Last Words on Earth - Softcover

Serena, Javier

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948830329 ISBN 13: 9781948830324

Verlag: Open Letter Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

In exile from his home country of Peru, Ricardo Funes embodies the ultimate starving artist. Fired from almost every job he's held―usually for paying more attention to literature than work―he sets himself up in a rundown shack where he works on writing stories to enter in regional contests across Spain, and foisting his judgements about literature on anyone who will listen as one of the last remaining members of the "negacionismo" poetry movement. Completely dedicated to an unwavering belief in his own art, Funes struggles in anonymity until he achieves unbridled success with The Aztec and becomes a legend . . . at least for a moment. Diagnosed with lung cancer a few years later, Funes will only be able to enjoy his newfound attention for a short time.

Told through the voices of Funes's best friend, his wife, and himself, Last Words on Earth looks at the price―and haphazard nature―of fame through the lens of a Bolaño-esque writer who persevered just long enough to be transformed out of obscurity into being a literary legend right at the end of his life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Javier Serena is a journalist and writer. His most recent books are Atila about the writer Aliocha Coll (forthcoming from Open Letter) and Last Words on Earth, a fictional biography of a Roberto Bolaño-esque writer.

Katie Whittemore is graduate of the University of NH (BA), Cambridge University (M.Phil), and Middlebury College (MA), and was a 2018 Bread Loaf Translators Conference participant. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Two Lines, The Arkansas International, The Common Online, Gulf Coast Magazine Online, The Los Angeles Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and InTranslation. Current projects include novels by Spanish authors Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aliocha Coll, Aroa Moreno Durán, Nuria Labari, Katixa Agirre, and Juan Gómez Bárcena.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I’ll call him Ricardo, Ricardo Funes, although that isn’t his real first name, or last. I won’t reveal any factual details about him, except to say that he was from Peru and never forgot that he was an exile, not even after three whole decades in Spain.

Funes resided in Spain for thirty years: in Barcelona, at first, and then other Catalan towns during his nomadic phase, in which he devoted himself to selling leather goods at flea markets, and performing stints as a night watchman at various campgrounds, until finally settling in Lloret de Mar.

Now that statues have gone up in his honor and he is universally admired after his untimely death, Funes the man has been obscured by the towering shadow of his legend, his history appropriated and fetishized, his works quoted and beloved by all. His literary triumph couldn’t have seemed more unlikely when I first met him, a poor immigrant silenced on the margins. A true outcast.

That’s what I thought that first day: here was a lunatic or hermit, a pariah forced to live on the village outskirts. I’ve never forgotten the impression he made. I met Funes at the invitation of a mutual friend, a fellow writer who taught at the Universitat de Girona who had discovered Funes the summer previous at a campground near the coastal town of Castelldefells. That’s where Ricardo Funes’s mother ran a notions shop, up until the day she decamped for yet another inland town, driven by the habitual, ingrained nomadism that defined their little family of two. I decided to accompany my professor friend to Castelldefells after several phone conversations during which he described Funes with an intriguing mix of skepticism and appeal. According to my friend, Funes was more familiar with certain periods of Latin American literature than even some of his department colleagues, but the man expressed himself with declarations so provocative it proved impossible to invite him to give a lecture. “It’s like he has to argue until the other person is offended,” he said, explaining that Funes had recently been fired from the campground because, while an inebriated English vacationer almost drowned in the pool, Funes was reading instead of making his nightly rounds. Finding himself without a job and with a bit of money, Funes had apparently decided to spend all his savings on a shack near the beach rather than follow his mother out of town.

I had heard so much about him from my friend that I decided I would join him on a trek out to Funes’s hut. The May day was so cold and rain-swept that it seemed to exaggerate Funes’s status as an exiled resistance fighter living in poverty. It’s strange to think of how forsaken he was back then given the commotion caused, decades later, by any old manuscript found on his computer. But back in those days, Ricardo Funes was so far removed from ordinary life that he was characterized as somewhat of an outlaw who harried the other villagers: “Watch yourselves now, the Peruvian’s mutt probably hasn’t eaten in a while,” a neighbor advised us, peering out from under the hood of his raincoat when we stopped to check our directions.

