Ráfagas: Sobre Los impresentables, de Raymond Nedeljkovic / Carlos Ávila

Bursts: On Los impresentables, by Raymond Nedeljkovic

Raymond Nedeljkovic, Los impresentables (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 2011)


Twenty years later, a woman in a wheelchair remembers what she lived through during the disturbances of 1989 in Caracas: she sees a neighbor carrying two bags of ice —“Ice, what for?”—, she sees a woman with a refrigerator on her back and she watches her own husband trying to calm down a group that’s trying to loot a neighbor’s business. In the background of her story we can hear gunshots, desperate steps and the murmuring of a crowd of people crossing the avenue. The woman holds in her tears and evokes the bullet that wounded her and the one that killed her companion: both of them shot by the neighbor they were trying to protect. That’s the story told in “Disfraz de zombie,” a text that makes use of two central marks of this book: the very subtle insinuation regarding an era’s “mood” and a particularly careful treatment that’s given to the topic of violence.

There are eighteen very short stories: each one a burst that doesn’t reach two pages. And while several of them respond to a linear and perhaps more conventional form of the story, many of them are built out of fragments and leaps in time. The author also turns to resources such as italicized letters or the trio of asterisks in between paragraphs to highlight a change in tone or a transition; or to more technical dexterities like the flashback, the ellipsis and the deliriums that are unique to oneiric fiction. The language is diaphanous and simple and with the bare minimum it manages to register intimate experiences, though the prose doesn’t ever close itself off to poetic gleams. At the same time, there’s a reflexive handling of the narrative as a practice, that is, several of the voices possess a clear awareness of what they’re telling and how they’re doing it: some question themselves about the nature and form of the story and others about the impossibility of writing. In general, the stories follow the path of realist tradition, but each eventual denouement brings us back to the knot where they would seem to resolve themselves, as if the story’s “exit” were hidden between two or three lines that have been left behind. The effect is a degree of uncertainty: each clarification is barely suggested and found mid-way between the fantastic tale and a type of metaphysical determination. One of the narrators, for instance, tells her story from her own death and another one announces in the opening sentence that he himself is a ghost. The most significant aspect of these stories might just be that: the possibility always exists that the words will surprise us with a final explosion or they’ll force us to surprisingly reinterpret the tale on unexpected grounds.

First thing: the atmosphere in which the majority of these stories occur tends to be that of a newsroom; almost all the narrators and characters are tied to the world of journalism (correspondents, reporters, photographers). Second thing: the book can be read as a collection of snapshots, not just because of their brevity but also because each story seems to be trying to outline a static image. It’s as if the exercise of photography constituted a restlessness that the prose tries to liquidate: as though among the author’s purposes was the notion of telling the story of a photo. Third thing: most of the stories revolve around a certain trembling of solitude and the form that love takes in the middle of a crisis. Nearly all of them are told by meditative and solitary men; many of them find themselves facing an abyss, sustained by an identical paradox: a woman’s love as the cause of their ruin and at the same time their possible salvation. Fourth thing: among the plots and storyline of each text moves the frequent presence of the social theme that has gained so much importance in the current Venezuelan discussion. A clear demonstration of this is found in “Coleccionista de ventanas,” where beginning with a phrase enunciated by an important leader at the end of the nineteen nineties —an apparently imperceptible detail—, we’re able to configure a certain apathy that’s characteristic of the era faced with political dissertation and reasoning. Fifth thing: the urban theme is recurrent, along with a violence figured in a repeated rumor of gunshots. Despite the fact that the image of Caracas is displayed throughout various time periods —the late sixties, late eighties and “the present day”—, it becomes a matter of representations that share an identical violent assault in common. That’s it. The final effect is of an unmistakeable but curious sensation: of producing amid the book’s pages the precision of a single echo of bursts and detonations.




{ Carlos Ávila, Facebook, 7 February 2014 }

Caracas a través de Los impresentables de Raymond Nedeljkovic / Caneo Arguinzones

Caracas Through Raymond Nedeljkovic’s Los impresentables

Photo: YVKE Mundial

Raymond Nedeljkovic (Caracas, Venezuela, 1979). Undergraduate degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). At this institution he participated in the workshops given by professors Luis Felipe Castillo and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón. In 2010 he was a member of the fiction workshop at Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, under the direction of Carlos Noguera. He received honorable mention in Fiction in the Semana del Estudiante UCV 2002 contest, and third place in Poetry in the 2008 edition. He was the Coordinator of the newspaper about journalism Palabra y Media (2005) and of the web page of TeleSUR TV station (2006-2008). He currently works as an editor for the team of the Presidential Press of the Ministry of Communication and Information. With Los impresentables he won the VIII Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors, in the category of Fiction, as well as the Municipal Prize for Literature 2012.

