From Borges to Pornosonets: Pedro Mairal inaugurated the Dialogue series with a review of his work.

In a nearly packed Victoria Ocampo Hall, following the presentation by Verónica Abdala, journalist and curator of this series, the opening of the Dialogue of Argentine Writers series took place last night. This season, one of the highlights of the 49th Buenos Aires International Book Fair for several editions, has been the highlight of the show. The host and moderator of the discussion was writer and editor Mauro Libertella. The author of My Buried Book, Winter with My Generation , and The Style of Others , among others, spoke for nearly an hour with writer Pedro Mairal .

The author of four novels – all renowned and critically acclaimed: Una noche con Sabrina Love, which won the Clarín Novela Prize in 1998 , El año del desierto, Salvatierra, and La Uruguaya –, short stories, and books of erotic poetry – his famous Pornosonetos – delved into several of his works, spoke about his composition method, and, among several Borges quotes, generously shared with an audience that came forward with interest some details of his own universe. One that has him, he says, in the middle of writing his next novel and very happy to be able to see all his work published in a very neat and aesthetically elegant manner under the Seix Barrial label with illustrations by Gastón González.

"I'm getting started with the interrogation," Mauro Libertella said, prompting one of the first laughs of the evening. Several more would follow throughout the conversation.

The first question sought to explore his moments as a reader . Mairal described a childhood memory: “I remember a moment of great happiness. At school, you could choose to take literature as an extracurricular activity. I remember reading Borges’s “The Shape of the Sword,” a story that turns around in the last sentence, and smiling, thinking: how well he did that. It was a very foundational moment . I also read only Martín Fierro; I was interested in the rural world: folklore, José Larralde, Yupanqui. That was a connection with my folkloric side.”

Mairal recalled his truncated medical studies at the university and said he couldn't bring himself to tell his parents he'd dropped out. "So I kept going to the cafeteria. I brought things to read . I read Borges, Cortázar ( All Fires, the Fire ). I read them with a pencil in hand to see how they'd done the trick. Literature was a place where I could tie up loose ends at nineteen, completely lost. Who am I? I don't know now, at 54," he confessed, eliciting a few shy smiles that erupted with the following anecdote: " I went on a major psychopathy trip with my parents : I sent them to see the film Dead Poets Society . In it, a young man commits suicide because they wouldn't let him study theater. My parents came back dismayed. I remember them telling me: it's important that you study whatever you want."

So he took the desired path and enrolled in Literature . "My time there made me a specialized reader. You become a reader who doesn't miss a thing. It's so true that many people stopped writing, they became overwhelmed," he described.

Based on this last comment, Libertella asked if the author was still capable of immersing himself in a plot and letting himself go. “I don't have a problem,” he stated, “I find it very absorbing. A bit like the character in 'Continuity of the Parks.' I have some reader/writer flaws. Paper feels very definitive to me; it calms my anxiety. I get very anxious when someone sends me a digital text that I can read as if I'm constantly correcting it,” he noted.

Libertella asked him, following the reissue of his work in the same collection, how the definitive nature of the novel comes into play. "Are you tempted to modify anything?" he asked. The author commented that he finds it "a very nice experience" and highlighted how a review by Libertella himself inspired one of the cover illustrations, by Gastón González: "You had done a very interesting review of Salvatierra , titled 'Los rollos del padre.' I mentioned it to him, and that inspired the cover, which shows a man with rolls on his head . With my editor, Mercedes Güiraldes, we rethought the books. This forces me to revisit them."

In that sense, Mairal revealed a detail that he modified and admitted it was “out of pure ignorance. In La Uruguaya, I used the word "autistic" as a metaphor for being lost. Several mothers of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum wrote to me telling me they felt offended. So I changed it .”

He also described how distant he feels from many of the things he's written: "For example, One Night with Sabrina Love . I think it was something a 28-year-old guy wrote . But I don't agree with the idea of ​​taking it out of circulation. If anything, it will serve to show how people thought at the time," he cautioned.

The discussion continued with a question about creation. Libertella quoted Ricardo Piglia, who said there were two types of writers: those who always wrote the same book throughout their work, and those who always wrote a different book. He placed Mairal in the latter category and asked, "How do you do it when you're writing a new book? Do you have your previous ones in mind?"

