For the past few years, every December/January, we’ve been posting a series of “Best of the Year!” podcasts—on fiction, on nonfiction, on movies, on music (my personal favorite podcast)—along with resolutions about what Open Letter/Three Percent/me personally would like to accomplish in the forthcoming year. (See last year’s post in which my number 1 resolution was to “Drink more mimosas!” Speaking of, it is a snow day, I do have some left over booze . . . )

Over the next few weeks, we’ll probably maybe get right back on that. I hesitate only because I’ve read around about 10 million year end lists over the past few weeks, each of which was, by necessity, incomplete and incapable of addressing its incompleteness and the biases underpinning that. (I even read about Largehearted Boy’s “List of Year End Lists.”) Thanks to Facebook and the success of all those awful click-driven, shitty websites named in this article on social media exposes us every moment of every day to absurd list after absurd list.

Which isn’t just annoying, but in the opinions of (self included), pretty much a horrible thing for the world as a whole. (For more on Morozov, I highly recommend checking out profile. And he lost 100 lbs on a rowing machine watching European art-house films? That’s the exercise regime I need to sign up for.)

But there’s something so compelling about seeing information in this way . . . It’s like numbered, or at least ordered, compilations of information tap right into the reptilian part of our brain and spew out all the morphine feelings. Jason Diamond’s ridiculous ? I MUST HAVE IT. And hey look! I’m number 3!! WEEE!!

At the same time, we live in a world of way too much information. As awesome as this seems to techno-utopians, it’s pretty much fucking up our brains. (Obviously, that’s the scientific conclusion.) As I sit here, at my kitchen table, I have 20 tabs open on my browser—ranging from information about car batteries to Facebook to to to ESPN’s Soccer section—Spotify is playing one of the 596 tracks I pulled out as my “favorites of 2013,” to go along with the 5,000 more from 2010 onwards, and I’m staring right into my “to read” bookshelf (not to be confused with the “already read” and “probably going to die before I get there” bookshelves) that has 103 titles on it. And, no surprise, in between sentences, I’m getting my ass kicked at Words With Friends by both Tom Roberge and Steven Rosato. There’s too much going on.

None of which is news to anyone.

And like a lot of people, one of my personal resolutions for 2014 is to fuck as much of this shit as I can and live in the real world for more than 15 minutes at a time without checking Twitter for the latest witty hashtag meme (#AddAWordRuinAMovie) or international football scores. OK, that’s going too far. Football scores are still allowed.

I don’t want to just do my “old man screaming at the goddamn trees to get off his yard” rant though. The thing is, I kind of can’t live without all this stuff. Professionally. Without blog culture, I would never have “published” anything. Without email and Facebook and the rest of it, only a handful of people would ever have heard of Open Letter’s books.

What I wonder is if there’s a better, more effective way of providing readers with useful information. I started these monthly overviews because a) I wanted to pull out and highlight books that could get lost in somewhat overwhelming Translation Database and b) I wanted to make jokes.

This time of year always makes me a bit reflective . . . Not to mention that I take all of this a little too personally (result of being almost 40, having worked in this thankless business for 12-plus years, and chronic self-doubt) and get totally bummed when not a single Open Letter book shows up on the lists. (SPOILER ALERT: All you’ll find behind that link is The Most Experimental Dalkey Archive Books and Seiobo There Below.)

For now, I’m not sure if there’s a better way to provide readers with information on forthcoming translations. My current mix of jokes and titles is probably not smarmy enough to go viral, and not smart enough to serve as a legitimate place to check for recommendations. (Surprise! Three Percent is not the Times Literary Supplement.) I’ll keep thinking about it over the course of the year though, and hopefully along the way we’ll provide some interesting recommendations. (And starting next month maybe we’ll say something about the books themselves. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the listicle sites, it’s that content is totally and utterly irrelevant.)

And with that, I’m ready to announce Resolution #1: No More Writing about BuzzFeed/Flavorwire and the Reasons They Annoy Me. Down with lists and resolutions! Long live lists and resolutions!

by Mikhail Shishkin, translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield (Quercus)

Resolution #2: Write More Reviews.

Every year I make the same promise—to do more reviewing—and then fail miserably. Out of the 112 books I read last year, I wrote reviews of what, four? Five? That’s pathetic. My goal is at least two a month, preferably three. And The Light and the Dark will be one of these.

(Although when I do review this, I’ll have to make a disclaimer that there is a LOT of bad blood between me and Quercus, over Shishkin’s work in particular. And thank god Shish got himself a new agent. Read into that all you will.)

by Carlos Gamerro, translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett (And Other Stories)

Resolution #3: Sell a Lot More Books.

So, here’s some breaking news for everyone: As of June 1st, Open Letter will be distributed by This is fantastic news for everyone involved. This should make it easier for us to get our books into East Coast and Midwest stores (the West Coast has been doing great by us, thanks to George Carroll’s efforts), and frees up some time for us to work at promoting our books.

Aside from the practical reasons for joining up with Consortium, I’m really excited to be in with a group of great publishers like And Other Stories and BOA Editions and Copper Canyon, and Dzanc, and others. Feels like the place that we should’ve been all along . . .

by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Resolution #4: Create a Special Series for the World Cup.

George Carroll announced our forthcoming World Cup of Books at today, which means it’s definitely going to happen. I’ll be posting more specifics in the not-too-distant future, but if you’re interested in helping contribute, please let me know. (Really looking for people well-versed in the literature of the with fewer books available in America.)

Seeing that Croatia took out my beloved Iceland—which would’ve been the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup—this seems like an appropriate book under which to announce our little contest.

by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland (New Directions)

Resolution #5: Read One Book from Every World Cup Qualifying Country.

Following up on #4, this seems like a great way to combine my interests in soccer and literature . . . Not sure The Guest Cat will be the book I read from Japan, but it does feature a cat and we all know that cats sell. I know there’s no way ND would ever put together a cute cat video compilation to promote this books, but, seriously, cats sell. This poster is pretty much the only reason so many students sign up for my spring class:

by Oliverio Girondo, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (New Directions)

Resolution #6: Make September A Thousand Forests in One Acorn Month.

This anthology—edited by Valerie Miles—features 28 Spanish-language authors, including a lot of “Big Name” writers like Fuentes, Marias, Vargas Llosa, Vila-Matas and the like, and twelve that have never before appeared in English. What’s unique about this collection is that each piece is prefaced by an interview with the author in which s/he explains why s/he chose this particular story/excerpt as a representative of his/her “aesthetic high point” and also talks about his/her influences, etc. So, for the month of September, every day we’ll run either an excerpt from one of the interviews, or a bit from a previously untranslated story. Stay tuned—this is an incredible collection and you’re going to love the shit out of these pieces.

by A. K. Ramanujan, translated from the Tamil by the author (New York Review Books)
Resolution #7: Expand My Reading Horizons.

