Haroldo Conti's weapons

How can we conceive the essential fiber of a literary work when it was interrupted by an event as decisive as the last military dictatorship? One hundred years after his birth (May 25, 1925) and 49 years after his kidnapping and disappearance (May 4, 1976), Emecé inaugurates the Haroldo Conti Library with 10 essential stories.

The selection and prologue are by Juan José Becerra : “The principle of arbitrariness to which it responds, which cannot compensate for the injustices of the case, attempts to detect the complete repertoire of Conti ’s literary masks ordered by a formalism of silence: of the missing language, restored by the reader at the level of sensations, and which pays tribute first to beauty and then to politics.” And he adds: “What appears in these operations is, by introspective extension, Conti ’s own line of masks (guessed in his characters), for whom life was a ‘draft’. Life is neither original nor copy but Work in Progress.”

In this way, entering these stories isn't like delving into a minor sector of the Conti project, but rather can be perceived as an important part of his oeuvre, which reaches notable peaks of mastery and relevance. There's "The Cause," almost a short novel, one of the best pieces of political literature one could ever read. Or the charm of "Ad Astra," where a small territory is shaken by the certainty that there is a man who flies.

Or the brutal block, because that's how nature is, formed by "My Mother Walked in the Light" and "Perfumed Night," which relates profound issues like this opening: "A man's life is a miserable draft, a handful of sadness that fits in a few lines. But sometimes, just as there are entire years of long, thick darkness, a minute of a man's life is a dazzling light." Or "Marked," a story of river dwellers that, along with "The Ballad of the Carolina Poplar" and "The Wait," can be linked to his masterpiece, Sudeste.

Or "Cinegética," which retains within it something of the ruthless (that is, unadorned) tone of the novel En vida . The last story is "Bibliográfica," perhaps an anomaly, and therefore valuable in this corpus, from an author like Conti, who wasn't interested in writing literature about writers, since his focus was more on entering those minds and bodies defined not by words but by actions or by what is left unsaid.

These 10 essential stories reflect a voice and narrative pulse that transcends its own generation and its historical moment of publication (its first steps were taken in the late 1950s and its last story is dated the same day as its kidnapping) to be read today and show that it is a prose that continues to generate enchantment: it speaks to us of a bygone world with a tone in which each word achieves its own specific weight on the page.

This is how we come to understand that the material and substratum of these texts have to do with certain traces of eternity on earth: the river, silence, nature, the unexpected, time. Haroldo Conti writes with stunning economy about what presses on existence and remains unresolved.

10 Essential Stories , Haroldo Conti. Selection and prologue by Juan José Becerra, Emecé, 264 pages.