At what point does someone start reading? What episodes and habits are part of that story of origin? In what way does reading drive writing, which, in turn, over time redirects reading exploration?
These questions were addressed by the handful of Argentine and Latin American writers (including Noé Jitrik, Sylvia Molloy, Alan Pauls, Jorge Monteleone, Edgardo Cozarinsky and Margo Glantz) who have contributed their book to the “Lector@s” collection. from Ampersand Publishing House.
In profane avellaneda (which is integrated into the constellation of Virgil’s wheelof Love and of the essays on Barthes and Kafka), Luis Gusmán also does the same: he goes back to his childhood to, from there, climb up to the present and account for his relationship with books.
The volume begins with the conviction that reading is a key that opens doors to other worlds (a conviction that is the product of his own life experience, as well as quotes and anecdotes found in other writers). An idea –that of the doors to other worlds– that may sound banal, but whose complexity we realize when we advance through the pages and find out regarding the gears and the characters that activated the process: a reading grandfather, a singing father of tangos, a mother devoted to spiritualism.
Beyond the fact that books and reading are the excuse or the initial reason, profane avellaneda It is fundamentally an autobiographical narration that in its development is annexing different aspects of personal history: Avellaneda and the neighborhoods of childhood, the need to read to order the tango lyrics that he knew by heart, but whose meaning escaped him, the first dances and challenges to masculinity, the discoveries of comics, the Racing club and its library (where he met, among many others, the works of Felisberto Hernández, Borges, Bioy Casares and Gombrowicz).
Later on, he deals with moving to the capital and working in bookstores, another threshold that he crossed and that opened the doors to other streets and other links, but more than anything to a labyrinthine and less measurable cartography: complicity with other writers ( Germán García, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Ricardo Zelarayán), psychoanalysis, magazine projects Literal y Place.
In addition, crossing that threshold would mean writing his books: the first, deviated from the norm, like The bottle, glitters, veiled body; “lost books”, as Gusmán himself insinuates, written with a crossed eye perhaps due to the squint he suffered as a child. And years or decades later, from the novel Villa and of some contemporary tales, the arrival of a certain form in which the style is more adjusted to the rigor of the plot.
With this autobiography it becomes clear how writing contributes to organizing the always confusing universe of reading in life, and of the life of reading. And it does so in a coming and going that glimpses another logic, which at times confirms and at others contradicts that of chronology and linearity.
- profane avellaneda. From Luis Gusman. Editorial Ampersand. Buenos Aires. 224 pages. 2022. $1,800
