirelessly burst in the celestial vault. And suddenly a rain storm explodes that seems to fracture the firmament and tear it apart in liquid pieces. Then the sea seems to open up, the waters rehearse a horrible contraction and drain toward the sides, leaving in the center of our visibility a distant and mysterious small blue island that makes a sinister silence coagulate in the wind. At that instant we realize: it’s the wave that grows. An enormous, monstrous wave that marches full speed toward us and seems to scratch the air as it moves producing a dry and clamorous sound, an unbearable roar. It’s the same wave I’ve dreamed of so many times before, it’s the same recurring nightmare, that repeats itself with a rigorous and macabre perfection in reality: myself, hugging the body of a woman with firm breasts (in the dream the woman was faceless, I couldn’t have known it was Verónica), watching the wave approach, both of us terrified, paralyzed in front of the final horror. Then I know this time I won’t wake up. And it’s my turn to decide how all this will end: either letting us be dragged, crushed and drowned by the wave or handing ourselves over to the sepulcher of the immense white dune moving furiously from the other side. “I’ll pass,” I think, but it’s too late for me to tell Vero.




Translator’s Note: This short story is included in the new book by Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).




{ Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Prodavinci, 3 June 2011 }

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: Me siento lúcido frente a un cuento / Michelle Roche Rodríguez

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: I feel lucid in front of a short story



While his short stories are shrouded with the quick intensity that drags the reader toward the final effect, Roberto Martínez Bachrich’s modesty captivates. Wary of interviews, or false stage lights, he only feels comfortable when talking about the writer’s work. For him, literature is what others do; his own work is merely “an irresponsibility.”

But since every mania has its cure and and each writer his editor, the new imprint Lugar Común presented last night Las guerras íntimas, the most recent collection of short stories by the author born in Valencia in 1977.

A relationship that unravels, two vengeful nephews, a man with an aversion toward tables, a pair of reckless youths, the feline perversity of a woman who uses her lovers, the journey of a family of Italian immigrants or the ghost of a decapitated nurse, these are some of the anecdotes about small daily passions that parade through the book.

(Re)writing. Martínez Bachrich finds the best of his literary experience in the constant editing of his texts, even to the point of paroxysm. For example, the first version of Las guerras íntimas was finished in 2001 and it was a collection of 16 short stories. But, in the process of correcting it, only the title and five stories remained. Between 2002 and 2007 he created a dozen more and after the task of rewriting he was left with the list of 10 stories that have just been published: “My first short story collections were published very quickly and I try not to repeat those errors any more.”

The most evident trait of his prose is a return to the classical forms of the short story, which once represented the vanguard of the style of Julio Cortázar’s Historias de cronopios y famas (1962).

With cohesion as a premise, not a single phrase in his stories is extraneous. “Surprise is a pillar of the classic short story and in these texts I’m working on the idea of attaining it, thinking of the knock out Cortázar discusses,” he points out before emphasizing the real weight of the symbol in the short story: “The image can be a point of departure, but the arrival passes through the necessity of a story that’s autonomous and well-rounded, that works.”

Other short story collections by the same author are Desencuentros (1998) and Vulgar (2000). Nearly a decade ago he published the poetry collection Las noches de cobalto, but he prefers not to talk about that genre, though he hasn’t abandoned it: “I feel lucid in front of a short story because I can defend it and I understand where it comes from, which doesn’t happen to me with the poem.”

Now, as he enjoys or in his case, rather, flees from the brief flashes of celebrity that touch those who present a book in Venezuela, he is also finishing the last details of his biography of Antonia Palacios entitled Tiempo hendido, which won the tenth edition of the Concurso Transgenérico de la Fundación para la Cultura Urbana last year.




{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 4 June 2011 }