For reasons I don’t quite understand, although Metempsychosis, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s most recent book can be obtained in physical copy in many of the countries where his publisher has offices, here where I live you can barely access the electronic copy (not in all bookstores).
Yes, the previous lines are a kind of claim, on behalf of the remaining literary readers: I understand that the publishers (against their editors, defeated by the departments of marketingwhose unconscious objective seems to be the extinction of the reader who does not lend himself to inconsequential readings, but of immediate profit) work according to unspeakable commitments, but I do not understand that the appearance of a new book by the Guatemalan author is not celebrated, everywhere, like a party
Among other reasons, the surprise
A couple of weeks ago, at a table at the Centroamérica Cuenta festival, talking about artificial intelligence, algorithms and promts, it became clear that one of the problems of current reality is the annihilation of surprise: the funnel of taste becomes an unalterable vector and desire, unfortunately, gives way to what is already desired. Do you like yellow dogs? You will know everything about yellow dogs, but you will never see a blue dog… not to mention a cat, whatever color it may be… and forget about birds! The world that is emerging, however, brings the impulse that we, its ultimate creators, have given it, in all spaces, orders and levels.
As far as we are concerned here, which are books, that is, writing, editing and reading, things have not been so different; We are not, I mean, an exception, although we would love to think that: during the last decades, little by little, in the majority of publishing houses, it does not matter if they are large groups or independent ones, they seem to have decided that their authors would be better as they were more predictable or, at least, as long as they were not surprising (this predictability, of course, does not only concern what is told, that is, the stories, but also the way in which it is told, that is, to language): “Menganito returns to the territory from which he never left”, “Perenganito continues with the way of telling that we fell in love with”. In this sense: who wants to celebrate a party for the appearance of the latest novel by an author who refuses such predictability?
Rodrigo Rey Rosa is always a rebellion, a revolt against the stories he has told before and also against the forms he has used: he knows, he understands, well (in addition to clinging to the only inalienable right that every great writer should hold, that is , being a different writer in each book), that there is nothing more important than surprise. And this, the surprise, should not only assail the reader and despair the editor, but should be the ultimate fuel of writing. What writer can feel or call himself a writer, if he writes with the ways of what has already been done, I mean, if he does not discover the stories again and again, if he does not reconquer the language again and again?
‘Metempsychosis’
Metempsychosis, lRey Rosa’s most recent novel—where the form is a flaming kaleidoscope; where one character, who will later become two, is narrated in the first person, but also in the third person; where the puzzle is put together with pieces of metafiction, crime novel or clinical trial, or where the fabric of reality unravels at the edges, to be knotted with the threads, also untied, of madness—, is, at least for me, a party that should be global, for what has been said, that is, because it surprises as a whole and also on each page, but, above all, because it is beautiful.
In Metempsychosis The story is beautiful—a man who does not remember faces the manuscript he wrote before getting lost in the corridors of his mind, a manuscript that also seems to tell him, not only as a being but also as a character, and not only as a man of reason, also of spirit – and the language is beautiful – in each of Rey Rosa’s writings, the words are born in a new sense, as if by being there, in what he tells, they meant something more and sounded like music. new-.
“He is the best writer of my generation,” wrote, as almost everyone knows—except, perhaps, the marketing people at the publishing houses—Roberto Bolaño, about Rey Rosa. What fewer people know is that the Chilean writer also wrote, regarding the Guatemalan: “reading him is always like learning to write.” And, of course, one only learns from what one does not know, from what one has never read before.
So you will forgive the insistence, but I repeat: Metempsychosis —novel in which time folds so that one believes one is in a wormhole that unites Pythagoras with Pope Bergoglio, the wazaries with immortal beggars and atoms of opposite charges, and the victims of desire with the inhabitants of a refugee camp—is a party.
“If it was not a mere coincidence that led him to that city that fall, what was it? If one was not capable of inventing one’s own God (writing, for example: God is the smallest thing that could exist in any World) – he reasoned – one was not worthy of having it either. Strictly speaking, what is not deserved cannot be possessed. If there is room for one God, isn’t there room for all gods? If space is infinite and can continue to expand, are all the gods we invent possible?
Coordinates
Metempsychosis, Like the rest of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s work, it is in an edition of Alfaguara.
#defense #party