Sergio Pitol (1933–2018)

This collection did not work for me on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with, overall, the entire endeavor of reading these stories was a slog. It reached the point where I dreaded attacking the next story, knowing I would lose the battle. And I cannot recommend highly enough avoiding, at all costs, even bothering.

First, the excruciating attention to details. Sentences that went on forever; paragraphs that went on forever. And none of it seemed to be in the show more service of anything except the act of putting out a lot of words. The details added nothing to whatever story was evolving, and the meandering sidetracks within those details (which may be part of what people love about the writing – I can’t figure it out) only served to drag the pieces deeper into their own navels.

And that results in the second issue: the shear density – both in content and visually – of the writing. Entire pages are made up of single paragraphs and, perhaps, single sentences. (I was too weary from slogging my way through to actually go back and check this hypothesis. If it is not true, it sure feels like it it.) it is tough to look at a page completely covered with print and thing “Oh boy, I get to read that!”

Third, a number of the stories are the narrator discussing drafts of novels that are in process. I think the discussions are supposed to bring added light to both subjects of the piece – the people in the real world and the actions that occur in the novel synopses. But it seemed like each of these pieces was just the author not wanting to work on the idea he had concocted so, instead, he just put the synopsis into a short story.

Finally, the stories seem to have no reason for existence. Plots are minimal, developing next to nothing, and the introspection that appears to be the primary purpose for these pieces is, when you can dig your way through the prose, not particularly moving.

And one more thing. I do not comment on the typos for an advance review copy. I understand they will be cleared up in the final edition. However, in this case they were rampant. And the only reason I bring this up is that, in some instance, it felt like these were actually the result of the translation. I can’t put my finger on it, but I began to wonder if part of the failure of this collection was in the translation.

The translation issue is not something I can ever know the answer to. However, I can definitely know that the other issues are real and they have resulted in a reading experience that no one should have to go through. show less

I had never heard of Sergio Pitol, a renown Mexican author, before getting this book. This isn't a huge surprise, though, because his work really hadn't been translated into English until just before his death in 2018. This collection of short stories were selected by Pitol as some of his favorites from across his career (they are arranged chronologically by publication date, ranging from 1957-1994). The stories are challenging and engrossing and difficult to describe. Pitol was a fiction show more writer throughout his life, but professionally he was also a diplomat (he spoke seven languages and lived all over the world, eventually serving as Mexico's ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1980s), and a translator. His stories are frequently about Mexican diplomats or businessmen or writers living abroad. Often the stories are about the process of writing. The narrator may start by remembering an incident from his past, then veers to a work in progress and tries on different ways to start the story, then veers again. In almost all the cases, we are dropped into the story with a series of sentences that barely hold together, with clauses and diversions that necessitate visiting the start of the sentence again once you've finally come to the end of it. That sounds bad, but it is actually amazing! Once you get into the stories a bit, it all comes together, and the mix of memoir and fiction, and Pitol's ability to pull the reader close at the same time that he pushes you away, make for some very unusual and compelling stories. show less

This is an extraordinary collection. As I read I felt like I was in the presence of a unique and creative and perceptive and restless mind. The stories challenged me. Frequently I found myself wondering what I was missing. But I just lived with that feeling, because it never got in the way of another feeling, the feeling of being given a gift, the gift of a new way of seeing, a new way of perceiving the world, a new way of thinking about language and its intentions. Of being in the company show more of a very unusual person, someone with unique perspectives. One thing I never felt was that Pitol was trying to make things easy for me. I needed to be an equal partner. I needed to pay attention. I was deeply rewarded. show less

I bought this the moment I saw Vila-Matas had written an introduction. He calls Pitol "the greatest Spanish-language writer of our time," says he has a "passion for confusing life and literature," and that the crucial marker of his style is the idea of "fleeing anyone who is so dreadful as to be full of certainty."

But this book is disappointing. Pitol does confuse life and literature, or rather, he is immersed in literary imagining, and his mind is populated mainly by the names and lives of show more hundreds of authors. In that it's like Vila-Matas's "Dublinesque" and his other books. But an indifferently veiled autobiography of the author whose imagination consists entirely of other authors is not an easy subject. One thing it absolutely requires, I would think, is real engagement with the ghosts, the literary voices, the contemporaries. Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." does that very well, because it is about paralysis, inaction, abnegation, and silence. Here the names are just a cavalcade of Mexican and other authors, as in some of Bolaño's work, but without even the interest Bolaño's mixtures of literary culture, imaginary stories, and real politics.

Pitol is safe inside his world of authors: they are a comfort to him, they're the air he breathes, they nourish his imagination. The authors he thinks of do not haunt him (as writers haunt Pessoa, Borges, Bolaño, as they bewitch "Bartleby & Co."). In fact the novels Pitol has read seem barely to talk to him except in generalities and stray remembered quotations that serve more as decorations than insights, and this novel's philosophic moments are mainly asides that come up when Pitol has a temporary respite from the continuous rain of thoughts about publishing, fame or its absence, literary lineages, schools, manners, communities, and histories.

This is the literary life as cocoon. Sometimes the threads of an author's cocoon can be so fine, so capacious, that they seem like the air itself. The cocoon seems to disappear, and the author imagines himself in touch with the raw world itself. But this is not life, this is embalmed and becalmed and proof against any intrusion. Pitol reminds me, in that respect, of the late Bellow, so warmed by his self-regard and the praise of the friends and readers he'd chosen.

The only parts of the world that intrude are clichés. The book opens with some awful pages about Venice, in which the narrator rehearses all sorts of commonplaces about the city: he knows they are episodes from the history of the city, because he's read so much fiction and poetry set in Venice: but it doesn't seem to occur to him they are all, every last one of them, comforting clichés, received knowledge, the sort of thing Bouvard and Pécuchet would have tried and abandoned, the sort of thing Pessoa or Beckett or Bernhard would never go near. show less