Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi (Montevideo, Uruguay, November 12, 1941) is a Uruguayan writer, translator and political activist who went into exile in Spain during the Uruguayan dictatorship in 1972 and lives in Barcelona, where she has developed most of her literary career. In 2021 she was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize.

According to the critic Seymour Menton, she has been one of the most prominent contemporary short story writers in Uruguay since the 1950s, while the editors of Confluencia magazine say that "she is considered one of the most important Spanish-speaking writers, translated into more than twenty languages, including Yiddish and Korean". However, she was censored during the military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay from 1973 to 1985. Her work was banned in the country, thus as the mention of his name in the media. Despite her exile in Spain, under the Franco regime, and also later in Paris, the author continued to publish works with a high political content and did not stop getting involved in activism outside Uruguay.

Peri Rossi has been a pioneering author and is the only female writer linked to the Latin American boom, a movement that is generally associated with authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. She has translated works by Clarice into Spanish Lispector, Graciliano Ramos and Monique Wittig, and collaborated in Spanish media such as Diario 16, El Periódico and Agencia EFE.

Biography

Early years and education

Peri Rossi was born on November 12, 1941, in Montevideo, Uruguay, the first of two daughters in a family of Italian immigrants, though they spoke only Spanish at home. Her father, Ambrosio Peri, a textile worker, died when she was young, although this death does not seem to have influenced her daughter's life. Her mother, Julieta Rossi, who was a teacher, recognized very early on her daughter's talent for writing and was an inspiration in her career. Peri Rossi was also close to her uncle, single, communist, and owner of a a large library; In fact, she relied heavily on them for reading, due to her family's financial situation. In an interview she reveals that she used to read in libraries, because she couldn't buy books in bookstores. When she was sixteen she went to the National Library, where she read The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir.

She attended a public primary school and later the Rodó public high school, where she also completed pre-university studies between 1958 and 1960. In the same year she was accepted into the Instituto de Profesores Artigas, a tertiary education institution that trains teachers teaching. She there she dedicated herself to comparative literature, in addition to teaching in the pre-university. She won the professorship in 1964 and thereafter she taught at various institutions for the next eleven years, until her exile.

The Institute of Artigas Teachers, where Peri Rossi studied in teaching.

In parallel to her teaching career, she developed as a writer. She published her first work in 1963, Living, a collection of short stories. The second of this same genre, The abandoned museums , was published in 1969. The release of her first novel, The book of my cousins , was in that same year. After these publications, she began to be recognized as one of the most important writers of her generation, with awards such as the Arca Youth Award (1968) for Abandoned Museums and the Marcha Award for The Book of my cousins (1969). These works, and others that were published until her exile in 1972, progressively incorporated a more ideological charge, related to the seriousness of the political situation on the eve of the military coup.

Meanwhile, Peri Rossi joined the leftist Frente Amplio coalition as an independent member. This relationship, together with her participation in the weekly Marcha , closed by the military in 1974, and in the then communist daily El Popular resulted in threats to her life.. At thirty-one years old, her political activism prompted her to flee to Spain, where she has taken up residence.

Exile

On October 4, 1972, he went into exile in Spain, where he has lived ever since. However, he fled to Paris with the help of his friend Julio Cortázar when, in 1974, the Spanish government collaborated with the Uruguayan government to refuse to authorize his Spanish passport again; he would stay there for a couple of years. Upon returning to Spain, he obtained Spanish nationality in 1975, although he was granted Uruguayan citizenship again in 1985. At this time, he maintains both nationalities. With the arrival of democracy in Uruguay, he considered returning to his country but chose to stay in Spain, even though she never felt comfortable there. She however insists that a writer must feel uncomfortable to write well.The exile influenced not only her writing, but also her relationships with other writers. In Barcelona she met writers like Ana María Moix, Montserrat Roig and Esther Tusquets.