In a little while, I’m going to post a list of all the books I read in 2013. This is kind of pointless, but since I kept track of the titles and what languages they were originally written in, I can confirm that, out of the 111 books I read last year only 27 were by authors from courtries outside of Europe and North & South America. And that includes the 16 Korean titles I read for the LTI Korea—most of which I wouldn’t have otherwise picked up. So, to be honest, less that 10% of the books I read last year were from India, the Middle East, Africa, Asian, etc. . . . That’s kind of sad. I want to do better with that this year.

by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New Press)

Resolution #8: Create Some Sort of Translator Love Month.

Way back when, Erica Mena and I interviewed a bunch of translators at ALTA Pasadena (in 2009??) and posted all of these on Three Percent. As an advocate for translators, I think we really should do this more often, like, maybe in October, to correspond with the publication of A Man Between: The Life and Teachings of Michael Henry Heim, we could have a month of short interviews highlighting the most interesting and talented translators working today. You know, people like Linda Coverdale.

by Giulio Mozzi, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Open Letter)

Resolution #9: More Self-Promotion.

This is probably my depression talking, but it seems like for the past few years, we’ve been talking up all sorts of interesting and fantastic projects and books, but receiving very little love in return. As a result, I’m going to take extra efforts to make sure that we get a lot of info about our new books up on Three Percent and elsewhere.

Starting with this year’s first release, the short story collection, “This Is the Garden”: by Giulio Mozzi and translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris. It’s a great collection, and one that includes angel dong. Seriously. Come for the angel dong, and stay for the beautiful prose!

by Olga Griasnowa, translated from the German by Eva Bacon (Other Press)

Resolution #10: Post at Least Once a Day.

When things get busy, it’s really easy to just skip posting for a day, which then becomes two . . . three . . . a week. Thankfully, Kaija has been keeping the site going with lots of book reviews (thanks to all of you!), but I’m going to make a dedicated effort to install a Five Day Plan mixing book posts, with industry posts, with links to other interesting articles.

by Lasha Bugadze, translated from the Georgian by Maya Kiasashvili (Dalkey Archive)

Resolution #11: Launch Open Letter After Dark.

I’m keeping most of this under wraps for now, but sometime soon, I hope we’ll have some exciting news . . .

Have a great 2014!

Aleksandra Fazlipour is the student I introduced last week who just completed a semester long independent study on writing reviews. After this, I think we only have 4 more reviews of hers to run . . .

I actually met Carlos Gamerro when I was in Buenos Aires on an (AWESOME) editorial trip a few years back. He’s an incredibly interesting guy and writer, and actually contributed to Three Percent. His novel is coming out from And Other Stories this month.

Here’s the opening of Aleksandra’s review:

In An Open Secret, author Carlos Gamerro, a native to Argentina, weaves together a complex murder mystery that explores how the death of a single man both affects and implicates an entire community. Twenty years after left-wing journalist Dario Ezcurra vanished from the small town Malihuel during Argentina’s Dirty War (a time during which thousands of political dissidents were murdered, their bodies disposed of and never found again), Fefe shows up under the pretense of writing a fictional account of Ezcurra’s disappearance. Fefe is no stranger to Malihuel—the grandson of the town’s former major, he spent his childhood summers there.

Through a series of interviews with the townspeople, Fefe reveals the complicity of the entire town in Ezcurra’s murder and subsequent disappearance. Ezcurra had a reputation as an arrogant philanderer, which led to a strange bet between the Colonel and the Superintendent. In possession of an unwavering and idealistic faith in humanity, the Superintendent asserted that the townspeople would refuse to be complicit in Ezcurra’s murder, despite any personal grudges. However, when the Superintendent talked to families around town, the people did not voice any dissent. Although the police chief was directly responsible for Ezcurra’s murder, anyone could have saved him by speaking out. Their resentment against the philandering journalist and their fear of facing a similar fate decided the outcome of the bet.

Click here to read the full review.

Through a series of interviews with the townspeople, Fefe reveals the complicity of the entire town in Ezcurra’s murder and subsequent disappearance. Ezcurra had a reputation as an arrogant philanderer, which led to a strange bet between the Colonel and the Superintendent. In possession of an unwavering and idealistic faith in humanity, the Superintendent asserted that the townspeople would refuse to be complicit in Ezcurra’s murder, despite any personal grudges. However, when the Superintendent talked to families around town, the people did not voice any dissent. Although the police chief was directly responsible for Ezcurra’s murder, anyone could have saved him by speaking out. Their resentment against the philandering journalist and their fear of facing a similar fate decided the outcome of the bet.

[The Superintendent] thought people’s natural reaction to an imminent crime would be to stop it, or report it. His need to lie paradoxically reveals his faith in people. It never entered his head that the perfect crime is precisely the one committed in the sight over everyone—because then there are no witnesses, only accomplices. His premise was correct—in a two-bit town like this you can’t waste a prominent inhabitant without everyone knowing: because it only takes one person to find out for everybody to know. He mistakenly concluded that, in the face of such vigilance, impunity wasn’t an option. Of course it wasn’t, as certain distorters of public opinion repeat ad nauseam, because the policemen of his generation had notions of morality, honesty or honour that were later lost; no, it was simply narrow-mindedness, intellectual laziness—a eureka moment, a Copernican revolution, the Superintendent was simply too old for it. All he needed to arrive at the right solution was a leap, a flip of the imagination that stood logic on its head and set the clockwork going—the realization that you can hold your tongue while talking out loud, that town gossip can work the other way round. That silence also travels by word of mouth.

The prose itself is difficult to wade through: a majority of the text is written as extended quotations from Fefe’s interviews, with punctuation stylistically omitted. Overall, this makes the panic and tension palpable for the reader, almost as if characters are speaking directly at them. It is easy for the audience to become immersed in the story line and submerged in a sense of confusion while attempting to piece together the loosely intertwined narratives. As the story moves forward, it becomes more and more apparent that the stories presented in the interviews are secondary to the tone itself—the novel itself is primarily composed of many unique voices interweaving into a sociological record of the town during a desperate time. Each person’s character is created largely out of their dialogue, and the bulk of the story itself is presented as a series of soliloquies. Truth is interspersed with contradiction and lies, and everyone is motivated by their own self-interest throughout Fefe’s interviews, either trying to hide their own involvement in Ezcurra’s murder or simply trying to lay blame on individuals they personally hold grudges against. This is undoubtedly a reflection of the self-serving attitudes individuals would have displayed twenty years prior, when faced with the possibility of saving Dario Ezcurra from his impending death.

The discovery that Dario Ezcurra’s mother Delia falls victim to a similar fate, quite likely because there were complaints that she was bothering the townspeople with her inquiries, makes the sense of horror evident in the panicked dialogues of the novel come to a head, and fuels the revelation that Fefe is Ezcurra’s illegitimate son. This explains Fefe’s investment in a story that beforehand simply appeared to be significant for the sake of childhood nostalgia, because he did not seem deeply concerned with writing the book itself.

