Great debate forward | Culture | EUROtoday

Fleur Jaeggy corrects loads in her thoughts: “I start writing by deleting the text in my head from the first minute. I start by removing things. Many are deleted, many that I have not even written.”

A Fleur Jaeggy (The stunning years of punishment) you all the time have to concentrate to it, not in useless is it one of many important beacons of the Lispector Constellation, that random and virtually secret conjunction of authors with distinctive types, none of them much like the opposite, however all cultivating “new ways of writing about real life.”

Jaeggy, in his non-public yard, masters his private strategy of suppression and has virtually the behavior of taking sudden and radical turns in his texts and instantly main us, for instance, to note a poor captive animal. And he additionally masters the artwork of agile replicas. Laura Fernández wrote final yr in these identical pages: “Jaeggy’s answers have the words counted and crystallinely elusive.”

In his latest Ode and Encounter within the Bronx (Ediciones UDP, Chile, 2024), Jaeggy recollects a dialog with Oliver Sacks in New York and, removed from going into many particulars about what was mentioned, he instantly diverts his speech, in a crystalline elusive method, in the direction of a fish trapped without end within the restaurant’s fish tank.

In sudden and radical turns like this, Jaeggy is unparalleled, neither is his clear, sober phrasing, so exact that we are going to hardly wish to recuperate what his thoughts was capable of cross out earlier than beginning to write. Jaeggy is artificial, interval. You haven’t got to the touch something he writes. On the opposite hand, I wouldn’t have the identical impression in what buddies who’re amongst my favourite residing authors publish. In the final guide of every of them, I’ve come to marvel what phrases, what phrases, what concepts may have been crossed out, misplaced, or mistakenly undermined, whereas the work that they lastly revealed was being woven.

What did they stumble over and what did they offer up? It is a query very prone to debate. Even figuring out how troublesome it’s to get writers to put in writing frankly about their very own work, and much more so in a literary market like the present one, I’ve been contemplating for some time about sending emails to these colleagues with whom I as soon as spoke freely in regards to the flaws that occurred in our respective types.

Perhaps as a result of I miss that relaxed environment of confessions, I’ve not been capable of comprise myself and a second in the past, guaranteeing anonymity, I’ve simply written and despatched emails to admired colleagues asking them to dare to completely decide their newest guide and to not disguise particulars from me when explaining the very private issues that stopped a part of the ambition they positioned in it.

When the solutions arrive and I see that everybody would profit from a deep data of the hitherto hidden writing difficulties of others, I’ll quickly make them public. Guaranteeing the promised anonymity, they are going to be mentioned in a tense Great Debate, in a number of days that may upset all the things. A poetic catharsis that urges us.