Marked Books: A Poignant Journey Through Memory and Poetry

I think it was Stefan Zweig who said that it was urgent to feed the memory of ghosts with our own blood. A sentence presented with the completeness of the most poignant evocations and whose exercise would imply invoking (or summoning) voices that the past has not yet erased in the fog of days, not even the memory (as in old photographs) that fades after the passing of death.

In this case, “Marked Books” by Antonia Torres installs a subjective, an optic, a bend that goes from childhood to adulthood around the figure of the father, the endearing poet Jorge Torres Ulloa who traveled the rainy streets of Valdivia, with her skeptical but fraternal voice and that today her daughter’s words turn into that kind of tutelary ghost that still guards the sayings and feelings of an entire era.

Father and daughter discover the craft of poetry aboard an old blue Oxford bicycle wandering through a winter city guarded by the military dictatorship. It is a Chile escorted by the guardians of authoritarianism and the bicycle is a kind of camera where childhood and adulthood record that southern city in which suspicion inserts its sharp stiletto.

What are memories in the prose of Antonia Torres? Without a doubt, something more than remembrance and remembrance. It is an (almost cinematic) reconstruction of faces that enter and say goodbye, of certainties that suddenly become fragile under the weight of reality, of scenes where the father – always a actor in the face of adversity – seasons the grayness of the days and the scourge of her kidney disease, with that precious gift that is creative vitality, that rare amulet that her daughter conveys and displays in its pages. Characters such as Jorge Teillier, Raúl Zurita, Diamela Eltit, Rosabetty Muñoz, Maha Vial appear in that Valdivian house and in all of them a halo is translated, a presence where the poetic is neither evanescent nor metaphysical, but deeply material and experiential.

Although memory (that construction that is always being forged) is cardinal in Antonia Torres’ book, the author does not give in to the temptation of the memoirist and reiterates the attempt of the novelist, the fabulist, the creator of fictions. “Marked Books” slides with twists and shocks in an always traveling temporality, from the most naked childhood to the consciousness of adulthood, from the Chilean military dictatorship to the agreed democracy, from the original experience of writing to sad regional athenaeums. And reality literally clings to the pages like a shipwrecked board.

It is a book where father and daughter share the craft of skepticism. It has also often been thought that the two homelands of every writer are his past and his language. In the case of this book, a sense of futurity persists despite the historical night.

However, as seen in the poems of Jorge Torres’ youth, the poet, despite his distrust in communication and language, constantly seeks the embrace of spring and wonders about the friends who will arrive at his funeral, tired. , with woolen clothes and umbrellas, eager to finish the funeral process soon and embrace that season in which he already finds himself fused with the black and humid earth.

Through its pages we will see the poet directing a play in German, “The Physicists” by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, in which the ghosts of madness and shock seem to cross the limbos of a language and insert themselves into the winter of the most complex and contradictory feelings. , until realizing a surveillance state that persists.

And certainly death, that warning that the poet-father foresees from the beginning to the end and that the writer-daughter links through the years, as a survivor of a dark time that makes room for other moments, other moments, new visions and areas where you have to travel. Death, which is nurse and avenging angel, always flies over this fictional journey.

Antonia Torres’ prose is precise and neat, at times it exudes black humor and at times it seems to harbor the secret root of a very genuine and contemplative melancholy, to the point that her characters move and remain fixed in the reader’s iris.

Criticism and academia in our country need to open the windows to new areas of reality, to other literatures that escape a certain hegemonic canon, certainly markedly metropolitan and sometimes somewhat repetitive. In that dimension, Antonia Torres’s novel proposes a bundle of memories that, in their accurate rhythm, delimit a narrative that should be read with attention and an investigative spirit. A prolix and goldsmith literature, a narrator who writes black on white, the poetics of her daughter and her unfathomable daydream.

The content expressed in this opinion column is the exclusive responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The counter.

2023-09-17 04:16:34
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