It cannot be said that Rodrigo Fresán (Buenos Aires, 1963) is writing, installment after installment, a unique novel, but in each of his books we find approaches and ingredients from the previous ones, so that his is, for us, a familiar reading. , and not only because he is a unique and inimitable author. And this is what happens from his collections of stories Argentine History (1991) and Lives of Saints (1993) to novels such as Kensington Gardens (2003), the trilogy The invented part (2014), The dreamed part (2017) and The remembered part ( 2019), Melvill (2022) and, now, The Style of the Elements.
In the Golden Age of literature, books of a certain length were divided into volumes. It doesn’t happen in this seven-hundred-page novel of dwarf flea type.
In any case, they would not be volumes but cassettes, in which Fresán, a true ghost-writer, transcribes a long conversation with Land, son of the owners of a small publishing house “which they captured without hardly needing to use that wooden pencil and half red and blue lead (…) with which the erratic error/errata was first marked in red and then corrected by suggesting in blue what was thought correct or better.” Pencil that becomes a recurring motif and appears in the design of the cover, the work of his son Daniel Fresán.
In the style of Don Quixote, here are three exits, called movements, that cover the three cities of Fresán’s life, his odyssey. This is not an autobiographical novel in the sense that it is about telling us about his life, but rather there are experiences that become narrative material. The first is Buenos Aires, where the author was born, the “Great City I of his non-existent country of origin” and to which “returning now would make him very sad because he only wants to forget it”, in a novel in which I have only two Argentinianisms. Big City II is Caracas, where Fresán lived between 1975 and 1980 and where his parents took refuge, fleeing the Argentine dictatorship. They lived in the Country Homeland Residence. It is the most thoroughly described city. And “different is the key word in Big City II, where everything is equally different for Land.”
We deduce that we are in the never-mentioned Caracas, among other things because of the view of the city from the plane, because the houses do not have numbers, because it is the oil capital, because of its celebrated soap operas or because of its lexicon. Curiously, we are barely told anything about Gran Ciudad III, Barcelona, ??where the writer has lived since 1999. There (well, here) he meets Ella again, the Dulcinea of ??the book and the one who creates a narrative tension that leads us to the outcome.
Something that has deeply marked the author, like Don Quixote (and Land, of course), is reading. There are no Spanish authors, not even spirits related to him like another great innovator of the genre, Enrique Vila-Matas. Among his favorite readings are the Confessions of Saint Augustine, the voluminous Dracula, the Tractatus, by Wittgenstsein, or reading The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, deserves special mention because it illuminates other aspects of the novel: the frequent observations on writing, which find their best expression in the decalogue, here vigintuquatologist, of the principle elements of style or writing.
And finally, an observation about time, seen here as an instant in which “the present of things past, the present of present things, and the present of future things” come together, which inevitably refers to Burnt Norton’s Eliot. from the Four Quartets: “Present time and past time / are both present in future time” and where “all time is eternally present.” Which is the impression we have that in this novel what matters is memory, forgetting, N.O.M.E., I Don’t Remember, and that we live in the moment of reading more than its narrative development. Another thing is the inevitable passage of time for humans where, with old age, “life no longer wanted to see them.”
Although Fresán rejects the scheme of the traditional novel, he does not fall into experimentalism, but we are faced with a prose full of life with word games resulting from the awareness of language, long enumerations and abundant parentheses, in what is an authentic and absorbing writing from a powerful mind.