And yet, for the sake of the book’s plot, this fact about Fefe being Ezcurra’s son in and of itself is not the most striking part. It is the change in human behavior as evident by a difference in tones of the dialogues of the characters that is observable after the revelation that is significant: people who were complicit in the murders of Fefe’s father and grandmother now offer their condolences, altering their behaviors to fit their audience. The murders themselves, in light of Argentina’s Dirty War, are not unique. What is new and significant is the idea that the responsibility for the murders, in this case and perhaps in many others, does not rest simply with the authorities and the government. Ordinary people are to blame, both by their silence and their choice of words when they spoke out. Perhaps history might have unfolded differently if people had listened to a left-wing journalist pointing out the injustices befalling the community. This book is more than just the story of a man documenting the life and death of the father he never truly knew—it is a sociological record commenting on the behaviors of people under the pressure of not only other people but under their own personal bias against one another.

As a huge fan of Southern Cone literature, the fact that there’s quality contemporary works coming out of that area isn’t that surprising, but it is almost shocking to realize just how many great Argentine books are being published in the States . . . Here are the five titles that Joey focused on, with short clips from his descriptions:

Friends of Mine by Ángela Pradelli: Called ‘Friends of Mine’, and also translated by [Andrea] Labinger, the novel tells the story of a group of women living in the Buenos Aires province, who meet once a year on 30th December to eat dinner, celebrate the New Year, and reflect on the strange, difficult and wonderful passage of time. Structured in short, lucid fragments, the novel reads like a coming-of-age tale for a group of friends, a neighborhood, and an era of life in middle-class Argentina that has as much resonance today (and outside of Spanish) as it did when it was first published in 2002 and was awarded the Premio Emecé. [. . .]

The Islands by Carlos Gamerro: Like the spiralling narrator of ‘Bad Burgers,’ the protagonist of ‘The Islands’ chases his own trauma down a rabbit hole when he discovers that, despite the passage of ten years, the Falklands/Malvinas War is still raging — a reality he’s not quite ready to confront. [. . .]

Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman: Neuman, who has written poetry (‘No sé por qué’), short story (‘Alumbramiento’) and travelogue (‘Cómo viajar sin ver’), created in ‘Traveller of the Century’ a novel that is at once contemporary and historical: set in Restoration-era Germany, it discusses sexual mores and intellectual disputes in a distinctly modern way. Praise from writers like Roberto Bolaño long ago boosted his reputation in the Spanish-speaking world, but more than acclaim or ambition, it’s the clarity and grace of Neuman’s prose that has earned him high standing among fans. [. . .]

The Planets by Sergio Chejfec: First published in Spanish in 1999, ‘The Planets’ was written during the fifteen-year period when Chejfec lived in Venezuela, a temporal and cultural dislocation important to the text. As ‘My Two Worlds’ used ambulatory reflection, ‘The Planets’ uses the act of remembering to elevate a simple story into an elegant register. It’s a mode of literature difficult to master, but worthy of celebration when done right. [. . .]

Varamo by César Aira: A novel kind of about a Peruvian man who takes up the homemade art of fish embalming, and also kind of about a very slow city-wide car race, and also kind of about the makings of a classic Central American poem, and yet somehow also not about these things at all. ‘Varamo’ is as strange, and as compelling, as Aira’s best work. In fact, it may be Aira’s best work. Or his worst. You’ll have to read all his books to know for certain.

The time has come for Carlos Gamerro to speak English. Born into a bilingual family in Buenos Aires in 1962, he’s been using the language since childhood. Since the 1990s, he’s been translating from it (books by Auden, Shakespeare and Graham Green) and lecturing in it (at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the US; at Cambridge University in the UK). But now, readers can welcome the author into a different kind of English conversation: over the next year, two of his novels will be released in first-ever English editions. Those books—‘El secreto y las voces’ and ‘Las islas’—will be released in the UK as ‘An Open Secret’ (Pushkin Press, 2011) and ‘The Islands’ (& Other Stories, 2012).

They are part of a diverse and cultivated body of writing that includes other novels (‘El sueño del señor juez’ and ‘La aventura de los bustos de Eva’), literary essays (‘Harold Bloom y el canon literario’ and ‘El nacimiento de la literatura argentina y otros ensayos’), and short fiction (‘El libro de afectos raros’), works that have helped make Gamerro, according to fellow writer Federico Falco, “one of the inescapable narrators of his generation.” In the last year alone, he’s released two new books: the novel, ‘Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara’, and the literary study, ‘Ficciones Barrocas’—both to significant acclaim.

available here in an original English translation, has been published thrice before in Spanish—in the magazine ‘Pisar el césped’, the newspaper Página 12, and in the story collection ‘El libro de afectos raros’. It distills much of what makes Gamerro’s writing distinctive; what Federico Falco, writing in the newspaper Perfíl, has called “the three fundamental pillars” on which Gamerro’s writing stands: “brilliantly hatched plots, characters who, without surrendering the profound, rub up against pop culture, and a view of the national reality somewhere between critical and humorous.” Reason enough for English-speakers to listen to what he has to say; now, at long last, in our native tongue. tion (‘El libro de afectos raros’), works that have helped make Gamerro, according to fellow writer Federico Falco, “one of the inescapable narrators of his generation.” In the last year alone, he’s released two new books: the novel, ‘Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara’, and the literary study, ‘Ficciones Barrocas’—both to significant acclaim.

And here’s the opening of the interview:

Joey Rubin: You have two books coming out soon in English translations — ‘An Open Secret’ and ‘The Islands’. Can you tell us a bit about the process of bringing them into English? Are they your first full-length works to be published in English?

Carlos Gamerro: Yes, these are my first full-length works to be brought into English. After a few near misses — all of them in the UK, I suppose it’s a side effect of my upbringing. Or maybe it’s one of the mysterious effects of a general trend of Argentine culture where practically all the ‘English’ schools are precisely that, English (even though mine advertised itself as Scottish).

So, after years of waiting, I suddenly found myself with two publishers vying for my work! Pushkin is a prestigious publisher of classics and choice new fiction, and & Other Stories is an exciting new venture you should do a piece about! I was lucky in that both accepted my choice of translator, Buenos Aires-based, England-born Ian Barnett, who’s been living in Argentina for ages now, is an avid reader of Argentine fiction and has been wanting to do my stuff since he first read ‘Las islas’ back in 1998. His translations of me are ‘in collaboration with the author’ although my role is actually less to collaborate than to drive him crazy. With ‘An Open Secret’ we were using the ‘comments’ option and towards the end I thought of looking at the numbers and we had reached comment 1,500! But it’s a dream situation: to have the same translator for all my books, one who is open (or resigned) to all suggestions, who is obsessive, devoted and, to top it all, a good friend.

The is worth checking out, as is Joey Rubin’s translation of

I’m personally very excited to get my hands on both of Carlos’s forthcoming books, which we’ll definitely review here. (And maybe include in Read This Next?)

See the bottom of the article for a list of all the authors and books mentioned in the speech.

