3 best books by the inexhaustible Sergio Pitol

There are those, like Sergio PitolThey are writers in that other alternate life that passes while fate ensues. If we had more lives, each one would be a different thing in the new outings., but time is what it is and Sergio Pitol was enough things as if to limit it only to his facet as a writer.

Still or precisely thanks to his alternation, Pitol wrote some of the best works of Mexican narrative with his Trilogy of Memory at the top of his literary production. Something like the vital work of that Proust engrossed in his heptalogy.

It should also be noted in that definition of the writer that his life was not precisely a bed of roses. This is how it is shown that adversity when it does not destroy conforms to the irreducible spirit, the surviving human being, especially himself, the restless and hungry soul ...

Thus, strictly narrative we enjoy the Pitol that weaves our own and that of others in that scenario where the writer is the protagonist to provide lucidity, passion and answers in his own way to all the questions about existence.

Top 3 recommended books by Sergio Pitol

The Art of Fugue

First part of the trilogy. To try to turn the biographical into a literary work is to consider that the verisimilitude of the plot that makes up life itself depends on the most absolute frankness. Presenting oneself as the Ecce Homo stripped of flesh and stripped of any attire that hides the truth becomes essential. Of course, there is nothing better than surrendering to the chaos of what you have experienced so that everything makes sense...

Classical music manuals defined the Fugue as a «composition in several voices, written in counterpoint, whose essential elements are variation and canon», which today could be freely interpreted as the possibility of a form rocked between adventure and order, instinct and mathematics, the liturgy and the bataclán. The central character of this book -we suppose that the author himself-, a creature as defenseless as the most defenseless Dickensian characters, but unlike them armored as a warrior whose weapons were stupor and parody, escapes from a cell to find himself prisoner in another that could be paradise, although he will be in charge of turning that Eden into a ridiculous but at the same time endearing place.

The Art of Fugue it becomes an accelerated gallop that in its journey joyfully confuses all instances, removes borders, denies genders. One thinks that one enters an essay to suddenly find oneself in a story, which will mutate into the chronicle of a life, the testimony of a traveler, of a hedonistic and refined reader, of a child dazzled by the immense variety of the world. If "everything is in everything", as is often stated in these pages, the fugue also becomes an ironic walk through the communicating vessels that transform the unitary into the diverse and the peripheries into the center.

The cultural cast is vast, as is the geography. There are no worthwhile chronologies: everything is in everything, from the author's childhood in Veracruz to the testimony of his trip to Chiapas, after the Zapatista insurrection, to his long and happy stay in Barcelona. «One», says Pitol, «I venture to believe, it is the books he has read, the painting he has seen, the music heard and forgotten. One is his childhood, his family, a few friends, some loves, quite a few annoyances. One is a sum diminished by infinite subtractions ». Carlos Monsiváis points out: «In The Art of Fugue, the sum that is Sergio Pitol adds to our more fluid and stimulating reading experiences. »

The Art of Fugue

The Wizard of Vienna

A closing of the trilogy of memory apotheosis in its harmonic chaos, in the unbalanced balance of experiences, memories and pages of life assaulted with the most certain disorder towards the essence and understanding of everything.

Sergio Pitol has written illuminating books, that is known; they are a testimony of chaos, of its rituals, its slime, its greatness, abjectness, horrors, excesses and forms of liberation. They are also the chronicle of a bizarre and playful world, delusional and macabre. They are our Esperpento. Culture and Society are its great domains. Intelligence, humor and anger have been his great advisers. ??

In some autobiographical pages Pitol reveals the intense relationship he has experienced with his writing, the discovery of a Form, his poetic ars, a creation that oscillates between adventure and order, instinct and mathematics. His relationship with literature has been visceral, excessive and even wild: One, I venture to say, is the books he has read, the painting he has known, the music heard and forgotten, the streets traveled. One is his childhood, a few friends, some loves, a lot of annoyances. One is a sum diminished by infinite subtractions.

The art of the fugue was a watershed in his work. There Pitol hedonically confuses all academic instances, removes borders, upsets genres. An essay slides without feeling it to a story, to a chronicle of travels and passions, to the testimony of a child dazzled by the immense variety of the world.

The Wizard of Vienna is more radical: a leap from order to asymmetry, a constant brushing of themes and literary genres, to enhance memory, writing, favorite authors, travel and discover, as the alchemists wanted, that everything was in everything. ?? Sergio Pitol is undoubtedly one of those older figures who appear from time to time, almost miraculously, in Mexican literature. ??

The Wizard of Vienna

The parade of love

A novel where maturity is carried away by the irreverence of youth, where the grotesque reinvents itself in other parts of the Atlantic. A story that puzzles with humor and intelligence.

Mexico, 1942: this country has just declared war on Germany, and its capital has recently been invaded by the most unusual and colorful fauna: German communists, Spanish republicans, Trotsky and his disciples, Mimi milliner of ladies, Balkan kings, agents of the most varied secret services, opulent Jewish financiers.

Much later, after the accidental discovery of some documents, a historian interested in such an exciting context tries to clarify a confusing murder perpetrated then, when he was ten years old, and the narrative - which crosses the eccentric poles of Mexican society, the media of the high politics, the installed intelligentsia, as well as its most extravagant derivations - allows Sergio Pitol not only to paint a rich and varied gallery of characters, but also to reflect on the impossibility of reaching the truth.

As in a Tirso de Molina comedy, no one knows for sure who is who, the confusion continues incessantly and the result is this exhilarating parade, which for a reason bears the name of one of Lubitsch's most famous comedies.

The first edition was greeted like this by critics: «Permanent magic game in the hands of an unknown magician who performs real miracles with the sole purpose, in the background of the show, to demonstrate to the public the falsity of all evidence. Or, what amounts to the same thing, reflection on the only axiom: absolute truth is a value in which only delusional butterfly hunters without a net can believe »

The parade of love
5/5 - (25 votes)

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