Rodrigo Fresan

Rodrigo Fresán (Buenos Aires, July 18, 1963) is an Argentine writer, translator and journalist.

Literary career

His first work, Historia argentina (1992), was considered transgressive in content and experimental in form. Friend of Andrés Calamaro, he collaborated with a text in the edition & # 34; No one leaves here alive & # 34; (1989) and, on albums such as La lengua popular and Calamaro On the Rock. He acted in the movie & # 34; Martín Hache & # 34;, in which one of the opening scenes is based on one of his stories.

In the early 1990s he was connected to the legendary rock group Morfi & Vinegar.

The second book of short stories, Lives of Saints, preceded his first novel, Esperanto. We had to wait three years until what is probably his most emblematic work, The speed of things . At which Fresán describes with the epithet "trance". This stage of his work is characterized by being self-referential.

"Lives of Saints" is a series of stories marked by a common presence: a peripheral and obscure character who ends up appearing in the last of the stories ("Little Guide to Sad Songs"), giving meaning to the entire volume. "Esperanto" and "The speed of things" they are also traversed by characters in common (central characters in some stories appear as secondary characters in others) and by a place: the small town of Canciones Tristes. This place, full of magical and mysterious events, could well be the Macondo of the new generation of Latin American storytellers, who combine magical realism with pop culture, a generation of which Fresán is the clearest exponent. In many of the stories, Sad Songs turns out to be set in Argentine Patagonia (near the Planicie Banderita dam, a hydroelectric power plant located in the Province of Neuquén that provides electricity to an important sector of Argentine territory).

In Kensington Gardens, a novel set in England and which, due to its climate, is inseparable from the English environment, the town is called Sad Songs and is located in the suburbs of London. In other stories it had already been given that name in English, but it was located among the forests of Iowa, United States, and it is the place where a mysterious Foundation preserves the last specimens of an endangered species: the writers. A bizarre Mexican version of Sad songs is also mentioned in Kensington Gardens: Rancheras Nostálgicas. In other stories he gives other locations to Sad Songs, and in "Lives of Saints" he is given the ability to "move around the map like a spider" to the point of being impossible to locate due to geography.

In 1999, Fresán moved to Barcelona (Spain), where he published the novels Mantra, Kensington Gardens and El fondo del cielo at Random House-Mondadori publishing house (where he directs the Red & Black crime collection), as well as edited and enlarged versions of some of his earlier books. The three aforementioned novels have received important awards: Mantra the Fnac New Talent Award 2002, Kensington Gardens the Lateral Narrative Award 2004, as well as being a finalist for the José Manuel Lara Foundation Award), while El fondo del cielo received the Locus Magazine Favorite Speculative Fiction in Translation Novel 2018 award in the United States.

In this second stage of his work, his style has evolved, incorporating elements of pop culture. Precisely in his novel, Kensington Gardens , where Victorian London blends naturally with that of the sixties, the biography of J.M. Barrie and The Kinks. The novel has been translated into English and fifteen other languages.

For years he has dedicated himself to prologues and translations of the works of American writers John Cheever, Denis Johnson and Carson McCullers, among others. He writes regularly for the Argentine newspaper Página/12. He frequently publishes literary criticism texts in the magazine Letras Libres and in the cultural supplement of the newspaper ABC He also works in Spain as a translator and journalist.

In September 2009, Fresán published a corrected and enlarged edition of Historia argentina with an unpublished story and introductory texts by the writer Ray Loriga and the critic Ignacio Echevarría and, a month later, appeared his novel: The bottom of the sky, translated into French. In 2011 new editions --corrected and enlarged-- of his novels Esperanto and Mantra were published.

Between 2014 and 2019, he published an extensive trilogy made up of the novels The invented part (which has been translated into French, English and Italian and has received the Best Translated Book Award (2018) in the United States), The Dreamed Part (translated into French and English) and The Remembered Part (October 2019, last installment of the triptych). attention: the story of when he crossed a frozen river on foot to reunite with his family after having to flee, pursued by his creditors.

Work

Novels

• 1995: Wait.
• 2001: Mantra
• 2003: Kensington Gardens
• 2009: The bottom of the sky
• 2014: The invented part
• 2017: The dream part
• 2019: The remembered part
• 2022: Melvill

Stories

• 1991: Argentine history
• 1993: Lives of saints
• 1994: Manual work
• 1998: The speed of things