Scholem tells an anecdote about Walter Benjamin: As a student, he despaired of the mediocrity of his teachers. There was only one exception. On the first day of class, a certain Lewy dedicated himself to annoying each student with an incompetent performance: he asked them something to which he himself did not know the answer. Very few students showed up for the second class. “Okay, now we can begin,” Lewy said. These courses provided spiritual nourishment for the restless Benjamin.
Similarly, certain novelists practice this deterrent: expelling inattentive or mechanical readers. It's Nabokov's method in Ada or Ardor: 100 pages of 19th-century vocation, abstruse and boring, and suddenly one of the most exciting and imaginative novels imaginable. And this is also the method of Rodrigo Fresán (Buenos Aires, 1963) in “The Style of the Elements”.
The title itself is presented with the harshness of a pedantic joke. It inverts the title of William Strunk Jr.'s classic writing manual, The Elements of Style (1920), a guide with recommendations for neatness, brevity, one idea per sentence, etc. In short, a classic, one of the balancing features of a functional style . Fresán, on the other hand, devotes the 720 pages of his new novel to questioning all correctness and functionality. It is a book written against certain masters and, above all, against a time that publishes novels like someone who mass-produces bags (a small, functional and chic accessory). Fresán juxtaposes the comfortable with the monstrous, and the first thing one finds in “The Style of the Elements” is a profusion of quotations, digressions and meta-analyses, a blurring of the profiles of its protagonist: is it an autobiography in the third Person?
Fresán writes against intellectual prestige and every emasculating principle. Hence his Luddism and a certain Oedipal loneliness.
Perhaps this review itself copies Fresán's tactics to frighten the lazy reader, but whoever has gotten this far already feels that The Style of the Elements is a true delight, a book written in a state of rare inspiration was, with one of the most beautiful beginnings of all of Fresán's works. Written against the grain and with a certain sporting anger: what inspires him, what limits the freedom of his imagination. For over 700 pages!
The Style of the Elements is also the autobiographical novel of someone who would hate to be classified as an autofiction writer. It is not a factual Fresán, but a literary unit. The facts of a life are another element of a grammar of imagination; and the fictional material is precisely the element of contrast that enriches the poverty of the facts.
Land, the protagonist, is the son of editors. His parents want him to become a writer. But Land hates the idea: he wants to be a reader. In a sense, every literary work of any importance is written by a reader. Readers are “storytellers of other people’s lives.” And Land is also a reader of himself. “I became a ghostwriter so that I could not be a writer but a transcribing reader.”
We experience three episodes of his life: his childhood in Gran Ciudad I, his youth in Gran Ciudad II and the writing of this anti-manual in Gran Ciudad III. In other words, the years in which Land discovers literature (with the ever-present Dracula) in a world forced by his parents and the intellectuality of a likely Buenos Aires; the youthful uprooting in Caracas, where Land falls in love with “she” (the model here is licorice pizza); and writing this cacophonous and wise guide to writing as reading, already in the first person and in trendy Barcelona.
A book written against fashion, intellectual prestige and every castrating principle, hence its Luddism and a certain Oedipal loneliness. “HE COMPLETELY KILLED DADDY AND MOMMY!” is the headline that imagines the lonely country. I repeat it because it is not an insignificant detail: more than 700 pages kill parents and anyone who interferes with our enjoyment of reading. And more plots, subplots, digressions, quotes… And writing in a state of grace.
The style of the elements
Rodrigo Fresan
Random House, 2023
720 pages, 25.90 euros
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