There were no prominent Argentine women writers in the 19th Century, for approximately the same reasons Virginia Woolf gives, in A Room of One’s Own, for their absence in the English 18th. The first generation of Argentine women writers are more or less contemporaries of Borges and belong to the same aristocratic milieu: Victoria Ocampo, the great lady of Argentine letters, was the founder of Sur magazine and an ardent advocate for the constant updating of invigorating foreign influences: as a publishing house Sur was responsible for the first translations of Faulkner’s Light in August, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and Nabokov’s Lolita. Her sister Silvina, lifelong wife of Bioy Casares, is one of our best short story writers and specially apt in the difficult art of portraying the world view of children—Cortázar’s predecessor and only rival in this respect. In the words of her elder sister, her work is remarkable for “an atmosphere of its own, where the most incongruous and unlikely things are close to each other and walk hand in hand, as in dreams”. Women novelists include the remarkable Sara Gallardo; Beatriz Guido, whose claims to fame lie more in the scripts she wrote for her husband Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, the greatest of Argentine film directors so far (his are the film versions of such classics as Martín Fierro, Los siete locos, Boquitas pintadas and Borges’ “Emma Zunz”) than for her schmaltzy novels; and the angry and opinionated Silvina Bullrich, who unselfishly devoted her life to the heroic task of creating the Argentine best seller. If in the mainstream narrative genres the position of women is somewhat subsidiary, they occupy a very prominent position in poetry—with names such as Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik—in drama—Griselda Gambaro—and in generic narrative such as Science Fiction—Angélica Gorodischer. Argentine women writers have, as a whole, had to deal with a particular monster of their own—the as yet not fully challenged predominance of male writers and a masculine oriented tradition in Argentine mainstream narrative, of which this lecture might be, unfortunately, another example.

A word should be said, at this point, about the Argentine fantastic story tradition, because many foreign readers see it the local tradition as such. It has practically no roots in the 19th Century, which was, as we have seen, on the whole realistic (differing in this from both the U.S. and European traditions), and it is more urban than rural (differing in this from the Magic realism of the 60s which it influenced). Its beginnings can be found in the stories of Leopoldo Lugones (Las fuerzas extrañas) and Horacio Quiroga (Más allá), its culmination most certainly in the period spanning the mid-30s to the mid-60s, which includes the best work of “The Fantastic Four”: Silvina Ocampo, Borges, Bioy Casares and Cortázar. What they all share, perhaps, is the atmosphere of doubt and uncanniness, rather than the portrayal of outright horrors; the feeling of borders being blurred, of incompatible planes of existence merging or coalescing; and a sense of unidentified menace which harks back, in Borges at least, to the world of H. P. Lovecraft. All of these writers are related, through birth or affinity, to the Sur magazine tradition and to the endangered aristocracy, and in a reading like the one I offer, which has a strong local, historical and political bias, it is unavoidable to notice that the core of this thirty-year period is constituted by the Perón decade (1945-1955). Seen in this sense, perhaps the most ‘transparent’ story of the lot is Cortázar’s “Casa tomada”, which can be read both as a story on undefined menace (some ghostly beings slowly and inexorably take over an old family house) and as the indirect and allusive twin brother of Beatriz Guido’s El incendio y las vísperas, which deals very openly with the Peronists’ takeover of a large estancia and their burning of the Jockey Club and its invaluable art collection.

The generation of Borges’ grandchildren (writers born around 1930) include some of our best, many of which would still be alive had it not been for the zeal of the last military government in hunting them down. Three are the great names.

Internationally, the best known is Manuel Puig. His early novels take place in the provincial town of Coronel Vallejos: La traición de Rita Hayworth (written in a succession of Faulknerian interior monologues) and Boquitas pintadas (which masterfully blends a pop sensibility for Hollywood glamour, a pastiche of feminine styles in the manner of the Gerty McDowell chapter of Ulysses, and the portrayal of provincial banality in the manner of Flaubert or Chéjov). The influence of Joyce is strongest in The Buenos Aires Affair, written in a variety of techniques and styles, while the elaboration of the conflict between modern (or class-oriented) radicalism and the posmodern radicalism of gay or feminist culture has seldom, if ever, been as convincingly dramatized as in his masterful El beso de la mujer araña, which in passing also manages to tear to shreds the 70s presumption that the validity of art is based on its progressive political content.

Rodolfo Walsh is best known for Operación masacre, Argentine Literature’s claim to the invention of the non-fiction novel before Capote’s In Cold Blood. This book, written and published clandestinely in times of military dictatorship, deals with the illegal shooting of Perón sympathizers after a botched pro-peronist coup in 1956. Walsh’s fame rests on this and other works of political journalism, on his commitment to revolutionary politics—which led to his assasination by the military in 1977 – and on his superb journalism. But his literary genius is evinced mostly in his short stories, some of which—“Fotos”, “Cartas”, “Nota al pie”, “Esa mujer” are among the most perfectly written and finely crafted in all our literature. “Esa mujer” has been recently voted the best Argentinian short story ever, and while the claim is preposterous for a literature that includes stories like Borges’ “El Aleph” and “El inmortal”, it is the first and so far most succesful treatment of the Eva Perón theme—as is shown by the implicit and explicit homage payed to it by Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita. Walsh was working on his first novel when he was killed—he and its drafts remain disappeared.

Faulkner has been the single greatest influence on the Latin American literary boom of the 60s. Apart from the enormous force of his work, and the fact that he writes about a neo-feudal world much closer to Latin America than to the rest of the U.S., he provides the basic formula for the Latin American boom: the blending of the themes and contents of regional literature (usually traditional and conservative in form) with the styles and devices of the Modernist avant garde (mainly, Joyce). García Márquez, Onetti, Vargas Llosa are unconceivable without this formula, as is Juan José Saer, born near the city of Santa Fe, which he has turned into his literary territory, in the manner of Faulkner’s Yoknapathawpa or Onetti’s Santa María. Saer’s variation on the Faulkner formula was to replace the Modernists of the 20s with the French avant garde of the 50s, mainly Robbe-Grillet’s objectivism. Saer’s best novel, Cicatrices, is written in four long chapters that combine the powerful surge of the faulknerian monologue with the painstaking and neurotic attention to detail of the objectivist description. The result is truly awesome. Saer is not content with describing Santa Fe’s present, and his novel El entenado is set in the early days of the Spanish conquest. It might be, together with Herzog’s movie Aguirre, on of the few contemporary versions to capture the hallucinatory flavour of the conquest of America. Glosa, finally, takes some of Saer’s favourite characters (who recur from work to work) through the hell fires of the last military dictatorship.

Contemporaries or near contemporaries of these three include Haroldo Conti, also murdered by the military juntas, author of Sudeste, the novel that gave the Tigre delta its literary entity. Sudeste is a novel wholly devoted to the minutiae of physical action, in the manner of Hemingways’ “Big Two-hearted river”—the acts of fishing, cooking, mending clothes, rowing and dying. Conti’s foray into the revolutionary magic realism of the 70s, Mascaró, is not as wholly succesful.

