The reverse world of Juan Villoro
A masterclass on surprising the world with a single sentence
Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz wrote that distraction is the attraction to the opposite side of the world. The distracted Juan Villoro has become a resident of that land. His Friday columns in the newspaper Reforma are a weekly exercise where the Mexican writer says something about one thing to talk about another. Why is it necessary to look in a mirror in the elevators? (about the social utility of vanity), since when to say “gentleman” to a man is an insult in disguise? (on the decline of courtesy), why is coughing in recitals an expression of freedom? (about the benefits of the hoarseness). Juan Villoro does not turn his back on reality but reveals his paradoxes. His use of ideas to appeal a reader accustomed to reviewing more than 150 times his phone a day, reaffirms the health of a style that can not be overcome by any algorithm.
Juan Villoro remembers the moment in which he learned that language has the extraordinary quality of improving reality. In his chronicle about the province of Yucatan “Palmeras de la Brisa Rápida” (1989), he remembers his grandmother, a Mayan descendent called Estela Milán. She told him stories of films that only existed in her memory, anecdotes where the good guys could only be the poorest. It was so dramatic that she could even shed a tear to add emotion to the tale. His imagination transformed memories into dramas. Villoro remembers her taking advantage of any opportunity to make the life of her house “become interesting, that is suspicious.”
The grandson of Estela Milán has taken this practice beyond that house in Yucatan. After losing his vision in one of his eyes in Madrid, he published a novel about cornea trafficking in Mexico. When he survived an earthquake on the seventh floor of a Chilean hotel, he proposed a chronicle about the horror of an 8.8 on the Richter scale. While touring Seoul, in South Korea, he wrote a brief history of hurriedness. It is as if he took advantage of any opportunity to make life on earth interesting, that is suspect.
The multiplied man
Villoro writes with the same motivation as a reader who opens a book: to imagine other lives. He has published a youth novel about a wild book that refuses to be read, a chronicle about the Mexican passion of chili, and — recently — a tribute to donkeys because “in a country without direction, nothing better than celebrating an animal that knows where it is going. “ Making it difficult to classify without having to resort to a list: novelist, playwright, Barcelona fan, storyteller, author of children’s books, television host, Necaxa fan, sports commentator, essayist, and chronicler. “I do not know if the dispersion makes me versatile, but at least it makes it harder for me to repeat myself,” he reflected on his evasiveness to specialize in an interview for Letras Libres. As one of the characters in The Wild Book (2008) states: “Nothing is as boring as knowing a lot about so little.”
Although, being too occupied talking about writing instead of pressing the keyboard, is one of the most common paradoxes for a celebrated author, he has taken charge of taking the challenge. His continuous appearances in Mexican cultural events are already compared with those of the late intellectual Carlos Monsiváis. Not only in frequency but in that attempt to break the mold of what society accepts as a culture.
Both writers understood that literature should not only be in libraries or bookstores. In one of his last excursions, Villoro read on stage his stories of Tiempo Transcurrido, a collection of stories published in the eighties, with a full rock band that turned his stories into spoken songs. The book was reissued and deserved a musical tour instead of just a presentation. “Fortunately for the attendees to date, I have not sung anything,” he admitted with the humility of a teenager who chose the books instead of a Fender Telecaster. During the presentation of the book, Joselo Rangel, bassist of Café Tacvba and author, declared that “Villoro did not form his rock band, but he gave us his stories as a map.” If his journalistic work is to explain the reverse of the world, his fiction feeds the imagination of a community.
What the literature debts to the rain
The book of stories that the Editorial of the César Vallejo University will publish in Peru for this year’s International Book Fair in Lima, Apocalypse (all included), is its seventh collection. Short stories are one of the few genres to which he has returned regularly. Perhaps, for the same reason that the writer Augusto Monterroso, every time a workshop participant told him that he was working on a novel, answered: “Ah, you are training to write short stories.” The tales of Apocalypse (all included) have little to do with a zombie invasion, terrifying volcanic eruptions or global warming.
Initially published in 2012 —the year in which the Mayans ensured the end of the world—, the narration that gives its name to the title tells the story of a tourist guide involved in a Congress that seeks to determine if that year would end everything. The end of the world as a form of tourism, would be part of the seed of what will later become Arrecife, his latest novel, which he will shortly publish in English. The plot is a mix of science fiction thriller and a search for happiness. The characters, plot, and context may be distant, but they share the spirit of Murphy’s Law: if something terrible has to happen, it will happen. In a turbulent time, these daily apocalypses give us the sensation of not being alone when the world seems to fail. Like when they invite you to do something for the first time in your fifties.