How did you get started in literary matters?

My beginnings in literature go back to the student contests at UCV: while I was there I received and honorable mention in Fiction and a third place in Poetry, I think around 2007. But my big opportunity came later, with the Contest for Works by Unpublished Authors at Monte Ávila Editores in 2010, when I won the Fiction category. It was my first publication, and at the end of that same year I was a finalist for the contest at the Society for Authors and Composers of Venezuela (SACVEN), that publishes the winners and the ten first runners-up in an anthology.

What was the creative process like for composing your book?

It’s hard to assume the task of the writer, to maintain the constancy, the discipline and to maintain the habit of writing. I think one writers and the book continues on its own, it speaks for you, and beyond that is where the writer exists. The book makes its own way. The short stories in Los impresentables are written from around 2005 onwards: I had a series of stories compiled when I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Literature, I was blocked with the topic for my senior thesis, I didn’t know what to do. Then it occurred to me to write one in the area of creative writing and so I approached Luis Felipe Castillo, who was my professor at that time and later became my tutor. I began to work from there: I gathered these stories, made a selection and forced myself to have the discipline to rewrite several of them that were half-finished. From that point emerged what forms the base of this book.

Does Los impresentables follow a certain structure?

Caracas gave this book its form. It’s a book that traverses the city, that’s how I’d define it: what gives it unity throughout most of it is the urban stories, about the reality of the capital city, and to a certain degree one’s own experience as a citizen of Caracas. I think there’s quite a bit of violence in my stories, acts of violence occur in about half of them, maybe more, it’s a violent Caracas. Maybe because the book has a great deal of autobiographical elements, and at the time I wrote those stories it touched me quite intensely, in a personal way. But of course, it’s only one focus out of many that can be given to Caracas.

How does the violence of Caracas traverse the short stories of Los impresentables?

It’s the violence we see in Caracas on a daily basis, but also the political violence, like the one we lived during the events of the Caracazo, something we see reflected in the story “Disfraz de zombie” in which the protagonist narrates how he was a victim of the police repression that was unleashed during those days. [Translator’s note: The Caracazo was a spontaneous, popular uprising on February 27, 1989 in Caracas.] In stories such as “Coleccionista de ventanas” we see a Caracas where president Bill Clinton appears, along with a phrase he said when he arrived at the airport: “Todo está chévere en Venezuela” [“Everything’s cool in Venezuela”]; a quotation that I employ in order to reveal the Venezuela that was asleep during those days, when politics were presented as a mere spectacle. It’s a Caracas that isn’t necessarily the one we know today, since other stories take place in the Caracas of 1967 and, actually, they’re inspired by a story my mom always tells me about the jewelry shop Francia. It’s a Caracas in various time periods. “Apenas una niña” is a very harsh story about that daily violence the world’s capital cities suffer, in which I explore the theme from the vantage point of a child’s tenderness, but when the protagonist is already an adult: it’s the memory of what she was when she suffered that traumatic event, when she was barely a child.

Why write short stories?

The other day I read an interview with a literary critic and he was speaking about a writer, whom I prefer not to name, who’s published a couple books of short stories; the critic said that this writer had reached a mature level and was ready to write a novel. I don’t see it that way, I think that a short story is a perfect version of itself, it’s not something that needs to mature. In my case, short stories are perfect for what I want to tell, for several reasons: brevity, tension, the depth I’d like to give my characters... above all starting from William Carlos Williams, one of the poets I most admire, and in whose poetry I’ve always seen as being very narrative. He’s a big influence on this book, a language that always seeks simplicity, closeness, intimacy in some form, and that believes in the power of poetry as an exercise in contemplation. I tried to imbue my stories with these elements.

How has it been to publish your first book through Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana’s Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors?