Antonio Di Benedetto, who survived imprisonment and torture but died years later of the consequences, wrote the impeccable Zama, set in the days of the Spanish colonization, a novel that can claim its place among the literature of hopeless waiting together with Kafka’s The Castle, Beckett’s Godot, Dino Buzatti’s The Desert of the Tartars and García Márquez El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. The ending, with a wanted criminal forming part of the posse persecuting him, is worthy of Chesterton or Philip K. Dick.

Raúl Damonte, better known as Copi, wrote mostly in French, demented novels that seem quite alien to our tradition—unless we are willing to incorporate, as some have, Witold Gombrowicz into it. Copi’s plays are arguably our best after—or together with—Arlt’s. Copi is also, together with the poet, essayist and short story writer Néstor Perlongher, one of the icons of our gay tradition. Perlongher’s claim to originality in Argentine literature also rests in his incopororation of the Gongorean Neobaroque tropicalism of Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, and others—before him the influence of the Spanish Baroque on Argentine literature, mainly through Borges, came more from the comparatively ascetic language and conceptual games of Cervantes and Quevedo than from the decorative proliferation of Góngora and his school. Eva Perón reappears in the work of these two writers: her theatrical or Hollywoodesque excess in Copi’s play Eva Perón, her protean capacity for transformation in Perlongher’s “Evita vive”, where she is at once whore, junkie and dead. Gay writers, Eloy Martínez claims, have understood her figure better than anybody in our literature. The trilogy of Argentine eccentrics is completed by Osvaldo Lamborghini. His story “El pibe Barulo” offers a rather perverse twist on the Greek topic of fate: a young boy inexorably doomed to be raped because of his fat ass provides a hilarious and very politically incorrect examination of the homoerotic roots of Argentine machismo, advanced in Gombrowicz’s Transatlantic and developed in Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña. Lamborghini is also quite good at rendering the perspective of children, but he differs from Silvina Ocampo and Cortázar in that all his children are little monsters.

At this stage, having come to the end of this inevitably personal overview, I can expand on our starting point. Argentine literature is not so much haunted by demons as stalked by monsters. Sarmiento’s dichotomy places the menace outside culture and the psyche: in the civilization/barbarity dichotomy, danger for literature comes from without. For us writing is not so much exorcism as combat. It’s not so much one’s own demons that must be cast out, but the demons of others that must be kept at bay.

And thus we reach te close of our talk. I will say nothing of the individual writers of my generation, as you will probably be meeting them yourselves and I don’t want to influence your better judgement. But there is one thing I would like to say about us, taken as a group. If what I said at the beginning is not entirely untrue, then the writers of my age have the greatest challenge to face, as no monsters in Argentine history can compare to those that carried out the greatest campaign of terror this country has ever known. Ricardo Piglia, one of the leading critics and writers of today, argues in his stimulating first novel, Respiración artificial, that we cannot say anything about the world of Auschwitz—a world beyond language. Auschwitz, of course, was his way of naming the last military dictatorship while it was still on, at the time when his novel was written and published. Literature—not to mention its writers – feels impotent before the magnitude of this task. We will do our best, and hopefully what little we can achieve may be taken up and continued by others following in our steps.

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Argentine authors and works mentioned in the course of this essay:

• Esteban Echeverría (1805-1851): La cautiva; “El matadero”

• José Mármol (1818-1871): Amalia

• Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888): Facundo: civilización y barbarie; El Chacho, último caudillo de la montonera en los llanos de la Rioja

• José Hernández (1834-1886): El gaucho Martín Fierro (la ida); La vuelta de Martín Fierro

• William Henry Hudson (1841-1922): “Marta Riquelme”

• Ricardo Rojas (1882-1957): Historia de la literatura argentina

• Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938): El payador; Las fuerzas extrañas

• Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1926): Don Segundo Sombra

• Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937): “La gallina degollada”; “El almohadón de plumas”; “La miel silvestre”; Cuentos de la selva; Más Allá

• Roberto Arlt (1900-1942): El juguete rabioso; Los siete locos; Los lanzallamas; Saverio el cruel; Trescientos millones

• Luisa Valenzuela: Cola de lagartija

• Leopoldo Marechal (1900-1970): Adán Buenosayres

• Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986): “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”; “Poema conjetural”; “Nuestro pobre individualismo”; “El indigno”; Evaristo Carriego; “El fin”; “El muerto”; “El evangelio según Marcos”; “Hombre de la esquina rosada”; “Historia de Rosendo Juárez”; “El sur”; “El escritor argentino y la tradición”; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; “La biblioteca de Babel”; “El inmortal”; “El Aleph”

• H. Bustos Domecq (Borges + Bioy Casares): “La fiesta del monstruo”

• Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969): �հ��������ٱ�á�Գپ�����

• Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999): El sueño de los héroes; La invención de Morel

• Victoria Ocampo (1891-1979)

• Silvina Ocampo (1906-1994)

• Sara Gallardo (1931-1988)

• Beatriz Guido (1924-1988): El incendio y las vísperas

• Silvina Bullrich (1915-1990)

• Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938)

• Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972)

• Griselda Gambaro (b. 1928)

• Angélica Gorodischer (b. 1928)

• Julio Cortázar (1914-1984): Rayuela; “Casa tomada.”

• Ernesto Sábato (b. 1911): Sobre héroes y tumbas

• Manuel Puig (1932-1990): La traición de Rita Hayworth; Boquitas pintadas; The Buenos Aires Affair; El beso de la mujer araña

• Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977): Operación masacre; “Fotos”; “Cartas”; “Nota al pie”; “Esa mujer”

• Juan José Saer (1937-2007): Cicatrices; El entenado; Glosa

• Haroldo Conti (1925-1976?): Sudeste; Mascaró

• Antonio Di Benedetto (1922-1986): Zama

• Copi (Raúl Damonte) (1939-1987): Eva Perón

• Néstor Perlongher (1949-1992): “Evita vive”

• Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940-1985): “El pibe Barulo”

• Ricardo Piglia (b. 1940): Respiración artificial

The quality of Argentine literature has always depended on the quality of its monsters. This might help explain why Argentine literature was off to a good start and a bad start almost simultaneously, and both at the hands of the same writer: Esteban Echeverría.

In La cautiva, a long narrative poem published in 1837, the enemies are the native inhabitants, “the indian” as they were invariably called, and the heroine, a white woman abducted by them—a topic later to recur in William Henry Hudson’s “Marta Riquelme” and in Borges’ “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva”. Echeverría’s poem is wordy, bathetic, unsufferably Romantic, and one would be tempted to set it forth as an example that a justification—however oblique—of genocide can never aspire to aesthetic greatness, if the second part of Martín Fierro, as we will see, would later offer much of the same fare but this time in powerful and authentic verse.

El matadero, on the other hand, is perhaps—even by today’s standards—one of the best pieces Argentine short prose has to show. The setting is as Argentinian as can be: a slaughterhosue for cattle in our first period of bloody tyranny, that of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled the country from 1829 to 1852. The slaughter of the animals metaphorically stands (as later in Eisenstein’s Strike!) for that of political dissenters, one of which, a young unitario, is eventually dragged to the slaughterhouse and publicly tortured, and is only spared from further humiliation (rape, if not mentioned, is implied) by what seems to be a timely heart attack.

