Writing was his way of breathing. Edgardo Cozarinsky He wrote with the modest certainty that appearance covers and conceals; That’s why he needed to break the facades to look for what was underneath. The past tense advances on the page and projects the dominion of death over life. Like a gust that tries to exorcise sadness, the “chorus” at the beginning of her first novel emerges, The Moldovan ruffian: “Stories are not invented, they are inherited,” says the old man. It is dangerous to make up stories. If they turn out to be good, they end up coming true, after a while they are transmitted, and then it no longer matters if they were invented, because there will always be someone who has lived them later.” His prose, that unmistakable “little music,” sounds clean, fluid, perfect. The writer, filmmaker, playwright and actor, winner of the Gabriel García Márquez Hispanic American Short Story Prize and honorary professor at the National University of Tres de Febrero, died at the age of 85 in Buenos Aires, the city where he returned after having lived in Paris between 1974 and 1989.
In his narrative he explored the existence of somewhat nomadic creatures that passively slide along the margins, carrying the backpack of an uncertain destiny; castaways fleeing real dangers, latent or imaginary threats, with false identities and passports, towards some distant shore where they can find refuge and work. These beings beaten by history with a capital letter propose to rebuild their lives, to reach a safe harbor where they will try, unsuccessfully, to free themselves from the fogged glass of the past.
“Babe, I am between so many generations and so many things!” exclaimed the writer in an interview with this newspaper in one of the bars he frequented, which was like his office, on the corner of Azcuénaga and Peña. “I am a guy who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, reading texts that almost no one read anymore. Afterwards I continued reading and writing outside of modernity, postmodernity, or better yet, current events. I am not current, and I do not say this as flirtation or to boast. It’s like this: better to accept it. I’m not going to put on a punk wig or say that I write post-autonomous literature, like Ludmer. What I do has its roots, I believe, in my reading: Josep Roth and Danilo Kiš”, he mentioned two of the authors he most admired and from whom he had taken the rootless “wandering” between cultures and places.
The writer and filmmaker, who was born in Buenos Aires on January 13, 1939, was descendant of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who arrived in Argentina from kyiv and Odessa at the end of the 19th century. His adolescence was spent in two groups: in neighborhood movie theaters, where he watched double shows of old Hollywood films; and between books that he read in Spanish, English and French by authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson. Cozarinsky’s creative universe cannot be thought of without that “between” generations and things, between fiction and essay, between literature and cinema, between fiction and documentary, between dramaturgy and acting. As a young man he became involved with Silvina Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges and José Bianco and He collaborated in the emblematic magazine South. In 1973 he won the La Nación Prize for essays, shared with Bianco, for a work on gossip as a literary form in the work of authors such as Henry James and Marcel Proust, a work that he expanded and republished in 2013 with the title New gossip museum. In 1974 he published Borges and cinemaa text that was expanded in successive editions.
Before heading to Paris, he flirted with cultural journalism and wrote in weekly newspapers such as Front page and Panorama. In 1970 she filmed her first film,… (Ellipsis)which was shown for the first time at the 1971 Cannes Festival. Once settled in France, he continued filming films that mixed fiction and documentary, such as War of a man’s soul (One man’s war), from 1981, in which he confronted the diaries of the German philosopher, novelist and soldier Ernst Jünger during the Nazi occupation in France and the French propaganda newsreels in the same period. His films include: Rothschild’s violin, Ghosts of Tangier, Warriors and captives (adaptation of the Borges story), night watch and Duetamong other.
Knowing he was mortal changed his life in the late ’90s. The diagnosis of cancer, the threat of a perhaps unappealable sentence, pushed him to write in 1999. Until then he was the author of a cult book, urban voodooa cross between essay and fiction, which seduced writers as diverse as the American Susan Sontag and the Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante. “Just as Godard said that he wanted to make fiction films that were documentaries and documentaries that were like fiction films, Cozarinsky has begun to write autobiographical narratives that are like essays, essays that are like narratives. urban voodoo It is a book of exile. Cozarinsky’s Buenos Aires (the local past) and his Paris (the cosmopolitan present) are both capitals of a nostalgia that is both retroactive and foreboding. The writer’s voodoo conjures the past to sharpen uncalmed desires, and also to exorcise them,” Sontag said.
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), Three borders (2006), Night maneuvers (2007) far from where (2009), Money for ghosts (2012), dark (2016), In the last drink we leave (2017) –book with which he won the V Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize–, The unpunished vice, Books and the street, Night shift and dirty sky, among others. Allergic to generic and all kinds of typecasting, he wrote and directed the play squash and together with his family doctor, Alejo Florin, he participated in Cozarinsky and his doctordocumentary theater proposal by Vivi Tellas.
When he returned permanently to Buenos Aires, the tango was waiting for him. To the young man of the 60s, it seemed like “old men’s music.” But at the beginning of the 21st century he became a devoted milonguero and that passion found its way into the chronicles and stories of the book. Milongaswhich he published in 2007. “Nostalgia is morbid, sticky, devitalizing,” Cozarinsky said in an interview with PageI12–. I don’t long for any past era, even when there are things that were better than now. It seems to me to be a negative feeling like everything that does not drive you forward, to live, to fight, to create. Anything that involves staying still in a more or less idealized memory seems morbid to me. I am interested in the past as an ecological reserve where I find characters, situations and anecdotes that are material for my work. “I dig into the past, but it is not out of nostalgia, but because I am looking for material.”.
Literature was his homeland, the territory of the present. Cozarinsky writes better every day. It is not about domesticated technique at the service of an idea of perfection or beauty. If he writes better and better, perhaps it is because he tries to delve into the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, that art of filling the fissures of a broken object not to hide the fractures, but to highlight them. By showing the scars of the characters he composes – detritus of his own camouflaged experiences or other people’s experiences covered with the power of that which seems too intimate –, they acquire a form of nobility: the nobility left by wounds in bodies, in life.
He believed in the afterlife, not in a religious-Christian sense, but in the memory of those who remain alive. Readers will always return to the dust of Cozarinsky’s stories, a literature that has interrogated with beauty and style the most complex issues of the human condition.
