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“MY MAIN BARCELONA REFERENCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN COPITO DE NIEVE (Snowflake)” Rodrigo
Fresán is an Argentinean writer who lives in Barcelona
since 1999. Why did you choose Barcelona as your place to live? When anybody says “Latin American in Barcelona”, most of the people tend to think that one is attracted by the idea of the literary boom, the European experience and the cultural circles meetings… Nothing like this happened in my own case, however… Even if my editor is Carmen Balcells … This is the only thing in common I could have with other generation of Latin American writers… To be honest, my main Barcelona reference has always been Copito de Nieve*… When I was a child and my parents travelled, I used to ask them to bring me postcards with Copito de Nieve images. And many years later, when I came to Barcelona in many occasions, I never went to see him… I had something like a superstitious fear… I finally went to see him when I came to settle here, in March, 1999. I must confess it was quite depressing… It was tremendous, he looked like Charles Bukowski, he was lying on his face, all covered in vomit… He was not longer white, but nearly grey… And the saddest thing of all –at a selfish level- was that he showed me a completely unavoidable fact: time had passed: “If Copito de Nieve looks like this, how do I look?” I asked myself. And we were born in the same year … Although gorilla years are multiplied by four, or something like that… Well, anyway he was not the one I remembered from the postcards; as I´m probably not the same man that appears in the photos of my first books… As I was telling you, I didn´t come with that kind of fantasy –for
me, really strange, incompressible- of coming to Spain to publish my
books… Or even sharing this idea that publishing here for a
Latin American author is the way to become a consummate artist… Which
turns to be the contrary in many cases, because if you publish your
work here and nobody reads it, it´s the end of this kind of chimera. How did your settle everything to come here? I proposed my idea of coming to Barcelona to Ernesto Tiffemberg, Página 12 director. They agreed with the project, because coming to this city means not only having access to all the things that happen here, but to all the people that come to Barcelona, people you can´t reach from Buenos Aires… And I also had some “connections” here, some friends, such as Enrique Vila-Matas, Jorge Herralde –who was my first editor here, for Anagrama- … I was also in touch with Beatriz de Moura and Toni López who were my editors in Tusquets… So it really was an interesting place to live, and has been so far. And what do you think of Barcelona as a city? For me, it has been a very nice city. I think that the good effects of the city on the writers can be measured by the books they write while living in that particular city. I like both of the books I´ve written here, the revision of others I´ve done and the one I´m currently writing; so that means I do like Barcelona. From a professional point of view, it´s a city where I feel comfortable. It has a very good size, very human… I haven´t got a car or a driving licence, so I appreciate its good means of transport, or the possibility of walking nearly everywhere… It has sea and mountains –even if you don´t see them, they are here-… This implies that you don´t have to think about actually going to the sea or the mountains, so you can rest quietly at home, with no problem at all… And there´s also an important difference with cities like Madrid or even Buenos Aires; Barcelona is a city that has a lot of activity inside the flats, inside the houses; doors are not open all the time to everybody…. And as I´m becoming more phobic and more neurotic with the years, I really like that, not being obliged to go to parties all the time or having parties at home… And I left my country for the first time when I was really young… So
when you leave your country being a child, you don´t really “miss” it.
I mean that you become a kind of citizen of the world, so you manage
to live anywhere… When I came back to Buenos Aires, I didn´t
really feel I was coming back to “my place”; I felt that “my
place” could be anywhere… I´m like Zelig in that
sense, I can manage everywhere. As a writer, I have always defended the idea that you have to move around once in a while, and you have to change the place of your desk, and if possible, take it to a different country. Move your eye, move your perception and even feel a bit uncomfortable… I don´t mean that I don´t understand or admire the writers who die in he house where they were born, and whose literary universe finishes 100 meters from their houses… I think this is admirable… One of my most admired writers, Marcel Proust, was basically a man who spent most of his time in bed. And he went out at night to see what was happening in Paris… In my opinion, Barcelona is a city that has a really good geographical situation, it allows you to move around, to make short trips with a few money, and change things a little. You met the writer Roberto Bolaño in Barcelona… I came to this city and after two days we were like very old friends. It happened just like that… To be honest, we talked more about “Big Brother” TV programme than literature. That is the truth. We have to make this clear because people tend to think that when two writers get together, they go to the beach and with all their hair in the wind, one says “Baudelaire” and so on… It´s not true; we talked a lot about bad cinema; both of us really enjoyed bad movies, those that you can see on TV… I also really like that kind of literature, trash literature, these best sellers about conspiracies and plots… I´m a good follower of The Da Vincy Code genre… Although The Da Vinci Code is really bad. It´s terrible; there are much better books… So we really talked about these things, and we used to “divide” readings (Bolaño used to read a lot). In many occasions, we used to retell the other some books we have read and which we knew the other would never read. We had a kind of “geographical division”: he read West Europe and I read United States… we were good friends. As good as we are with Enrique (Vila-Matas); they are writers with whom I identify myself with, because I think they are the kind of writers I was talking about, whose “roots” are based on their libraries, not on the land or country… I think this comes from (Jorge Luis) Borges, this idea that the lack of tradition, finally becomes a tradition itself… So everything is about your library, about your readings. This idea of the “reader who writes” is really an Argentinean feature: you can see it in (Ricardo) Piglia, in (Julio) Cortázar… It´s no news… You introduced and commented Salman Rushdie´s conference at the new Jaume Fuster Library… I think this was great. I really admire Rushdie. I like him very much,
and I feel close to him in style –with all the distance between
him and me, of course-. The way of dealing with popular culture, pop,
cinema, music… This freak thing we have in our writing
is similar… I enjoyed the conference very much…After
that we went to have dinner… I really loved doing it. *Copito de Nieve (literally,
Snowflake) was an albino gorilla who lived at Barcelona zoo for
many years. He died in November, 2003, not leaving an only young
albino gorilla among his breeding…
Fotos: Pablo Trepat |
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The “other” Rodrigo Fresán fake blog Some time ago, somebody set up a blog and pretended to be Rodrigo Fresán. Writing as he were the writer, he told the visitors about his life and activities… The real Rodrigo Fresán received mails insulting him and saying many other things… As he says –“he” meaning the real one, not the “other”-, “When I see blogs, I notice that my name comes up in many different and strange contexts. My friends laugh about this and tell me that what I write comes true…” At least it does in virtual reality… Books and biographical data |
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