Why is La cautiva so bad and El matadero, written more or less at the same time, so good? In part because “the indian”, seen as a terrible menace by the white men of the time, was really a victim, and a doomed victim at that. Rosas and his gangs of killers, known as the Mazorca, were on the other hand a formidable and terrifying enemy—and for twenty years writing was the only effective weapon to be mobilized against them. For his opposers, Rosas’ dictatorship represented the triumph of the primitive, barbaric and rural America of the past over the modern and cosmopolitan civilization they heralded. For this reason, artists and intellectuals were, as a block, united against him. One could say that Rosas scared the Argentine intelligentsia into art, thus inaugurating two lasting traditions: that of turning to literature when politics offers no outlet, and that of the artist-or-intellectual-in-exile. Rosas also supplied our cultural unconscious with one of its first icons of horror: that of the severed heads of the opposers lined upon the cart of a melon vendor—throat-cutting and beheading were emblematic of Rosas’ reign of terror just as ‘the disappeared’ have been emblematic of that of the recent military juntas. The anti-Rosas sentiment fuelled the birth of the Argentine novel (Amalia, by José Mármol) and, more significantly (since Amalia, as a novel, is rather bad), of a mixed genre we could term the narrative essay, noticeably in the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.

His Facundo: civilización y barbarie is a biographical interpretation of the figure of the rural caudillo (a semi-feudal type of warlord) Facundo Quiroga. In Sarmiento’s view there were two Argentinas: one represented by cities and written culture, which was modern, civilized, cosmopolitan; the other represented by the rural hinterland: backward, savage, cruel. All the enemies of civilization—Rosas, the gaucho and the indian – are conflated by Sarmiento into one (notwithstanding the fact that Rosas conducted the first large-scale campaign against the natives, and the gauchos were its executors). In Sarmiento’s view the two Argentinas cannot be united or reconciled: one must triumph over the other and absorb it. This helps to understand why the civil war that raged before, during and after Rosas’ rule was basically a war between Buenos Aires and the provinces.

The conflict described by Sarmiento became a crux for discussions about identity and nationalism. For later nationalists, Sarmiento’s Argentina was enlightened but inauthentic, and even a writer as free of any vestige of nationalism as Borges will have the bookish Laprida, hero of his “Poema conjetural” say, while hunted down and killed by the brutal gauchos, “an inexplicable joy /swells divine in my breast / at last I am meeting, face to face /my South American destiny.”

The writers of Rosas’ time saw themselves as victims, and we all know that believing you are the victim is, once you’ve reached power, one of the best alibis for committing atrocities without feeling any guilt. Very soon, after Rosas’ overthrow, they turned from persecuted to persecutors and forgot all about writing (historically, if not individually, losers often make better writers than winners). The gaucho became the enemy of progress, the symbol of what should be overcome. In their collective mode, the montoneras, they were persecuted and exterminated, noticeably by Sarmiento himself, who conducted the campaign against the last great rural leader of the montoneras, Chacho Peñaloza. Sarmiento, extending his gift for irony from prose into fact, had him beheaded after defeating him in 1863, a practical joke he rounded off three years later by publishing a life of Chacho (El Chacho, último caudillo de la montonera en los llanos de La Rioja) he himself wrote.

But if the gauchos couldn’t be upheld in the collective mode, as a group, the gaucho as individual, the loner, now become the victim of economic exploitation and the more or less unwilling executor of the genocide of the natives, was ripe for defense.

José Hernández wrote El gaucho Martín Fierro in 1872 as a pamphlet denouncing the misery and oppression of the rural population, forced into a semi-nomadic existence by the impossibility of owning land, wholly in the hand of the large estancieros or landowners, and forced into serving in the fortines or forts separating the areas occupied by white men from the realms of the indomitable indios. For the first time, but certainly not for the last, the monster of Argentine literature was the modern state, the legal system, the army, the police—what not so long ago Sarmiento had grouped under the pole of “civilization.” In a memorable page titled “Nuestro pobre individualismo” Borges names the most famous night in Argentine literature, that in which police sergeant Cruz turns against his own men and joins the persecuted gaucho Martín Fierro. We Argentinians, Borges explains, see ourselves as individuals, never as citizens: we cannot conceive of any abstract relationship, and for us personal friendship will always be more important than duty to state and country. At the close of Martín Fierro the hero and his newly found friend cross the border and “go over to the indians”—another twist in our time-honoured topic of exile, whether political, as in the distant and not so distant past, or economic, as today.

Seven years later Hernández publishes the second part (La vuelta de Martín Fierro), in which, as Thomas Pynchon in a memorable chapter of Gravity’s Rainbow, put it, “even the freest of Gauchos end up selling out”. The indians that offered a safe haven are now monsters unfit to live, and the gaucho preaches obedience and respect for authority. What has changed? A lot. The long civil war has come to its close, its last, residual battle fought in 1880: The Argentine bourgeoisie, urban and rural, has formed a united front against the common enemy, the indian, still holding more than half of the richest arable land in the world. The Return of Martín Fierro is published in the same year in which a modern and well planned military campaign sweeps the pampas from Buenos Aires to Patagonia and not only defeats the natives but expels them from those rich territories forever.

Martín Fierro, its few predecessors and a veritable deluge of successors configure the first wholly Argentine literary genre, the gauchesca. A feature singles out the gauchesca from much of the rural literature of Latin America: its complete disregard for superstition, the fantastic, the supernatural: closer in this to their authors than to their real life models, the gauchos of the gauchesca are wholly secular and live in a wasteland of unbelief. Thus magic realism could never achieve a strong foothold in Argentine literature, except, perhaps, in the feverish imagination of pseudo-Argentine novelists such as Lawrence Thornton, author of Imagining Argentina.

From 1880 to around 1910 (the Centennial) our literature is written by aristocratic gentlemen. Argentina is an oligarchy, as the first truly democratic elections would be held only in 1914. A veritable flood of European immigrants (only comparable to that which at the same time was pouring into the U.S.) was seemingly making Sarmiento’s dream of a modern and civilized Argentina finally come true. But the immigrants weren’t all as docile as these gentlemen expected. Many of them were highly cultured, and thus not dazzled by the local celebrities. Many were Anarchists or Socialists, and the Argentine ruling classes saw with horror the first organized labour movements and the first mass strikes. Their writers saw this menace in terms of a threat to Argentine values and way of life: our identity was about to be swamped in a deluge of foreigness. Argentine identity had to be invented before it was too late, and the intellectuals took the first ready-made model thay had at hand: the gaucho. The Centennial saw the canonization of the gaucho as an archetype of national identity, the formerly disregarded gauchesca as the quintessentially Argentinian literary genre, and Martín Fierro as our national epic. Ricardo Rojas in his History of Argentine Literature, and specially the Modernist poet Leopoldo Lugones (“Modernist” in the Latin American sense of the school led by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío) in a series of lectures titled El payador, furthered this view. The ferocity of this defense of the gaucho and his spent socio-economical force can only be explained as a reaction against the new monster: the radical politics and the radical ideas of the European immigrants. Ricardo Güiraldes’ novel Don Segundo Sombra is perhaps the last great work of the gauchesca: a novel combining the topics of gaucho literature with the poetics of French Symbolism, it is a long goodbye to the genre.

