The Journey. Sergio Pitol
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The Journey features one of the world’s master storytellers at work as he skillfully recounts his time as Mexico’s Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in Prague and two fateful weeks of travel around the Soviet Union in 1986. From the first paragraph, Sergio Pitol dislocates the sense of reality, masterfully and playfully blurring the lines between fiction and fact.
This adventurous story, based on the author’s own travel journals, parades through some of the territories that the author lived in and traveled through (Prague, Moscow, Leningrad, the Caucasus) as Pitol reflects on the impact of Russia’s sacred literary pantheon in his life, exploring the inspiration for his own novels and stories, and the power that literature holds over us all.
The Journey is the second work in Pitol’s groundbreaking and wholly original “Trilogy of Memory,” which won him the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2005 and has inspired the newest generation of Spanish-language writers from Enrique Vila-Matas to Valeria Luiselli. The Journey represents the perfect example of one of the world’s greatest authors at the peak of his power.
International praise for Sergio Pitol:
“Sergio Pitol is not only our best active storyteller, he is also the bravest renovator of our literature.” —ÁLVARO ENRIGUE on The Journey
“Pitol is unfathomable; it could almost be said that he is a literature entire of himself.” —DANIEL SALDAÑA PARIS, author of Among Strange Victims
“Once again Pitol takes the reader on a transcendent adventure through geography and history. His voice—learned and warm—is the perfect companion on these flights, giving dramatic glimpses into the intellectual life of Soviet Prague one moment and inimitable insights into literature the next. The reader leaves the pages wiser, more enriched and able to fully appreciate Pitol’s status in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.” —MARK HABER, Brazos Bookstore
“Reading him, one has the impression…of being before the greatest Spanish-language writer of our time.” —ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS, author of Dublinesque
“Masterful.” —Dallas Observer on The Art of Flight
ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY SERGIO PITOL:
The Art of Flight
translated by George Henson
Deep Vellum Publishing
2919 Commerce St. #159, Dallas, Texas 75226
Copyright © 2000 by Sergio Pitol
Originally published as El viaje in 2000 by Ediciones Era, Mexico City, Mexico
Introduction, “Sergio Pitol, niño ruso” © 2015 by Álvaro Enrigue
English translation copyright © 2015 by George Henson
First edition, 2015. All rights reserved.
978-1-941920-19-0 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2015935165
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Esta publicación fue realizada con el estímulo del PROGRAMA DE APOYO A LA TRADUCCIÓN (PROTRAD) dependiente de instituciones culturales mexicanas.
This publication was carried out with the support of the PROGRAM TO SUPPORT THE TRANSLATION OF MEXICAN WORKS INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES (PROTRAD) with the collective support of Mexico’s cultural institutions.
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Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz · annazylicz.com
Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.
Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.
Contents
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SERGIO PITOL, RUSSIAN BOY An introduction by Álvaro Enrigue
· 21 MAY
· MEYERHOLD’S LETTER
· 22 MAY
· FAMILY PORTRAIT I
· 23 MAY
· 24 MAY
· 25 MAY
· GOLDFISH
· 26 MAY
· 27 MAY
· FAMILY PORTRAIT II
· 28 MAY
· 29 MAY
· 30 MAY
· 31 MAY
· WHEN THE SOUL IS DELIRIOUS
· 2 JUNE
· FEATS OF MEMORY
· 3 JUNE
· IVÁN, THE RUSSIAN BOY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For Álvaro Mutis, my brother in Russia
by Álvaro Enrigue
There is a story that Sergio Pitol used to often tell when he still led a public life, and which he recorded in The Art of Flight. At the beginning of the eighties he spent a two-month vacation in Mexico City, after having lived for years in Barcelona, Warsaw, Budapest, and Moscow. At the time, he was 45 and had six or seven published books; he had translated Conrad and James and had been the editor of the legendary collection Los Heterodoxos, published by Tusquets in Spain and with a wide circulation throughout the Americas. Shortly after arriving in Mexico, he received a call from the PEN Club, inviting him to participate in a series of dialogues between writers of different generations—a reading, followed by a public talk, between a veteran author and a novice. He accepted, and they announced that he would read with Juan Villoro. The event almost ended in disaster for Pitol: he thought, as he ascended the stage—twenty-three years and a pile of books older than Villoro—that he was to be the novice at the table. Nothing better describes Pitol’s eccentricity: he was a referential figure for an entire literature, and he still thought of himself as a promising writer.
It is this eccentricity sine qua non that allowed Pitol to become first a cult author and then the writer who reintroduced Mexican literature’s beautiful secular tradition: authors of genreless books, more disposed to suggest a conversation than impose a monolithic