“Eugenia Zicavo She is one of the best cultural journalists we have in the country. “She is one of the people who reads best, and who best communicates about books,” she started the talk. Patricio Zunini making the guest blush in the auditorium Ticmas in the book Fair. The truth is that the career of the sociologist, journalist and professor reflects her versatility and passion for reading.
Zunini said that Zicavo is working with workshops that invite people to reread the classics, an idea that first arose from the work that the host did for the Leamos platform and that she later developed with the “excuse of rereading books that I read twenty, fifteen years ago.” and that pass the test of time. That’s why I call them contemporary classics; It is a great excuse to return to classics that moved me.”
“I don’t know if there is a responsibility; In my case, what there is is a great pleasure,” explained Zicavo when Zunini asked if journalists had some kind of obligation towards their work of reviewing books. And the journalist added: “When I read something that breaks my head, I want the world to read it.. I am a kind of evangelist of literature. What I abandoned about religion, I poured into another place. If something moved me, I want it to happen to others.”
Zunini recalled that Patricia Kolesnicov I used to review a book or work maintaining the spirit of it, for example: “If the book was dry, I would do a dry review.” “I don’t have a method, I am quite unsystematic due to my reading drive,” the journalist reflected and stated that over the years she built “her own canon” and a reading community where one of the pillars is trust “that does not It is unilateral, because I end up reading a lot of things that people who write to me on social media recommend, because a shared common sense of the literature that we like really builds up. And strong debates also arise, sometimes I propose things that are very disruptive or very visceral; I like literature that doesn’t leave you calm at all, and not everyone feels like opening a book to get into those universes. I think of literatures like that of María Fernanda Ampuero, Monica Ojedathat of Leonidas Lamborghiniwave of Rafael Pinedoauthor of Plop!”.
What happens when we have to face readings that distress us, but that we choose? Zunini asked. “To go to a comfortable place, what do I know, you put on a soap opera. He is a bit of a liar too, because there are great romantic novels that I love and there is an Italian author Elena Ferrante who wrote a divine tetralogy,” Zicavo said.
And I add: “I like to be taken out of my comfort zone, either because of the plot or because of the style. There are novels that tell very little, and if one would say what this novel is about, or what this story is about; Well, the subsidiary history of language (…) is when a voice that is not mine becomes my own.”
Zicavo also highlighted how enriching reading is when “it makes you get out of your own head” and gives you a new perspective when it comes to seeing the world.
Since his time in the program Gerardo Rozinthe City channel and now in Futurerock next to Juan Francisco Gentile; When Zicavo reviews his professional career as a cultural journalist he reflects: “More than ten years passed since Tonight books; There was a section that I did that was very risky – those risks of youth and that Gerardo let me do – (…) there was a section that was called the best and the worst of established authors.
Although she stressed that she disagrees with herself when remembering the section in which she compared the literary work with its film version; “The categories she used to compare the two languages were not fair to film language.” And she stated that she does not revisit those books that at the time “seemed bad to her.”
“Now that I’m older and I reread, and now with the workshops much more, I didn’t understand people who reread before; “Now I’m understanding about returning to a safe place,” Zicavo joked and added: “Do you know that didn’t happen to me that something that broke my head today says what rubbish? Yes, sometimes I surprise myself with my own underlining. The reader’s point of view is as important as the author’s point of view. We complete the works.”
“I am very interested in what Latin American authors are writing. I have a reading system: Brenda Navarro from Mexico, Valeria Luiselli also from Mexico. From Ecuador the ones I mentioned, Ojeda and Ampuero. Mariana Enriquez…Elaine Vilar Madrugawho is a Cuban author (…) I think that something new is happening there, that there is a much more honest voice that seeks to generate new things with the language and brings to the fore the different ways of speaking Spanish, without going through that homogenization that the different Castilians went through when they were published in Spain,” Zicavo reflected.
Zunini asked, “But don’t you think we are always discovering female authors? Fifteen years ago you would have told me about Almada Jungleof Alejandra Costamagna, Samantha Schweblinof Pilar Gamboa…”. Zicavo interrupted him and said: “No, I would have talked to you about Alan Paulsof Juan José Becerra.. and I can continue telling you about them, but the gender bias was brutal as a reader; It was scandalous. I didn’t read women until ten years ago; systematically that they have weight in my library, I didn’t read at all.”
“I have the library organized by continents, by countries and within countries by affinities. And then I took Argentina and separated women from men – I didn’t do that with any other place – and since my library is quite representative, because I have privileged access to books, the publishers also send them to me; Of the last fifteen years of what is published in Argentina, women occupy three shelves; the men seven,” Zicavo said.
“Spain continues to be a reading distribution center (…) There is something very frustrating that to read authors from Chile or Uruguay you have to wait for them to be published in Madrid or Barcelona,” Zicavo reflected and added “There is something wrong in the conversation.” of the market, because the literary conversation is very oiled; There is something that corrects it a little, which is the presence of small or medium-sized publishers, called independent.”
And he exemplified: “Last year, I met the author Elaine Vilar Madrugabecause a Chilean bookstore at the stand The skirt He recommended it to me at the Book Fair. There is something in circulation, like in the Editors’ Fair; what the big labels on the market don’t do, which the smaller publishers end up solving.
To close the talk, Zunini asked for a recommendation of a book to look for at the Fair and Zicavo highlighted the latest book by the writer, journalist and editor. Leila Guerriero: “The call. A portrait” (Anagrama, 2024) that tells the story of the Argentine Silvia Labayru who was kidnapped, tortured and abused in the ESMA, during the civil-military dictatorship. Zicavo highlighted that Guerriero is “A great chronicler who gives a look with many edges.”