Because this revival of the gaucho spirit was essentially a Romantic and nostalgic gesture that only proved the inevitability of change. Argentine society at the turn of the century had become cosmopolitan, with its population composed of almost 35% foreigners, mostly of European origin (which in the decisive province of Buenos Aires reached 55%). Writers and writing also changed. The first generation of the 20th Century saw the emergence of the professional writers—that is, those who didn’t posses large personal or family fortunes, didn’t pursue writing as an adjunct to political activity and made, or at least attempted to make, a living through their pens, and who belonged in the main to the middle classes, many of immigrant descent. The most representative is undoubtedly Roberto Arlt, the father of the Argentine novel as we know it. Arlt came from the lower middle class, had a very basic education and was monolingual (in one of his prologues he frets and fumes against those who could read Joyce’s Ulysses, as yet untranslated). Arlt’s first novel, El juguete rabioso, is a semi-autobiographical picaresque: its hero, Silvio Astier, has access to culture through the books he steals. Towards the end he is tempted into joining a gang of professional thieves whom he, reversing Cruz’s magnificent gesture in Martín Fierro, betrays to the police. A similar gesture of betrayal is effected by the protagonist of “El indigno,” Borges’ unacknowledged homage to Arlt. Arlt’s masterpiece is the saga composed by the two novels Los siete locos and Los lanzallamas, which follow its hero Remo Erdosain from embezzlement, through a failed career as inventor and revolutionary conspirator, into suicide. The plot centers on a revolutionary organization in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Demons: a loose amalgam of Lenin’s bolshevism, Italian fascism and the Ku-Klux Klan, led by an astrologist and financed by a chain of brothels. (Those who smile at the possibility might remember the last days of Perón’s goverment, wholly managed by our local Rasputin, the infamous López Rega, who was said to control presidents Juan and Isabel Perón through Brazilian umbanda rites practiced on the embalmed mummy of Eva Perón—as fictionally depicted in Luis Valenzuela’s Cola de lagartija). The two novels were published in 1929 and 1931, immediately before and after the first of a long series of military coups, and one of undoubtedly fascist inspiration at that. Arlt captured the whole gamut of social and political phantasmagoria of the Argentine 20th Century: all the phantoms brewing in the paranoid minds of the military and the ruling classes, all the high ideals and not-so-high methods of conspirators meet in his hallucinated world. His influence on essential writers like Rodolfo Walsh, Juan José Saer and the Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti is unmistakable, and Arlt’s novels are still the most powerful our literature has to offer. In his latter years (he lived to be 42) he switched to the theatre, with works like Saverio el Cruel (where a travelling salesman is asked to play the part of a dictator) and Trescientos millones (which takes place in the vengeful dream-world of a molested house-maid) both of which anticipate in spirit and tone Jean Genet’s plays The Balcony or The Maids. One of Arlt’s most appealing features is his unsentimental portrayal of the failed and the impoverished: all his “poor people” are mean and evil, their souls warped by envy, jealousy and frustration. In this he is miles apart from the critical but ultimately benevolent realism of those contemporaries he is sometimes yoked together with, the “social” writers of the Boedo Tradition.

A contemporary of Arlt, and another great novelist, is Leopoldo Marechal, whose Adán Buenosayres inaugurates in Argentina the time-honored tradition of rewriting Joyce’s Ulysses in a local format (as Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz in Germany or Martin-Santos’ Tiempo de silencio in Spain)—Argentine literature has shown itself very porous to the influence of Joyce, perhaps because Joyce offered a formula for standing neo-colonial impotence on its head, showing how political and economic submission could be inverted in the realm of culture. In this regard I should mention that the first—and in my opinion still the best—translation of Ulysses into Spanish was published in Buenos Aires in 1945. Marechal’s massive novel is marred by its last 2 (out of a total of 7), parts by the rather pedestrian application of Dante’s method of taking revenge on friends and foes by placing them in the circles of hell. Adán Buenosayres was published in 1948, during the first government of Perón, of whom the author was a confessed supporter. As the Argentine writers and intellectuals rallied against Perón (and were antagonized by him) with the same zest their predecessors had rallied against Rosas (Borges, as many of them, always spoke of Perón’s government as “The Second Tyranny”) Marechal’s novel was either ridiculed or ignored – its first edition took 17 years to sell. Only a young and unknown reviewer hailed it as a major landmark in Argentine literature: his name was Julio Cortázar.

If Dostoevsky (read in the awful style of the Spanish translations of his day) was the formative inflence on Arlt’s powerful but rather messy style, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe were the shaping force behind those of Horacio Quiroga, born in Uruguay but living and writing mostly in Argentina, and on Argentine topics. Argentine narrative has always been stronger on the short story than on the novel form, which makes it very puzzling when Argentine editors, today, systematically answer the authors’ submissions with “no short stories please.” Horacio Quiroga is the master of the Argentine horror story: whether of a pampered little girl slaughtered by her four idiotic brothers (imagine Caddy Compson murdered by four Benjys, and you get the picture), as in “La gallina degollada” or a bedridden bride sucked dry by a monstrous louse lurking in her feather pillow, as in “El almohadón de plumas,” or a young man paralized by wild honey and eaten alive by jungle ants in “La miel silvestre”. Quiroga eventually moved to the jungles of Misiones, where he led the life of a pioneer. The jungle operated on him as Tahiti on Gaugin and Tangiers on Paul Bowles, and his stories set in this wild frontier are arguably his best, recovering the old 19th Century angst over the horrors of unbridled nature. His stories for children, collected in the book Cuentos de la selva, are still the most popular in our literature.

