Colombian writer Fernando González Ochoa.RR SS
I was preparing this issue of our newsletter, dear reader, when a close and very dear friend reminded me of a wonderful book I had read a long time ago that had been lost in the attic of my memory.
The book is entitled “Viaje a pie”, it was published around the third decade of the 20th century and its author, Fernando González Ochoa, founded an entire genre – that of the wanderer who tries to find a way through the very personal experience of the journey Connection between from the landscape and the stones to the illusions of the last being with whom he crosses his path and the multiple philosophies of life.
Obviously, there were other similar exercises before González Ochoa’s book, but certainly not of the dimension, scope and quality of the Colombian’s book, which not only systematizes a certain aesthetic of drifting, but over time will become a model for a certain time would become literature that would sprout across the continent – it is also important to note that what González Ochoa did, he did before Robert Walser or WG Sebald -: the Nadaísta movement of the 1960s, for example, was inspired by his character and his work.
From drift to flight
Close to where González Ochoa settled towards the end of his life and where he settled on his itinerant journey, close also to where the Nadaístas would have located their emotional center of operations, and moreover close to them Idea that seems to hold that literature is above all a form of exploration of the world only insofar as this exploration allows or not the author to inhabit both the world and this exploration itself long afterwards, even after the explosions of the boom, He would become a writer – what a writer, by the way, as I have said in other parts of this newsletter – Tomás González.
I bring Tomás González here, beyond the fact that from an aesthetic point of view he seems to me the most important Colombian writer of his generation, also beyond the fact that the other González, González Ochoa, was his uncle, and beyond that In Beyond seems this uncle of having inspired many of the forms, ideas and shortcomings of the protagonist of the first novel of the other González, that is, Tomás – Horacio’s story, because in a way it is Tomás who at the same time creates the best literature, gives to the drift literature a beastly turn and opens a gap to the escape literature: on the horizon the fence of violence had appeared everywhere and Tomás González, as is clear when one reads There was first the sea or the fog at midday, but above all the stories from the book “The King of the Honka Monka”.
The way of escape
Evidently, there has always been literature about flight and flight, not only on our continent but on the rest of the planet, in other traditions and in other languages. But just as the current of González Ochoa is particular, I insist on the fugue that Tomás González gives shape to the stories of El rey del Honka Monka, especially the story of Verdor, in which a man gradually gives himself up to be more Destroying one’s past is just as special as destroying one’s present or future, and is based on the same interest I highlighted earlier: that of literature as a way of exploring the world, but suddenly also as a way they give up leaving both the world and the exploration itself.
A literature, then, that suggests that itself, literature, can of course also be a way of leaving the world after one has inhabited it, and at the same time a way of deconstructing the experience itself, both types of indwelling and of abandonment But why did I come here? Why else wouldn’t he want to talk about one of the two González? As I said more or less at the beginning of this newsletter, because while I was preparing to write about Una música, the latest novel by Argentinian writer Hernán Ronsino, a friend reminded me of Viaje, a cake I later baked I think of the Thomas Gonzalez books.
Ronsino’s escape
I don’t know if Ronsino read Tomás González’s novels or short stories, but I do know that Una música – a work in which the Argentine gives his work a twist: suddenly the echo that beats the strongest is that of the past and not the one of the present, suddenly Di Benedetto, Saer and Piglia are air currents and not guides, suddenly history is there not only to give rise to the wonders of language and form, but to illuminate and fill each other with nuances (Ronsino is an excellent stylist) – is also the newest cog in the fugal literature I am talking about here.
Of course there are other González Ochoa, Tomás González and Ronsino in other latitudes of the continent, but the last book on escapes amazed me, not knowing that it was part of this circle that I had not imagined until now , until my friend El viaje a pie pointed out was that of the Argentine whose earlier works should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand the cross-currents of Argentine literature.
For whoever wants to know where our fugue literature is leading must of course read Una música, in which a pianist leaves everything behind, traveling from the center of his own life and history to the temporal fringes and emotional aspects of them, while moving from the political , social and economic centers of their reality to their peripheries.
Moreover, anyone who understands that in literature, in addition to searching for a different fate, escape is also a search for a different way of counting.
And it is the case that in Una música Ronsino also managed to escape from this imprisonment in a single narrative style.
coordinates
Una música by Hernán Ronsino has been published by Eterna Cadencia – a few days ago it even won the El Libro Foundation Critics’ Prize during the Buenos Aires International Book Fair – and by Sexto Piso. The work of Tomás González has different editions, both in Alfaguara and in Seix Barral. There are also several editions of Journey on Foot that are actually available free of charge.