Rodrigo Fresán was born dead, clinically dead, so finding him in the Giardinetto bar almost 60 years later is confirming the strength of life and the stubbornness of the human being to get ahead.
Fresán always wanted to be a writer and when he was kidnapped as a child in his native Argentina, he knew, somehow, that one day he would write that story. That’s where it all started, the big bang of his literary universe, the space of spectral realities. His truth escapes the corset of time and lodges in the mind, the subjectivity that makes us thinking people.
We talked over a whiskey in between and Fresán’s head was heavy. He weighed so much on her that she had to hold it with her hands. His hands and forearms were scaffolding for a swinging head, as round and bald as an ecclesiastical dome.
As he spoke, Fresán inquired into the topics that have always attracted him: the past, culture, the parent-child relationship and the limits of reality, which in his opinion are more elastic than those of fiction.
Barcelona has been his city for years and he finds it “quite perfect for a writer” because he has a discreet and orderly social life. It is easy to isolate and relate. There are no stridencies.
A great defender of style and a great detractor of non-rhyming poetry, that is, of prose in verse, Fresán writes very quickly but only with one finger. He goes too fast. His output is prolific and heartfelt.
Sincerity is not always expected of a writer. Invention justifies everything. But Fresán does not have the fold of success. He writes what he needs to write to disclose a mental universe that he shows us as a living and expansive organism.
Nabokov is as important to him as Vonnegut. Science fiction is not a genre apart from great literature. What’s more, it’s not even appropriate to talk about genres. Everything mixes and everything makes sense if the writer is able to give it to him. “River Plate literature -says he- is the only one in the world where all of his totemic writers touched on science fiction”.
It would be good to investigate why. We would find the secret keys that order his books.