Exile is a personal experience for her, as she had to leave the country due to the political situation. In an interview conducted in 2005, she said that she had nothing to live for in Uruguay:

"When the dictatorship fell, I realized that I had lived fourteen years with nostalgia of Montevideo – a terrible nostalgia – and now I did not want to have nostalgia of Barcelona. To have nostalgia, I still have the same. In addition, one is not exiled because he wants, exiled because he has to save the skin, and I think that, within that foolish geometry that is life, an involuntary act does not have to be answered with a voluntary act as it is to return. Strictly you cannot come back because it is a time that no longer exists. »

Cristina Peri Rossi

Nevertheless, she suffered greatly from this exile and several times contemplated committing suicide. Today the writer seems to have become accustomed to a life outside her homeland —she has passed through France, Spain and Germany—; she however considers herself a citizen of the world. According to Peri Rossi, the countries with which she feels an affinity are those in which there is justice and where human and animal rights are defended. In her opinion, that is the true homeland.

Literary career

Her literary career began in Uruguay in the 1960s. A writer from the more radical left, Peri Rossi published her first books with this intention, because as she stated in an interview, "she was a very committed writer and the public voice of the left." After some time, he began to write books whose protagonists were mainly children. She continued to write in exile, where she later addressed issues such as eroticism and homosexuality. Although the theme of lesbianism is more popular in her later writing, there is still a distinction between her lesbian and non-lesbian writing. Her earlier writing, for example Living , "consists of stories steeped in submerged lesbianism," while most of her later fiction has female protagonists exploring the sexual attractions of hers. her towards other women.

First publications

The author herself confesses that she did not have a happy childhood, but through writing and imagination she was able to affirm her identity and fight against manipulation. She considers herself a writer from a very young age, because she maintains that the activity of writing is not limited to fixing a text, but also includes the act of & # 34; imagining it, dreaming it [and] intuiting it & # 34;. She claims that she wrote poems and stories from "the dawn of childhood. " In fact, at the age of six, Peri Rossi revealed to her entire family her desire to become a writer. Her family's reaction was laughter and disbelief, apart from her mother, who had been aware of her daughter's talent since childhood.

Living

His first work was published in 1963, although it was written much earlier. The book consists of three realistic stories, "Living", "The Dance" and "I Don't Know What", three narratives with female protagonists. Each story offers a dark vision of the world, representing a restricted place for the women who inhabit it. The first is about a woman who is condemned to a single life. The latter tell a similar story: that of the daily life of a woman, who is not capable of changing her destiny. Both stories implicitly address the issue of lesbian relationships.

Abandoned museums

The Abandoned Museums is a collection of short stories, although some critics consider it a short novel. literary awards such as the Arca Youth Award. One of these critics, Julio Cortázar, wrote to say that after reading Los museos he had to throw away the first version of his own novel, Libro de Manuel, because there were so many similarities between the two books. Both addressed the main political conflicts of the guerrillas — their bourgeois origins, their hatred of intellectuals, the humiliation of women. Peri Rossi explains that these topics were current among the members of the generation of '68 and were part of the daily life of people in places as diverse as Paris, Havana or Montevideo. In fact, the first edition of The Abandoned Museums was dedicated to the guerrillas, although Peri Rossi later corrected it. Mario Benedetti highly appreciated The Abandoned Museums: he praised the text in the magazine Marcha and later dedicated an entire chapter of his Uruguayan Literature of the 20th century to the work.

The Ship of Fools

Romanesque Tapestry of Creation, CenturyXI) of the cathedral of Gerona, which appears in the plot of ‘The ship of the madmen’.

One of his most notable works is The Ship of Fools (1984). It is considered the most important Spanish-American novel after the Latin American boom. La nave is an allegory of exile that goes beyond politics to also challenge notions of inclusion and exclusion at any level of human experience, especially those of gender and sexuality. The novel consists of two narrative levels, the first of which is the representation of the Romanesque tapestry of Creation (the one that represents the creation of the world according to Genesis). In this world (and, consequently, in this plane of the story) everything is harmonious and structurally ordered. On the other hand, the second narrative plane deals with the life of Equis, the exiled protagonist, and other fictional characters. This world is opposed to that of the tapestry because it is chaotic, fragmented and dispersed from reality. Instead of the harmony experienced by the figures of Creation, characters like Equis experience loneliness and alienation from the social world shaped by the experience of the exile.

