The most famous book historian inaugurated the book festival. Irene Vallejo, author of the bestseller The Infinity in a Reed, said a few words at the opening of the Bogotá Book Fair, this Wednesday, one of the largest fairs in the Hispanic world and which this year has nature as its main transversal theme.
“The book is a living being, engendered, born, it develops,” said Vallejo in his opening words, quoting the words of the Afro-Colombian author Arnoldo Palacios, when the centenary of his birth was celebrated. Vallejo focused, in his speech, on the birth of writing, of the alphabet itself, when a P did not represent the letter but the human language to begin to name reality. “The letters were born as drawings,” Vallejo said. Drawings of camels, monkeys or sea waves that became the raw material for the letters. “As neurologists say, after this invention, we were never the same.” Reading modified our ability to think. And nature, its different forms or materials, allowed us to name reality.
“The survival of nature is linked to the survival of books,” Vallejo told EL PAÍS, before his inaugural speech. The Infinity in a Reed, winner in Spain of the National Essay Prize, in 2020, is a long journey through the classic history of the book from its materiality, not only from the ideas that they manage to spread throughout the world. Or, in other words, a Vallejo book in which she stops to take a good look at the body in which the words live, not just the words themselves.
“The one that is read on one material or another, that is read on clay tablets, or that is read on papyrus, or that is read on parchment, or that is read on paper, or that is read books of light as we do now , all of that has a very great importance,” he adds. “In the origins of the book there is a very clear confluence between nature—through the reed, the plant material that in papyrus and paper has been the receptacle of the book—and the alphabet and writing, which is an artificial invention, Let's say”. Living matter, nature, was the one who gave and continues to give the alphabet a home to exist. That is why infinity—that of ideas, metaphors, imagination—fits in a reed.
That said, Vallejo adds, if the book is written on a material that pest insects eat, or is fragile to fire from fires, or water from floods, the book is not “something purely intellectual.” The survival of literary works throughout the centuries depends on the survival of the planet. What if they weren't paper books? Even tablets or cell phones need a raw material—lithium, metal, etc.—to give words a place.
Infinity in a Reed is a book translated into 40 languages that transformed Vallejo from being an unknown in Zaragoza to an international literary celebrity. “I was not writing it at that moment thinking about the advancement of my literary career, but quite the opposite, I wrote it as a farewell,” says Vallejo. She wrote it when her newborn son was sick with a respiratory syndrome called Pierre Robin, and she thought that the illness would force him to give up writing to dedicate himself completely to caring for her. It was a farewell, “appreciating everything the books had done for me.”
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Furthermore, considering herself a writer who worked on the classic history of books from the Spanish periphery, far from the great publishing capitals of Madrid or Barcelona, her farewell seemed inevitable. It was not a farewell, she knows four years later, but a new chapter. One that led her to open the doors of the book fair in Colombia.
Before Bogotá, Irene Vallejo arrived a few days earlier to a place that, from the Colombian capitals, is considered the periphery: the department of Chocó. “I have always felt that love for the peripheries and a little the feeling that the peripheries are centers of other territories, of other views, of other languages, and considering them peripheries is even a problem of perspective,” says Vallejo.
Vallejo traveled to the capital of the Pacific coast department, Quibdó, to meet with Velia Vidal, director of the Motete project, which promotes reading in this Colombian Pacific department—one of enormous environmental wealth and a long history of discrimination against Afro peoples. .
“There the idea becomes a reality that access to books, in territories traditionally lacking resources for reading, has a real impact on people's lives,” says Vallejo about the experience. He met with the young people who have been part of Motete, and “I felt that they had really discovered a facet to express themselves, through words, and they had that impulse to tell themselves, to feel that their stories were important enough to so that they deserve that listening. The fact that their education, their imagination, their words and their creativity were considered important has enormous force in the feeling of dignity.”
“We talk about how every action to save books is, in reality, a way to save ourselves,” is how literature professor Yijhan Rentería, columnist for El PAÍS, summarizes it in a talk with Vallejo at the Technological University of Chocó.
In addition to giving an inaugural talk at FILBO, Vallejo will have a conversation this Thursday about books and democracy, will be signing books and will visit the Bogotá district prison towards the end of the week. “It will be the first time I visit a prison,” says the author. “I am also interested in the impact that books can have in these extreme situations. We know stories of people who have started writing in prison, or who have become reading mediators, so we must explore what happens there, because it is said that Books are for the elites and we are perhaps depriving those who need them most,” he adds.
Vallejo, a book researcher, seems like the ideal author to celebrate the good time of the book. According to figures in Colombia, the majority of Colombians now read more than before the pandemic, and book clubs among friends and family seem to be having a renaissance. ”I would dare say, book clubs are a new way to socialize,” says Vallejo. A few years ago, before the pandemic, she remembers that she only talked about “the catastrophe of the book, that the book was ending, dying, becoming extinct. But a real global catastrophe came, and people read more.” The book survived and, now, it is partying in Bogotá.
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