The writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky He died at 85 years old. He was the author of more than twenty titles, including The Bride of Odessa, Far from Where and Money for Ghosts.
He was an artist of many languages (prose and cinema, to begin with, with all its genres included), who lived for decades in France and took on the challenge of returning to the country to once again take over a city that is central to his sensitivity. In addition to his prolific work, Cozarinsky belonged to the group of collaborators of Sur magazine.
Cozarinsky had a turning point in his life that precipitated his destiny as a writer. According to him in several interviews, in 1999 he was hospitalized for a disc infection and was diagnosed with cancer. He still lived in Paris, where he had settled in 1974. The proximity of death pushed him to write and since then, as if abducted by that private imperative, he published one or two books a year, in genres such as novels, short stories and essays. brief, or in that own genre that does not have a precise name and that he took to its extreme point: a virtuous mixture of memory, elegance, erudition, irony and modesty.
“I asked a friend to bring me paper and pencils and I started writing the draft of The Bride of Odessa. From there also came the decision to get rid of the purely nutritional occupations that I had and organize my time and my finances so that I could dedicate myself entirely to writing,” she said.
Until then he was the author of a cult book urban voodoowho seduced writers such as the American Susan Sontag and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and had a profuse cinematographic work as a director and screenwriter, in which stand out The War of a Man’s Soul (One Man’s War, 1981), the adaptation of a story by Borges, Warriors and captives (1988) and Fantomes of Tangier (Ghosts of Tangier, 1997), among other films.
Two of the stories that make up The Bride of Odessa (2001) he wrote them while he was admitted to a Parisian hospital. Since then he published more than twenty books, including stories, essays and novels, such as The passing of the baton (2001), The Moldovan ruffian (2004), Gossip Museum (2005), Three borders (2006), far from where (2009), Money for ghosts (2012), dark (2016) and In the last drink we leave (2017), a book with which he won the Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize in 2018.
Cozarinsky’s style has the double charm of being at the same time very eloquent and very precise: his phrases transmit deep emotions (melancholy is one of them, perhaps the most prominent) but they generate the effect that one could not have gotten there. with others words. It sounds easy, but it is not.
