Against talent numbers

For some, writing is often a continuous conversation with the poetics of authors who have shaped their lives, their literary world—let's say, the plural, turbulent, and entertaining foreign world they "carry within." Without a doubt, the Argentine Alan Pauls, author of The Borges Factor , is one of them. I just realized this more than ever in an interview with his compatriot Hinde Pomeraniec on the occasion of the release of her new book of essays: Someone Singing in the Next Room . It may not seem like it, but it's a Virginia Woolf-esque title. In the interview, she clarifies this when Pomeraniec encourages her to comment on the title, and she confesses that she took it from an essay by Virginia Woolf in which she talks about why she finds it so difficult to read her contemporaries and why it's even more difficult to write about them. It was an essay by Woolf that took the form of a letter to a nephew who had reproached her for not writing about her contemporaries. In her reply, Woolf said that this was impossible for her because , for her, her contemporaries were people singing in the next room. And although one might say that Woolf said this with a certain disdain , Alan Pauls loved the phrase because it revived the idea that all the people and works he writes about can be considered contemporaries, since, after all, they are still literatures with which he is in conversation.

In fact, the conversation element is essential to Pauls's new book: "I thought it was important to include dialogues in a book of essays. Because for me, there's something about the essay genre that has a lot to do with that."

Suddenly, the interview turns to some words by Alan Pauls that could even be sacred to me, because in them he talks about how, while writing the book, he realized that he was actually collecting essays on poetics that somehow comprised him : “Because in this book, one can read what I'm made of. And see that there's a kind of X-ray of my chemistry as a writer, based on all those I've been feeding on, plundering, vampirizing. And in that sense, I think it's a very loving book. I've eliminated the ones that are critical—in the sense of being aggressive or challenging.”

But there are, Pomeraniec points out, severe reprimands for certain reviewers who were harsh on people like Roberto Arlt. Or like Kafka. Well, Pauls says, because they are writers who for me are obviously very important, but also very important was the way in which certain readings of those writers imposed an image of what they did and their practices that was completely, I don't know if false, but let's say, very questionable. Until a moment came when those writers were well read, or read in an innovative way , and suddenly there, those writers "unfolded all the potential that the other readings sought to lull."

Oh, I'm left thinking about this hellishly hot Madrid, where it would be worth going on a hunt for so many numbing factors of literary talent.