Patricio Pron, author: “The crises we are going through lead to the radicalization of cruelty” | Culture | EUROtoday

In a passage by Patricio Pron (Rosario, Argentina, 50 years outdated) the narrator is in New York in the course of the temporary time interval between the demise of former President Jimmy Carter and the second inauguration of President Donald Trump. In addition to noticing the distinction between the 2—for instance, the dedication to Human Rights of the previous; the contempt of the second—, he thinks: “A cruel country tends to make its inhabitants cruel.”

Is that what explains the present civilizational crossroads? “This has not only happened in the United States,” Pron responds in a cafeteria within the Madrid neighborhood of Malasaña, the place he’s a neighbor, “the multiple crises we are going through lead to the radicalization of sad emotions: cruelty, anger, hatred… We may not be condemned yet, since we can still exercise our right to be free. I exercise that right by writing these kinds of books.”

His new novel belongs to this class of books, In every thing there’s a crack and the sunshine enters by means of it —Pron is in favor of lengthy titles—, which is printed at this time by Anagrama and tonight is introduced on the Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, with the presence of the creator and the author Raquel Taranilla. What is it about? It is troublesome to specify: there are a number of points, however it might be stated that, since his is such a selected prose, the e book is concerning the expertise of studying itself, which prevails over every thing else. The theme is literature changing into evident earlier than the eyes of the reader. “I think all the books of importance in our lives have that theme. They all tell us that the way we read is contingent and provisional. And that it can be completed and displaced by other ways of seeing,” confirms the creator.

Patricio Pron was invited, between 2024 and 2025, to write down a e book on the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library about Benjamin Fondane, a French poet and filmmaker of Romanian origin, a person who had an existence that went past the bounds of the same old, in keeping with Pron: he broke André Breton’s nostril in a bar combat, he filmed a movie so immoral that the producer destroyed it upon first viewing, he warned of the hazard of fascism of the in his thirties and ended up selecting to die within the fuel chamber of Auschwitz-Birkenau, although he had the chance to flee, to accompany the one he beloved – his sister Lina -. “He could seem like an imaginary character, because his life was made of the stuff that biographies are made of, more than the best fictions,” observes Pron, who, whereas consuming espresso and glowing water, takes lengthy pauses in his speech to reorganize his concepts, as if he thinks the identical as he writes (which he most likely does). “He was someone who exercised absolute freedom in times very similar to ours,” he provides.

But, regardless of the depth of the character, Pron didn’t find yourself writing the e book about Fondane throughout that yr, however as an alternative wrote this different e book. That’s the plot: the story of a author who travels to New York to write down a e book about Fondane and does not write it and finally ends up writing one other one (which is that this one). Then, in Pron’s prose it’s troublesome to discover a concrete route, it will get tangled just like the convolutions of a mind, as a result of it is extremely cerebral, though it leaves fixed room for poetic discoveries and the phrases that one finally ends up writing down within the notes software on the cell phone. In some passage of the e book, Pron speaks of a author who “does not want to be read by all readers, but only by the best, by those who are willing to go further.” It may check with itself.

Sometimes, the dilation of time (whereas the protagonists have a espresso they’ll flip many pages and lots of issues) is paying homage to the texts of Javier Marías, whose affect Pron doesn’t reject, though he factors out others: “I am an Argentine writer, at least in part, and we have that tradition of blurring the limits of fiction and non-fiction, of essay and narrative, like Borges. I belong to that tradition,” says Pron. Thus, small essays are woven into the story, lengthy footnotes, and footnotes to footnotes (and even footnotes to footnotes to footnotes, as in a recreation of Russian dolls), quite a few observations on town of New York, dissertations on artwork, or on ache, tales of infamous New Yorkers, corresponding to Homer and Langley Collyer – the primary deceased, in Harlem, crushed by the tons of objects they collected obsessively; the second by hunger shortly after—or just like the Fox sisters, pioneers of spiritualism.

Family tales, just like the final one, that of Pron’s paternal grandfather, a migrant in Argentina, who as soon as got here throughout a fox that may at all times accompany him and that may give him the supernatural capacity to “heal the fields.” “But, apart from stories, what matters most to me is creating texts that engender their own thought, something like novels of ideas,” says Pron. “I like to read, and I aspire to write, the kind of story that continues to live when you have finished it, because its ideas have become important to you.”

The fixed presence of New York leads us to marvel concerning the relationship between the heavy mythology across the metropolis that accompanies each Westerner from delivery and the fact of town that’s then introduced to the customer (see, for instance, the New York of the documentaries How to with John Wilson). Pron acknowledges his privilege, as a visitor author: for instance, within the headquarters of the New York Public Library alone, to which the creator had full entry, there are six million objects, from Toscanini’s footwear to the stuffed animal that impressed Winnie The Pooh. For Pron, the vital factor was to have the ability to frequent some basic objects of the Anglo-Saxon literary custom, which he additionally feels as his personal: manuscripts of WH Auden, first editions of Fitzgerald or Shakespeare, diaries of Virginia Woolf. Or the primary try at binding to the lighthouseof the latter, when she was launching the Hogarth Press publishing home together with her husband Leopold.

He assures that, regardless of every thing, he didn’t have a lot of a fetish across the metropolis. “I was rather interested in some aspects that we do not usually talk about: the political message in the homilies of the African-American community, the forms of resistance to the concentration of capital that are manifested in urban space, orchards, cemeteries,” says Pron. “They are places where I saw a lot of life.”

At that point Trump was not but unleashed nor was the fury in opposition to immigration, embodied in ICE, sweeping the nation. “But I did find alarming signs, anticipations, of what could happen in Europe. It was disturbing: the realization that this could happen in the country in which we live,” notes the creator.