In an interview for Gatopardo magazine in 2013, he assured that in his third age will be full of drama. In his sixth decade, he still wants to write novels, but the theater is gaining space in his agenda of future projects. To jump to the tables in a certain way was his introduction to writing: at 14 he was part of “Crisol”, a play inspired by a novel from Alejandro Jodorowsky. Too many years later, when he received an invitation to write a piece at age 50, he fell in love with the genre again. Although his first attempt at writing was a play at eight, for Villoro, “it was very stimulating to reach the genre at 50 and be an absolute beginner”. Since then more than a dozen works have been staged between Spain, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. About this incursion, in an interview in the Argentine newspaper La Nación, they asked him: if the chronicle is literature under pressure, then the theater is literature with people?
—With people and coughs from the public. The liveliest variant of the word— Villoro replied. Feeling the reaction of people to their stories is a more energetic and immediate satisfaction than waiting for the next book signing. A writer can succeed in sales or show up at a different event every month; however, feeling the immediate effect of your words has proven to be an addictive experience. Among his works, the most popular is the Conference about the Rain, which has been staged up to a hundred times in Mexico. In times where Broadway productions dominated the attention of the world, the play gets the public to pay attention to a librarian who speaks alone, whose choreography is to drink a glass of water, and a table is all the scenography. The monologue begins with the main character realizing that he has lost the papers of his conference minutes before starting, and decides to improvise to talk about his collection of literary Rain. Rain as an excuse and motive, as a stage and protagonist, as a hero and villain. Demonstrating that literature has a pending account with dark clouds.
Novels of a single line
His two volumes of bookish essays, Personal Effects and De eso se trata, present us their favorite authors turned into literary characters. The author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, uses writing as a time machine. The writer of Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry, is presented as a man so convinced that art is a disease, that he spent 20 years between drunkenness and hangovers. But the most relevant literary character that Villoro presents to us is Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. His prologue and translation of 1989 would result into the first edition in Spanish of his Aphorisms, published two centuries ago. His extensive preface is a bibliographical profile where he shows the genius of the German author who turned brevity into a superior form of ingenuity: “the human tendency to be interested in minutiae has led to great things”. A modern teacher who affirmed that “what I have always liked in man is that, being able to build Louvres, eternal pyramids and basilicas of San Pedro, I can contemplate fascinated the cell of a honeycomb, the shell of a snail. .. “ Besides being one of the first to make us smile with those jokes that appeal to our attention — “Have you caught something? Nothing but a river” —, the Lichtenberg Aphorisms are a collection of loose phrases, but there is no doubt about their impact on the writing of their translator. As Enrique Vilas Matas points out, “Villoro’s brilliant prose is lit up with flashing aphoristic phrases that punctuate his texts as inspired whips”.
In social, there is a group of fans willing to suffer those inspired lashes, “The witnesses of Villoro” are a community on Facebook that keeps abreast not only of the author’s appearances but also their fixations: last April they celebrated Nabokov’s birthday, with a text from his pastor. Although they are not yet invited to the literary discussion, their devotion is clear, they have as cover an illustration of their favorite writer as a saint, holding a copy of The Witness, his first novel. Besides that, they follow the passage of their thirty books. But it is on Twitter where he finds his biggest audience, with more than 300 thousand followers. Although a few years ago the account was just a repository of its events and publications, during 2011 and until 2013 there was hope in that modern Babilonia. For lack of a better word, his Twitter account published “villorismos”. Up to four a day. In just his first month he put us to look for our digital double: “My name was already taken on Twitter: a relative? A replicant? With philosophy you know yourself; on Twitter, you know your double.” He gave the advice to deal with the corrupt and the bad traffic: “In times of crisis there is nothing more rebellious than feeling good.” He justified the brevity of the 140 characters: “Tweets last longer in the mind than in the eyes: the brief has a long history”.
It is no coincidence that the librarian of Conference about the rain shares a trait that accompanies Villoro in its different facets: they are collectors of quotes. Away from the academic, which Villoro selects sometimes look like novels of a single line. On the importance of listening: “I will die the day when I do not want to hear someone talking about himself” (Elías Canetti); about the value of continuing to think like a child: “What made us geniuses is what we keep as children” (Charles Baudelaire); about the truth of happy people “Never consider happy anyone who depends on happiness” (Seneca). Classic and contemporary authors appear in their texts to corroborate an idea or propose a different point of view. Relying on the wisdom of others had a less arrogant and didactic effect. When presenting to large audiences authors who accumulate dust on the shelves, the quotes acquires its most romantic meaning. In Spanish quotes are also a date. It’s about having a plan with someone, even if it’s from an author born two centuries ago. A blind date, with the recommendation of a friend. If everything goes well the next step will be to know more of each other, to turn the pages of the days, to see where this adventure ends.
