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One of the most celebrated Argentine writers returns: Rodrigo Fresán. His new book, The style of the elements, is a work about the relationship between parents and children, reading and writing. But there is something else. The text can also be read as an autobiography of Fresán himself, in which he reviews his childhood and adolescence, with ironic notes that discuss the novel genre.
Published by Penguin Random House, The style of the elements It has more than 700 pages and It is already in bookstores in Spain – a country where the author has lived since 1999 – and It will arrive in Argentina in February.
In an interview with the newspaper El Español, Fresán anticipated that this, like his other books, “they warn you from the start so that you know what you are getting into and, if you don’t like them, the world is very big and the shelves are very wide.”
“I always liked long books, that abduct you and claim you,” he stated in dialogue with the Spanish press. The title of the novel, in fact, The style of the elementsrefers in some way to that: it inverts the title of the classic writing manual by William Strunk Jr., The elements of stylefrom 1920, which is a guide with style recommendations.
The novel, which although autobiographical, moves away from the confessional codex“it draws on a lot of episodes and situations that are very close to me, but limiting myself to telling what happened would seem like a very small thing to me,” Fresán added.
Starring Land, Fresán’s alter ego who prefers to be a reader rather than a writer, and narrated in the third person by someone who only knows the thoughts and intentions of the character on whom he focuses, his new novel, he said, “is not an undisciplined chaos, but rather it has a structure and responds to certain conditions that I myself imposed, although not in a military way.”
This new work dialogues with the concerns expressed in its The Told Part trilogymade of The invented part (Best Translated Book Award United States), The dream part and The remembered partand that arrives after Melvillewithout the letter e, inspired by the father of the author of Moby Dick and in a true event: when he crossed a frozen river on foot to reunite with his family, fleeing from his creditors.
The style of the elements discusses the idea of supposed correctness in writing, an act that extrapolates to the editor’s work in the figures of Land’s parents, the protagonist of this adventure.
Furthermore, it delves into the possibilities and impediments of narrate memory. “The truth is that everything is memory from the moment you type the first sentence,” he said in the aforementioned interview, “a memory that is reactivated every time the reader opens the book and begins to read it.”
In fact, “the parts of the book that seem strangest to you are probably the most real,” he said and continued: “For example, that I didn’t go to school for two years without my father noticing.. However, I don’t have a traumatic memory because too many things happened to me. Of course, everything is recreated. There are characters that are a composite of many people I met. Nobody is exactly who they are in the book.”
“Everything is left behind, but there is nothing more interesting than the exercise of memory. Martin Amis once told me that at 60 years old the doors of the past open to you. Perhaps because your future is increasingly shorter and your past increasingly broader, a kind of curiosity arises about what happened to you, what stopped happening to you or what could have happened to you,” said Fresán.
Based in Barcelona 25 years ago, the most important awards received by this Argentine writer, critic and translator, one of the most outstanding of his generation, in 35 years of work, – something like a little more than half of his life (now is 60)-, respond to English and French translations of his works.
In 2017 the Roger Callois recognized his career, and in 2018 the University of Rochester distinguished him for having shown, with The invented partthat “there is a new territory in the novel and new structures to build”, together with the translator, who managed to “transfer all that mastery to English.”
The author of texts like The speed of things, Argentine history, Mantra and The background of the skyis recognized for issues such as the omnivorous desire of his books, for a desire to read everything that appears in the constant, almost encyclopedist references of his novels, for refracting in his writing the possibilities of the world and literature, for a style that It is yours and no one else’s.
Source: Télam SE
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