But of course, if we say that Argentine Literature is based on the short story, it is because this was the form favoured by Jorge Luis Borges, without any doubt the greatest Argentine writer of all times. It would be preposterous to try and sum up Borges’ significance in the few paragraphs I can devote to him: the most I can attempt is to place him in the context of a literature he contains and transcends. Two main lines can be traced in Borges’ literature: the maternal line is derived from his personal family history, linked by blood ties to all the great names of our national history: these texts have an oral slant in language and syntax and deal mostly with local topics and settings. These include his first books of poetry, the biographical essay Evaristo Carriego and all the stories set in the pampas of the gaucho (“El fin”, which gives an ending to Martín Fierro, “La intrusa”, perhaps the finest analysis of machismo, “El muerto”, a rewriting of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday set in the wild frontier of Uruguay and Brazil, and “El evangelio según Marcos”, which relocates the crucifixion in the pampas). It also includes the stories of manliness and courage set in the suburbs of Palermo, where Borges lived as a child: the world of the tango and the orillero, where the only men who mattered were the brave, and courage was always proved at knife-point: “Hombre de la esquina rosada”, “Historia de Rosendo Juárez” and a host of others emphasizing an ethics of courage—their focus placed on the pole of barbarity Echeverría and Sarmiento had deplored. The other main line in Borges’ writing, the “civilized” line, derives mostly from his father’s side, particularly from his library full of English books. Because of it Borges was often accused of being foreign or European in his subjects and concerns. Of course he was, and that is why Borges’ work is the summa of Argentine literature: if his roots run deep into our rural 19th century past, the Spanish and criollo culture, his education takes place in the period in which European immigration changed our racial, cultural and linguistic identity for good. Many of his stories dramatize this conflicting sense of identity: in “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva” he gives us the twin stories of a barbarian who changed sides and defended the Roman empire, and of an Englishwoman who turned indian and rejected civilization, and argues that both made basically the same choice; in “El sur” a bookish reader of gauchesca lays dying in a hospital and is given the chance (whether by God or by his own delirium, the story, modeled on James’ The Turn of the Screw, won’t say) of dying in the open air, in an authentic gaucho duel. This duality also helps explain Borges’ fascination with Anglo-Saxon Literature: The Anglo-Saxons are the barbarians of English culture, which for Borges and many of his group epitomized civilization, and through them the opposition of civilization and barbarity is subverted and confused. The ethics of courage in a macho-centric feudal or neo-feudal context equates in a way the worlds of Beowulf and Martín Fierro. (Borges probably learned the trick from one of his favourie novels, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where we are reminded that the most civilized nation on earth, the British, were once the savage Britons who drove the civilized Romans to despair and madness in the swamps and jungles of the Thames.)

In terms of Argentine, or perhaps Latin American literature, Borges is unique for two main reasons. One is linguistic: he is undoubtedly the best writer in the Spanish language after Cervantes and his contemporaries, and with him the norm of Literature in Spanish decidedly shifts from Spain to the Americas. Just as the Irish like Yeats, Joyce and Beckett taught English writers how to write in English; Borges, García Márquez, Cabrera Infante and a host of others have saved Spanish Literature from itself, or as Borges himself would have it, from “the vain symmetries of the Spanish style.”

Borges is also unique in terms of his influence on the mainstream writers of the Western canon. Poe was perhaps the first writer from the Americas to influence and shape European Literature (I am thinking, of course, of Baudelaire and French Symbolism), but Borges is undoubtedly the first writer from a Latin American country to alter the local traditions of strong literatures: he has changed the way North Americans read Hawthorne or Whitman, the way the English read the Anglo-Saxons or Stevenson, the way Italians read Dante or Spaniards read Cervantes. In his famous essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” he defended not only our right to consider all Western Literature as our own, but predicted we had a greater capacity to change it than its true possesors—as we were, like the Jews and the Irish, both inside and outside this tradition. The prediction was true, of course, at least when applied to Borges himself—a good example of a self-fulfilled prophecy.

So as from the 50s our literature has had to deal with two types of monsters. One was, as in the past, political. Perón, who is elected president in 1945, was seen by the conservative writers of the aristocracy as a second Rosas, and by the progressive or left wing writers as a Fascist; and his followers, mostly inner migrants from the backward rural areas, were seen as the new violent rabble invading the cities. Given this vast coincidence, it is noticeable that anti-peronist literature didn’t produce any memorable pages—the reason probably was that Peronism, its intolerance towards dissenters and high culture excepted, was progressive in terms of economic and social justice. The best example of anti-peronist literature is Borges’ and Bioy Casares’ short story “La fiesta del monstruo”, a rigorous reenactment of Echeverria’s El matadero with the peronist rabble playing the part of the Mazorca and a book-carrying Jewish intellectual that of the young unitario, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the battering of the middle aged reader in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. This story is written in an artificial popular dialect strongly favoured by Borges’ and Bioy Casares’ third mind (I am borrowing the term from William Burroughs and Brion Gysin), also known as Bustos Domecq. A style, incidentally, both of which avoided when writing on their own.

What Borges couldn’t see at the time was that the real danger for Argentine literature, its new monster, didn’t come from politics but from literature itself. And the name of the monster was none other than Jorge Luis Borges. Argentine literature after Borges has been one long and desperate attempt to get away from what Tomás Eloy Martínez has aptly termed, paraphrasing the beginning of Sarmiento’s Facundo, “la sombra terrible de Borges”—Borges’ terrible shadow.

Adolfo Bioy Casares was fingered for doom. Being Borges’ personal friend, writing in collaboration, belonging very much to the same aristocratic milieu, only meant he could never extricate himself from his elder’s crushing influence. One of his best novels, El sueño de los héroes, is an expanded version of Borges’ “El sur”; and his science fiction classic, La invención de Morel, explores the ontological themes of Borges’ fiction such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (in which Bioy himself is, incidentally, a character) and others. The measure of this melancholy fate can be gauged in the many interviews in which Bioy was always questioned more on Borges than on himself.

Luckier was Julio Cortázar. Writing at a time when Borges was still unpopular and little understood, shifting to the French language and Literature as models (Borges’ language and literature, needless to say, are modeled on the English), embracing the avant-garde with the same zest Borges had rejected it, inaugurating a lifelong voluntary exile, and eventually deepening his left-wing sympathies as Borges aired his right-wing ones, he managed to put some distance between himself and his monstrous predecessor. Cortazar’s short stories became popular while Borges’ were still considered difficult or abstruse—and reading Cortázar helped train the common reader in the skills necessary for reading Borges. Cortázar became famous worldwide for his novel Rayuela, where all the devices of the French literary avant-garde, from Surrealism to Oulipo, seem to converge, but it is already clear that he will be remembered for his short stories, which envelop us in a sense of undefined uncanniness as no other in the language. Cortázar also had a natual genius for writing from the perspective of children—a trick Borges never mastered: all his children sound middle-aged.

Ernesto Sábato, the only surviving great figure of the generation of Cortázar and Bioy, has a mixed reputation. Revered as “the master” by the common reader and official culture (presidents, wether local or visiting, for some reason love to be photographed with him), he does not awaken the same enthusiasm among literary critics—specially academic. Of his meager production of three novels, Sobre héroes y tumbas is undoubtedly the best, and a great favourite with teenagers. Will Sábato remain a star in the canon of Argentine literature? Only time will tell. But if we consider his influence on the actual writing of other writers coming after him—his prospects don’t seem too good. Perhaps Sábato’s main drawback is that he saw himself not as a disciple but as a rival of Borges. In this novel he has a character dismiss Borges’ “philosophical” stories—has him say for example that “La biblioteca de Babel” results from confusing the notions of indefiniteness and infinity, and suggests that the best of Borges can be found in his poems on the streets and parks of Buenos Aires. All of this is fatal. A post-borgesian Argentine writer cannot choose to ignore Borges; one must grapple with him, doing one’s best, knowing one will lose. Underestimating Borges offers the easiest shortcut into literary weakness.