Don’t panic, dear, unemployed readers. I am not going to make a defense of the pleasure of rereading in the style that is perpetrated from time to time by nostalgic readers of a previous kingdom or order. It is not about looking back to collect the rubble of what was lost, and writing elegies of times past, but rather about standing in front of books as in front of a living matter, a body less perishable than flesh.
A new version of the Bogotá Book Fair has ended, and this text is not intended to be a balance of an event that is increasingly larger, more exciting and incomprehensible. To the clientele of these synthesis exercises, I recommend the analyzes published on his Facebook account by an accomplished editor, Nicolás Morales.
Rereadings were the protagonists of this edition of FILBo and one of the possible ways to not be devoured by its whirlwind of events, guests, events and launches. The central point was, of course, the invitation to read with new eyes the work of José Eustasio Rivera, which many of us read for the first time a long time ago and as if it were the emissary of a horror from the past, since we did not have the tools and sensitivity to realize that he was also talking about the future.
The commemoration at FILBo of the centenary of The maelstrom It was exemplary. To begin with, new editions multiplied, which made Rivera’s book itself the star of the fair, above other predictable best-sellers such as See you in August by García Márquez. “The commercial appetite of the heirs of García Márquez was totally overshadowed by the royalty-free formula of José Eustasio Rivera,” wrote – precisely – Nicolás Morales.
The cosmographic edition of The maelstrom, under the care of Margarita Serje and Erna von der Walde, published last year by the Universidad de los Andes, laid the foundations for an urgent and present reading of Rivera’s book. “Today we are understanding that violence in The maelstrom It does not come from the jungle, but from extractive exploitation,” says Erna von der Walde, who together with Ximena Gama was also curator of the exhibition “The tree that devoured a world: The directions of rubber in The maelstrom”, which could be visited in the José María Vargas Vila de Corferias auditorium. It is not the jungle that devours men, but men devour it.
The National University, for its part, faced the challenge of republishing the first edition of Rivera’s book and recovering photographic material that the author considered essential at the time. In a 1928 edition, the Huilense poet also included maps. Both these and the photographs were eliminated from later editions and are now recovered by the university editions, which are more critical than commemorative.
The last institutional effort that deserves recognition is that of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Knowledge, which, at the head of the commemoration, decided to make available, both in digital and physical format, the Vorágine Library, with 10 titles that expand the understanding of the book and propose a multi-layered reading, to overcome the corsets behind labels such as “jungle novel” or “violence novel.” The same ministry revived the cultural magazine Gaceta with a monographic issue dedicated to the jungle.
The new readings of The maelstrom They also open the door to reinterpretations of the political, cultural and sensitive universe of the early 20th century in Colombia. “Rereadings” is precisely the name of an editorial collection in which the universities of los Andes, Nacional and Eafit participate. Within this collection, a reissue of The city of pain. Echoes of the cemetery of those buried alive and the prison of the innocentwhose first edition was in 1923. Written in the lazaretto of Agua de Dios, both the book and the author (the lawyer, politician and writer Adolfo León-Gómez) remained in regrettable oblivion, as if the stigma that fell on the sick of leprosy would have triumphed historically.
This collage book in which its author lavishes himself in different registers (poet, chronicler, civil conscience of the nation, ear that listens and eye that sees to bear witness to the horror of confinement and the political uses and abuses of the disease), we It brings news from another border, from another long shadow cast by the iniquitous history of Colombia, from—in short—other places of sorrow. In parallel with the genocide caused by the rubber boom, other ways of letting die were in vogue in the country, efficient technologies for the elimination of that which did not join the bandwagon of progress. Today, those monsters and ghosts haunt us. Colombia is a spectral reality.
The prologue of the reissue of The city of pain, by Felipe Martínez Pinzón, is impossible to read without feeling an epistemological chill. Everything that in the 1920s seemed to correspond to a late or decadent sensibility (the profusion of the macabre and the Gothic) is what speaks to us today with “modern eyes.” To access the sense and significance of Colombian modernity and progress, one must read—and reread—its sick and nocturnal face. We must listen to their victims (Indians, lepers, tuberculosis patients like Luis Tejada, another commemorated: a whole legion or people to come) and recognize their resistance. Otherwise, the country will go from genocide to genocide, until its resounding and final failure.
Another great protagonist of the fair was the Spanish essayist and novelist Irene Vallejo. Motivated by her charisma, I finally approached reading Infinity in a reed. The essay by the Aragonese writer is also a rereading, in this case of the history of the book. It’s exciting how she shows us that books are not a distraction from the world; On the contrary, they are a way of being in it. They should not serve entertainment but concrete and intensified attention. They are not to forget what is real, they are to understand it. Maybe we didn’t invent books. Most likely, they invented humanity, and they will outlive it.
Vallejo’s book brings us news of battlefields, looting and pillage, fires and destruction, but also of dreams of community around the book. Since some of our ancestors learned to read without moving their lips, we have lived in the illusion of introspective reading. Perhaps those are not the readings that will dominate in the future. Or maybe yes. But as long as fear and death exist, the spell of books will exist.