According to the magazine Confluencia, "it is considered the best novel of the Latin American post-boom". The work deals with themes such as travel, madness and creation. The themes of the trip are evident in the novel as they are connected to the idea of exile, such as Peri Rossi's state of life. However, it is not her intention to develop her personal story, but rather to reflect the tragedy of exiles and disappearances related to "the crimes of the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America". In the novel, the people in the depths of the waters refer to those who disappeared during these military regimes, such as those in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. "La nave de los locos opens a space in literature that allows the exploration of alternative conceptual articulations of the concept of exile, while experimenting with the aesthetic and ideological possibilities of its incorporation into fiction ».

Works from the year 2000

Peri Rossi dedicating his poem "Strategies of Desire".

In the 21st century, Peri Rossi has written collections of poetry such as State of Exile (2003), Strategies of Desire (2004), My house is writing (2006) and Hotel Room (2007). The collection of poems Estrategias del deseo (2004) is an intense love story from the dawn of desire to the threat of oblivion. Each poem is the sequence of a fast-paced story, intertwined with careful eroticism, splendor, nostalgia and dreams. The scenes of love, words, memory or the body are the elements with which the author constructs the verbal plot of this collection of poems.

Playstation (2009) is another collection of poetry, with which she won the Loewe Prize, becoming the first writer to do so. According to the author herself, it is a very hard book, and completely urban. That is to say, it is the demystification of all the rituals of urban life and deals with a great loneliness. The writer indicates that it is a completely autobiographical book. Each of her poems deals with an experience from her life. For example, one poem describes a misunderstanding that occurred after Peri Rossi came on television. She was recently exiled in Barcelona, an inhabitant of a neighborhood of poor immigrants in San Andrés. Her neighbors, when she saw her portrait on television, treated her badly because they assumed that if she appeared on television she had to be rich and famous. Other poems have to do with the literary world, with the experience of having to live from literature. One of the most acclaimed poems, “Punto de encuentro”, talks about an experience she had in a sex shop. In this poem the theme of eroticism arises again. Another, "Formar una familia", deals with the notion(s) of what a family is.

In 2012, the collection of stories Private Rooms was published, winner of the Mario Vargas Llosa NH Short Story Award. All the stories share an urban setting and each one of the plots takes place in closed spaces: an after hours, a hotel room, a television set or an office. The small daily dramas and the search for friendship, love or sex show the most conflictive aspects of late capitalism and offer a subtle and ironic vision of the desires, conflicts and illusions of today's human beings.

At the end of 2014, he republished Julio Cortázar y Cris, an autobiographical work that narrates his intense loving friendship with Julio Cortázar. It is a tribute published thirty years after the death of the famous Argentine writer. In the same way, Cortázar had also dedicated a work to Peri Rossi: Fifteen love poems for Cris. Julio Cortázar y Cris is a collection of poems, stories, dialogues, letters and trips that celebrates the centenary of Cortázar's birth. Although the two had a friendly relationship since the early years of the Uruguayan writer's career, it was almost always a long-distance relationship. Already in the last decade of Cortázar's life, both met and lived an intense relationship, full of complicity, humor and love, literature and seduction between two cities: Paris and Barcelona. She has worked as a columnist for the Spanish newspapers Diario 16 and El Periódico and collaborated with Agencia EFE, a news agency.

In 2015 his latest collection of short stories Los Amores Equivocados was published. In this, the writer covers the subject of prostitution, which she has denounced in her journalistic writings and in her poems. of love in these tales can take various forms, an imbalance in the ages of the lovers, in their concepts of love or in the inevitable lack of reciprocity. The city of Montevideo appears in the eponymous tale of the collection.

In 2020, she published La insumisa, a novelized autobiography in which she addresses her childhood and early adolescence. The following year, she was awarded the Cervantes Prize, succeeding Joan Margarit and Francisco Brines. Furthermore, she is the sixth woman to be recognized with this award, the most important in Spanish literature, after Ida Vitale, Elena Poniatowska, Ana María Matute, Dulce María Loynaz and María Zambrano.