“Not too much,” he admitted, giving an example: “ The protagonist of La Uruguaya, I realized later that it was Daniel Montero, the protagonist of Una noche… , but at 40 years old . If I had seen it at the beginning, maybe I would never have written it. I prefer not to be too self-conscious. I wrote a novel in sonnets, but I wouldn't write it again.” He also praised the versatility of the novel, something that drives him to innovate: “There are moments where you move forward at great speed or in slow motion, essay-like moments or movie scripts. It's difficult to repeat resources,” he commented.

Libertella also opened the discussion about a few specific titles. He praised Salvatierra , which he admitted was his favorite Mairal book; the story of a silent painter from the interior who spends his entire life painting a long scroll that ends up being a kind of autobiography.

He asked about the origin of this idea, and the writer explained that it came to him after watching a documentary about the artist Jackson Pollock : “When they took the guy's photo for the cover of Life magazine, he froze at that moment and never painted again. I imagined the opposite, an Anti-Pollock, who would paint his entire life. I had also been working on the unpublished poet César Mermet. Hence the idea of ​​having an entire work fall on you. Then the detective story began to build: one more thing is missing. That's where the intrigue arose.”

It was also very interesting when he detailed how he spent nine months researching The Year of the Desert , perhaps his best novel, in which he narrates how Buenos Aires gradually disappears, leading back to the moment of its founding. All in a post-apocalyptic tone that begins during the 2001 crisis. “How did you work with the clues, the information?” Libertella asked.

First, he was inspired by the context: “ Everything felt like it was rewinding: children of immigrants were going to Europe. Everything was up in the air. There was a dystopian feeling. As Borges said in the poem "Insomnia": leagues of garbage pampas. I first saw the image of a pasture; the novel has to reach that point. When that image hit me, I lay down on the bed. I thought: I have to do this little by little. I divided 500 years of history into twelve months. At that time, I was renting an office, and those who visited me thought it was a police station because I had maps of Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires hanging on the wall. With a compass, I drew concentric circles and started thinking about how Buenos Aires fades away,” he recounted.

He highlighted a book by Adrián Gorelik, The Grill and the Park , which was key to his work, as well as his excursions to the National Archives: “I saw photos from 1850 and the people were alive. There were the tire workers of Recoleta, and there was nothing. Beneath the asphalt, the wasteland is still there,” and he summarized how that novel was transformative for him: “It transformed my view of the present. The present isn't just the present; it seems static, but it's moving.” Libertella, noting that the author explores temporality in several of his novels, exclaimed: “In the end, you were writing the same book; we've just discovered it.” “The Book of Time,” Mairal responded, amid more laughter.

Libertella asked about his life as a columnist and freelance writer , a job he held for several years at the newspaper Perfil and later published in two books ( Evasion Maneuvers, This Story Is No Longer Available ). “What I ruminated on during the week wasn’t very good; what I wrote two hours before closing time, when I thought Jorge Fontevecchia was going to come and bang on my door, was better ,” he confessed, to the audience’s laughter once again.

He emphasized this exercise: “It's a great exercise. I recommend writing within certain guidelines, with a deadline. It knocks you off your pedestal,” he added. “I like Kafka's idea: today Germany invaded Poland. In the afternoon I went swimming. I like to look at current events underwater,” he noted.

The question arose about the Pornosonets , those compositions made up of fourteen hendecasyllabic verses that bring together the author's most daring and explicit works , which he began publishing under a pseudonym. “I remember that Washington Cucurto once asked me for some texts, and I had these pornosonets that I was writing when I was working on El año del desierto . I sent them to him and he said: great, they'll be out tomorrow. I was embarrassed. So we invented Ramón Paz . It was very liberating.” He also explained why, some time later, he decided to publish them under his name: “When people started telling me: I like Ramón Paz's sonnets, I couldn't stand it.”

Towards the end, the audience asked some interesting questions about his current readings, his musical side (he has a guitar and vocal duo called Pensé que era viernes with fellow writer Rafa Otegui), and what he does when he gets blocked, to which he responded with some advice that may be useful to more than one person: “Wait. Move into different genres : if I get stuck on a novel, what happens if I write a short story? Write in bursts. What am I afraid of? Why can't I write? Write the question. Write in a notebook and say you're going to burn this later . Let the words come out. Even when very dark things come out. The stored word is somewhat toxic. Never writing does any harm. It may hurt others, but that's another thing.”