Such a warning would later prove unnecessary, as I never sensed even the slightest hint of a threat in any of Funes’s gestures, not that day nor in any of the years to come. It did, however, serve to amplify the mysteriousness of the scene in which we found ourselves. After the neighbor’s ominous words, we pressed on down the dirt road for several minutes, through tree boughs clawing the windshield and muddy patches where our tires spun, until we finally reached an empty clearing.

And there, for the first time, I was met with Ricardo Funes’s unforgettable figure. I saw him from the car, a hundred meters away, planted in front of the house like a lookout/sentinel guarding his homestead in the Old West. The shack was a rustic, single-story construction with a haphazard tin roof, and Funes stood outside with his dog, clutching not a shotgun, but a stick, surrounded by shirts and pairs of pants strung on a line, flapping like flags in the breeze.

We got out of the car, and as my friend and I walked toward him, I sensed his endearing amiability, which I would come to know as one of Funes’s characteristic qualities. He donned a summer shirt with green and orange flowers, more appropriate for Caribbean isles than our European latitudes. His hair was long and curly and he sported the round metal-framed glasses he would wear until he died. To round out his general appearance as a stray tourist cum novice farmer, he wore a pair sandals entirely ineffectual at protecting his bare feet from the mud.

“Welcome, professor.” Funes ironically greeted my friend, shaking his hand with sincere affection.

Then he turned to me. I took in his open shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a patch of chest hair and a silver chain. He was thin as a greyhound and in his unmistakable, hoarse voice―perpetual rumble, incurable lament―addressed me in a way that immediately won me over:

“And you are also very welcome, señor Vallés, sir,” he joked. “I’ve read all of your books.”

In time, I would come to learn that those were two of Funes’s most emblematic behaviors: to read everything and declare it publicly, and to express his opinions―whatever they were―with total sincerity and no reservation whatsoever, devoid of any strategy to advance his own interests. Pretense was not to be found among his defects.

That afternoon, however, I was less taken with his literary reflections than with the spectacle of neglect in which he lived.

The house struck me as so chaotic, so unsuitable for habitation, that it was a wonder he had already been living there for months. The first jolt was the strong smell permeating the place: the odor of a closed, musty pantry, or of the thick air of an unaired bedroom. It smelled as though Funes lived on nicotine and caffeine and wore his clothes so many times in a row that he didn’t remember how to wash them to expunge the pervasive stench.

In the main living area―the only room besides the bedroom―there was a kitchenette and sink piled high with plates and pots and pans, a couch covered in an array of blankets, clothing strewn across the floor, and books stacked in towers on shelves and atop the television. My friend and I sat down at a small table pushed against the wall that appeared to be used both for eating and working at his typewriter.

We sat quietly, taken aback by the shambolic state of his quarters, as he showed us the folders where he kept his manuscripts, organized in a color-coded filing cabinet with a meticulousness completely at odds the rest of the house, by year and classification―poetry, short story, or novel.

“Your first book is your best,” he said, crossing his legs and establishing the candidness that would govern the terms our future friendship. He lit his first cigarette before my friend or I had even ventured to try the coffee he offered.

The rest of the conversation unfolded along those lines, a succession of erudite comments and rash declarations. Funes didn’t hesitate to show contempt for acclaimed writers, or extol the virtues of others we hadn’t even heard of, all with a confidence in his own judgment that I had rarely seen in anyone else. “He’ll get old so fast that soon his work will seem like it’s from the nineteenth century,” he said about a popular prize-winning novelist. Or, in reference to a poet he had always admired who lived as a recluse: “He’s one of two or three who will actually last,” calming his dog with a pat. The animal hadn’t stopped yipping, whining, and sniffing our legs under the table.

The situation was an ironic one, since by that time, I had already published several books and had a weekly column in La Vanguardia, as befit the profile of the sort of writer I represented, vaguely bohemian but from a well-to-do Barcelonese family,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Open Letter Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1948830329
• ISBN 13: 9781948830324
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar