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The Art of Flight (1997)

av Sergio Pitol

MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
1601169,462 (3.84)2
The debut work in English by Mexico's winner of the Cervantes Prize, The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as an author, translator, scholar, and diplomat. The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory," The Art of Flight blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do.… (mer)
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I bought this the moment I saw Vila-Matas had written an introduction. He calls Pitol "the greatest Spanish-language writer of our time," says he has a "passion for confusing life and literature," and that the crucial marker of his style is the idea of "fleeing anyone who is so dreadful as to be full of certainty."

But this book is disappointing. Pitol does confuse life and literature, or rather, he is immersed in literary imagining, and his mind is populated mainly by the names and lives of hundreds of authors. In that it's like Vila-Matas's "Dublinesque" and his other books. But an indifferently veiled autobiography of the author whose imagination consists entirely of other authors is not an easy subject. One thing it absolutely requires, I would think, is real engagement with the ghosts, the literary voices, the contemporaries. Vila-Matas's "Bartleby & Co." does that very well, because it is about paralysis, inaction, abnegation, and silence. Here the names are just a cavalcade of Mexican and other authors, as in some of Bolaño's work, but without even the interest Bolaño's mixtures of literary culture, imaginary stories, and real politics.

Pitol is safe inside his world of authors: they are a comfort to him, they're the air he breathes, they nourish his imagination. The authors he thinks of do not haunt him (as writers haunt Pessoa, Borges, Bolaño, as they bewitch "Bartleby & Co."). In fact the novels Pitol has read seem barely to talk to him except in generalities and stray remembered quotations that serve more as decorations than insights, and this novel's philosophic moments are mainly asides that come up when Pitol has a temporary respite from the continuous rain of thoughts about publishing, fame or its absence, literary lineages, schools, manners, communities, and histories.

This is the literary life as cocoon. Sometimes the threads of an author's cocoon can be so fine, so capacious, that they seem like the air itself. The cocoon seems to disappear, and the author imagines himself in touch with the raw world itself. But this is not life, this is embalmed and becalmed and proof against any intrusion. Pitol reminds me, in that respect, of the late Bellow, so warmed by his self-regard and the praise of the friends and readers he'd chosen.

The only parts of the world that intrude are clichés. The book opens with some awful pages about Venice, in which the narrator rehearses all sorts of commonplaces about the city: he knows they are episodes from the history of the city, because he's read so much fiction and poetry set in Venice: but it doesn't seem to occur to him they are all, every last one of them, comforting clichés, received knowledge, the sort of thing Bouvard and Pécuchet would have tried and abandoned, the sort of thing Pessoa or Beckett or Bernhard would never go near. ( )
1 rösta JimElkins | Apr 23, 2015 |
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The debut work in English by Mexico's winner of the Cervantes Prize, The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as an author, translator, scholar, and diplomat. The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory," The Art of Flight blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do.

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