Style

Her writing is marked by an experimental style, both in poetry and in her novels. Indicios Pánicos, a collection of short stories placed in a poetic system, is an allegory that defies the genre of poetry, which writes with free verse and an innovative style. This collection contains 46 fragments, almost unclassifiable, stories, poems, essays or aphorisms. Critics say that he uses language "sometimes effusive and playful, sometimes content and intense: poetry in prose and/or verse". Likewise, his narratives are characterized by shifts in point of view, multiple narrators and a non-chronological plot. The work The book of my cousins is characteristic of this style, since it mixes prose and verse, has a polyphonic voice, frequently changes the point of view and uses various rhetorical and typographical devices. Uruguayan literary critic Hugo Verani emphasizes Peri Rossi's experimental style, although he claims that her writing is unified by a lyrical vision of the world. Also, her style has been characterized as witty, ironic, and metaphysical. On the other hand, On the other hand, the author herself has rejected the notion of a general style that characterizes her writing —an ambition, according to Peri Rossi, of the writers of the century. XIV and the first half of the century XX — and instead she tries to write each new work in a different style. Peri Rossi believes this is the epitome of freedom for an author.

Her writing combines the fantastic, the erotic, and the political, according to critics Kohut and Vilella, to suggest the possibility that an escape from logic may itself be an escape from individual freedom. Her work is included with to that of Silvina Ocampo, Griselda Gambaro, Luisa Valenzuela, and others, within those writers who address the "unusual-absurd-strange".

Themes

Eroticism

Peri Rossi uses her writing as a vehicle to explore sexual desire, as is the case in her short story A forbidden passion (1986) and her essay Erotic Fantasies (1991). With Erotic Fantasies, she attempted to liberate eroticism from male domination. The book discusses details of eroticism such as the world of inflatable dolls, prostitution, rape fantasies, fetishism, and sadomasochism. Peri Rossi examines how erotic imagination and fantasies are excluded from married life and explores the idea of using a prostitute to fulfill erotic fantasies in order to avoid mixing fantasy and reality. In Erotic Fantasies, argues that male eroticism uses sex as power, domination and humiliation while female eroticism is always humanized. Often this exploration is so explicit that some stories can be classified as semi-pornographic. She gives us the very definition of eroticism "a cultural activity, the elaborate satisfaction of an instinctive need".

In an interview, she explained that her lesbianism (another source of disapproval from her family, to the point of being subjected to psychoanalytic therapy) is closely related to her writing. For example, in 1971 he published a collection of poetry under the Greek title Evohé, which deals with erotic passion and the transgression of the female subject. The language of passion and desire in this work, in which "word" becomes synonymous with "woman," has been classified as subversive. A good part of her narrative and poetic work deals with the theme of desire from various points of view. According to her "desire is the engine of existence" and "one of the ways to be alive is to be desiring".

Sexual identity

According to critic David William Foster, his entire work affirms the need of the person to assume sexual identity as something separate from both biological and social impositions.

In the book Erotic Fantasies, Peri Rossi discusses various issues related to lesbianism. choice, and she wants all people to have the same rights and obligations. However, the author is not explicitly considered a 'lesbian writer', because this theme does not characterize each of her works. Generally, this theme has been identified in her writing since her exile, that is, the moment in which she found herself in an international context. Despite the fact that lesbianism is a common theme in her post-exilic writing, the author maintains a position ambiguous about her personal and literary relationship with lesbianism, without referring to the subject in her personal interviews.

Lesbianism aside, she has challenged a stable conceptualization of gender and sexuality in general as well. Through many characters in her novels, the author tries to challenge the rigid categorization of a sexual identity. In La nave de los locos, the protagonist Equís and the character Lucía demonstrate a multiplicity of sexual preferences and gender tendencies. In the same way, Aída and hers in love with her in Solitaire de amor hardly fit within stable conceptions of gender-sexual identity.

The political

As a political activist and writer, Peri Rossi's writing is fraught with political issues. It is this aspect of his life that led to his exile in 1972. Indicios pánicos (1970), for example, is such an evocative eulogy of freedom that the Uruguayan government prohibited its publication and distribution. of this work in 1972. What followed was his voluntary, albeit necessary, exile to save his life. Given his personal experience, it is not surprising that the theme of exile is one of those that characterizes his writing, although it is about of an "internal" exile. In other words, the author does not use the term "exile" explicitly in her writing, but her texts allude to such effects of exile as the process of alienation, gestures of dissent and transgression. However, there are some texts of Peri Rossi who do deal with the notion of exile explicitly. One of these is her poetry collection Estadio del exilio (1979). Likewise, several stories deal with this topic, such as "The influence of Edgar A. Poe on the poetry of Raimundo Arias" in The afternoon of the dinosaur, and "The city" or "The statues or the condition of the foreigner» in The Museum of Futile Efforts. The theme of exile is also explicitly reflected in the lines of some of his poems, such as «Diálogo de exiliados» in Europa después de la lluvia and «Te conocí en septiembre» in Linguistics overall. Furthermore, Peri Rossi wrote two novels about exile: La nave de los locos (1984) and Solitario de amor (1988).

