'The style of the elements', by Rodrigo Fresán: a masterful free autobiography against mass-produced novels

Scholem tells an anecdote about Walter Benjamin: when he was a student he despaired of the mediocrity of his teachers. There was only one exception. On the first day of class, a certain Lewy dedicated himself to annoying each student with an incompetent performance: he asked them something that he himself did not know how to answer. Very few students showed up for the second class. “Okay, now we can begin,” Lewy said. Those classes were spiritual food for the restless Benjamin.

In a similar way, certain novelists practice this deterrent device: expelling inattentive or mechanical readers. It is Nabokov's method in Ada or Ardor: 100 pages of nineteenth-century, abstruse and tedious vocation, and suddenly one of the most exciting and inventive novels one can imagine. And this is also the method of Rodrigo Fresán (Buenos Aires, 1963) in The style of the elements.

The title itself is already presented with the harshness of a pedantic joke. Reverses the title of William Strunk Jr.'s classic writing manual, The elements of style (1920), a guide with recommendations about cleanliness, brevity, one idea per sentence, etc. A classic, in short, one of the equalizers of a functional style. Fresán, on the contrary, dedicates the 720 pages of his new novel to contesting all correctness and functionality. It is a book written against certain masters and, above all, against an era that publishes novels like someone who mass-produces bags (a small, functional and chic accessory). Fresán opposes the comfortable with the monstrous, and the first thing one finds in The style of the elements It is a profusion of quotes, digressions and meta-analysis, a blurring of the profiles of its protagonist: is it an autobiography in the third person?

Fresán writes against intellectual prestige and any emasculating principle. Hence his Luddism and a certain Oedipal loneliness.

Perhaps this review itself is copying Fresán's tactic, scaring the lazy reader, but whoever has come this far already senses that The style of the elements It is a true joy, a book written in a state of rare inspiration, with one of the most beautiful beginnings of all of Fresán's work. Written against and with a certain athletic rage: he is spurred on by what restricts the freedom of his imagination. For over 700 pages!

The style of the elements It is also the autobiographical novel of someone who would hate to be classified as an autofiction writer. It's not a Fresán factual, but a literary entity. The facts of a life are one more element of a grammar of the imagination; and the fictional material is precisely the element of contrast that enriches the poverty of the facts.

Land, the protagonist, is the son of editors. His parents want him to be a writer. But Land hates the idea: he wants to be a reader. In a sense, every literary work of any importance is written by a reader. Readers are “tellers of other people's lives.” And Land is also a reader of himself. “I became a ghost-writer so as not to be a writer but to be able to be a reader who transcribes.”

We witness three episodes of his life: his childhood in Gran Ciudad I, his adolescence in Gran Ciudad II, and the writing of this anti-manual in Big City III. In other words, the years in which Land discovered literature (with the omnipresent Dracula) in a world coerced by his parents and the intellectuality of a probable Buenos Aires; the adolescent uprooting in Caracas, where Land falls in love with “Her” (the model here is Liquor pizza); and the writing, already in the first person, and in a trendy Barcelona, ​​of this cacophonous and wise manual of writing as reading.

A book written against fashion, intellectual prestige and any castrating principle, hence its Luddism and a certain Oedipal loneliness. “COMPLECATED HE STABBED DADDY AND MOMMY!”, imagines, as the headline, the lonely Land. I repeat, because it is not an insignificant detail: more than 700 pages killing parents and anyone who interferes with our reading joy. And more plots, subplots, digressions, quotes… And writing in a state of grace.

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