When you see your own book in bookstores you feel a certain form of obligation. It’s a big deal to be published. The positive aspect of it? To meet a stranger who’s read your book and makes a good comment about it, people who identified with the things you wrote, knowing that what you wrote meant something to them. It seems incredible to me to turn any corner —I’m speaking about Caracas, which is the city where I live— and find a Librería del Sur with more and more books and a greater variety of authors, and finding a convocation for literary contests, organized by the State in its multiple cultural and editorial organisms. In all the events the State organizes, like the International Book Fair, for example, you can see the access that many voices didn’t have previously; voices that are now revealing themselves and didn’t before. It seems very valuable to me, everything that’s been promoted in regards to culture in the most recent years of the Bolivarian Revolution. From each space there’s a struggle, mainly to confront a model and some characters who were very comfortably installed in their reality, and who didn’t seem to want to give space to what burst onto the scene, which is the opening and the access to culture for more people. And I say to confront, but to confront with ideas, with arguments, to try to convince without exclusionary ideas, so as to not damage what’s advancing: a greater inclusion, a wider dissemination of culture and literature. But it’s complicated, because there are two forces struggling against each other and you’re there trying to mediate, to offer ideas, to defend the things you believe in.




{ Caneo Arguinzones, Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, May 2013 }

Relatos de abismos / Rubén Machaen

Abyss Stories

Raymond Nedeljkovic, Los impresentables (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 2011)


Caracas is the backdrop to all the neuroses, deliriums, obsessions and disagreements of a fiction writer who wanders through the nihilist reaches of his consciousness and amidst the multiple human miseries of the inhabitants of a convulsed city. From the first story, “El centro de una pelota de béisbol,” the character’s skills —literary and literal— emerge when he is sure of success right at the moment of struggling against “each one of his manias,” with the exception of the “undesired thoughts” that are the aspects he hates most about his illness. “The Chinita, the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, was bare, that is, naked, on the kitchen table (...) I started to imagine, Jesus Christ, I don’t know why!, that I was penetrating the ground over Roberto Bolaño’s tomb with my penis.”

While the narrators of his short stories are not the same character, they do have the same voice. The story “Coleccionista de ventanas” has for an epigraph a phrase from Ricardo Piglia’s novel Nombre falso, that reads: “As though the stories had been there, on the other side of the glass.” And under that premise, the character narrates how, before posting an impersonal goodbye on Facebook, he joins the group of a man named Durantes Fuentes, who claims to be a collector of windows, a task that consists of nothing more than photographing key moments of his life through window frames. The narrator desists from his original intention and proceeds to reflect, through the click of a camera, transcendental moments in his life: the first one, taken from the bathroom of the Presidential Press Office, from where he has been fired; the second one, a dog that has been run over, where the driver ends up killing the animal with two shots, and the third one, “incomplete, although in a certain way it isn’t,” that leads him to the beginning of the story, in this way making an allusion to that last phrase of Bolaño’s in The Savage Detectives: “What’s outside the window?”

All the nervous exhaustion and boredom of these characters merges with the capital city. A metropolis girded by violence and apathy from which its characters are not exempt. “Final de duelo,” the ninth story, begins with “the burst of a machine gun” in the middle of Panteón Avenue that awakens an apparently happy married couple —or are they resigned?— and the screams of a mother crying over her daughter’s death. A news report that denounces robberies against women at the corner of El Chorro; the fear and desperation of the married woman, the husband Sebastian’s insomniac worrying, and his wife’s final answer —resigned?— the next morning at the corner of the robberies when faced with the man’s unease: Should I drink a juice before going up to the office, Seba, what’s it seem like I should do?

The last story, titled “Otra muerte,” narrates the dissipation of Tamara Silvestri, a public sector employee in the Ministry of Labor, for whom one fine day the world collapsed when her husband, also an employee of the Ministry, leaves her for a much younger woman and her employees begin to ignore her orders. Disaffection, fleeting power and bureaucracy make it so that “each tile of the floor that sustained Tamara Silvestri is replaced by a piece of the abyss.”

This is the composition of Nedeljkovic’s short stories: abysses. Such quotidian lives of such simple characters that, wanting to or not, find themselves at the edge of many precipices despite the fact that, in the words of the author, “there always exists a final second in which you can begin a serene escape without any surprises.” Although this route doesn’t turn out to be feasible in Los impresentables.




{ Rubén Machaen, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 10 February 2013 }