Equally, some works are commentaries on patriarchal society. Critic Ana Corbalán, for example, analyzes the stories "First love" and "La destrucción o el amor" to show how they reveal that the traditional family never works; instead, says Corbalán, Peri Rossi proposes other types of family models, such as non-heterosexual couples. She attacks the institution of marriage and rejects masculine authority, these works highlight sexual and family transgressions. "First love » is written in the first person, through a male narrator. The text explores other types of alternative sexualities and presents incest as a taboo subject in our society. In "Destruction or Love" things like communication and romance are seen. Peri Rossi rejects any approach to conventionality in the couple, believing that there is no need for verbal communication between a couple of a man and a woman, if it is a passionate romance. In "First love" and "Love or destruction" she talks about sexual diversity, homoerotic desire, and explores other types of alternative sexualities. She questions the validity of certain social structures, opposes gender roles and traditional family units.

Spatial displacement, or travel

“Critics have indicated the existence of a small group of texts by this author organized around the motif of spatial displacement or travel. These texts have been studied as variants of exile, although neither the term "exile" it manifests itself explicitly. »For example, a large part of her poems in the poetry collection Hotel room treat cities as transitory spaces.

Literary Influences

Julio Cortázar, whose friendship was fundamental to his literary career.

Peri Rossi has cited Ángel Rama, director of the Arca publishing house and with whom he had a distant but cordial relationship, as a decisive figure in his literary career. Rama gave her the nickname "La Rimbaudcita" because she saw in her writing a style similar to that of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud.Peri Rossi has made translations mainly of the Brazilian Clarice Lispector. It has been said that Juan Carlos Onetti and Felisberto Hernández have a lot of influence in the Uruguayan narrative and Peri Rossi considers them as his advisors or mentors. It is also evident that Hernández, who has edited a selection of short stories published in Spain, has had an influence on his career. Other famous writers who have also served as a model are Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Ray Bradbury and Dino Buzzati. It was the way Cortázar wrote, for example, that inspired Peri Rossi's experimental style. She herself has included Cortázar among her literary preferences as a reader, along with the American J. D. Salinger and the Irishman Jonathan Swift.

Awards

Since the beginning of her education and career, Peri Rossi has been recognized for her writing. Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama hailed her as one of the most important young writers of her generation. More recently, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights chose her as the writer who had contributed the most to the fight for peace and justice in the Castilian sphere (2008). The Uruguayan government awarded him the Delmira Agustini Medal for Cultural Activity (2013).

• Ark Youth Award (1968) - Abandoned museums
• Marcha Award – The Book of My Cousin (1969)
• Provisional Poetry Inventory Award – Exactly like the Algerians in Paris(1973)
• Palma City Award – Diaspora (1976)
• Gabriel Miro Award of the story (1979)
• Golden Gate Story Award - The fallen angel (1986)
• Finalist for the Extraordinary Prize of the Ibero-American Poetry of the Banco de España Foundation (1987) - Europe after the rain
• Barcelona City Award – Babel barbara (1990)
• Award Award Book of Poesía (1992)
• Award Award Book de Relato (1994)
• Feca Guggenheim (1994)
• International Prize for Poetry Rafael Alberti (2000)
• International Poetry Prize Torrevieja City – Hotel room (2007)
• Loewe Award (2008) - Playstation
• Premio Internacional de Relatos Mario Vargas Llosa - Private rooms (2010)
• Finalist of the III Short Narrative Award Ribera del Duero - Wrong love (2013)
• Don Quixote Prize in Poetry - Strategies of desire (2013)
• Universidad de Talca, Chile.
• Miguel de Cervantes de Literatura (2021), awarded by the Ministry of Culture, Spain.

Predecessor: Francisco Brines

Miguel de Cervantes Award 2021

Successor: Rafael Cadenas

Work