The Bogotá Book Fair ended last week. I read two conflicting versions. One says that to enter the venue you had to wait in endless lines and that the excessive advertising of publishing houses to sell was noticeable. Another says that Filbo is the biggest show in the world. And the Frankfurt and Guadalajara fairs in Mexico, nothing to see? The desire to sell for consumption, regardless of the merit of the book, which has become an object, is the concern of many readers, among whom I count myself.
But it is valid to dream of a book fair with no apparent novelty. Those that are essential. In the Latin American sphere there are books by authors that do not lose validity. I choose some without the intention of giving a lecture and with the weight of taste, which is subjective: Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo is a narrative, if not the best, at least one of the best about the Latin American rural world and its magical realism before the expression was invented. Next to him is The death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, which is undoubtedly the stark story of the Mexican Revolution told from the agony of a revolutionary. The most accurate definition of what our country is, yes ours, is from the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges in The sand book when in one of his stories, in which he was a teacher, he puts in the mouth of a fictitious Colombian professor an unpublished answer to the question that Ulrica asks him: “what is it to be Colombian?” “I don’t know,” I replied. It is an act of faith.” There is no history manual that says it in such short words. With impressive precision and timeliness, too. The Chilean Roberto Bolaño wrote a novel at the end of the last century The wild detectives, which is not considered part of the canon of the Latin American “literary boom” but should be for its frankly avant-garde style and visceral realism as Bolaño himself called it through his characters. How to let go Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, a novel that marked the identity of those of us who, studying in Europe, had to look for it to avoid being left out in the open? In the genre of biographies, that of Jacob Beard The Messenger by Fernando Vallejo has no equal because it is well documented and better written.
However, the reissue by Editorial Planeta of The Maelstrom by José Eustasio Rivera, on the centenary of its publication in 1924, deserved a worthy celebration at Filbo. A masterpiece of Colombian literature, a centenary book in new clothes. Couldn’t we invent a fair of books that are not new but to which we have to return without pause because they do not get old?
