Outsider Everywhere by Mercedes Halfon
Argentine Non-Fiction
Original title – Extranjero en todas partes: Los días argentinos de Witold Gombrowicz
Translator – Rahul Bery
Source – Subscription book
I have the fitrzcarradlo subscription, and one of the reasons I have it is the white books, their essays, and non-fiction works together. I love the breadth of the books they pick, but also the occasional odd little book like this, a book about a writer that is maybe not as well known as he should be a writer thaat spent a lot of his life in exile, a writer that maybe isn’t as well known in the english speaking worlkd but in both Poland and Latin America he is considered a important writer. That writer is Witold Gombrowicz. The Polish writer who escaped Nazi rule by heading to Buenos Aires in 1939, but unlike many exiles, he then spent more than twenty years in his adopted homeland.
On 21 August 1939, La Nación newspaper publishes an item with the title ‘New ship arrives bearing Polish flag’.
In it, the Argentinian journalist Pizarro Lastra interviews the three writers who came on board the luxury transatlantic liner. He writes: ‘Among the travellers who came on the Chrobry was … Witold Gombrowicz, a modern humourist, a man of great learning. He has just had a resounding success with a potboiler entitled Ferdydurke.’ Other pieces were published about the ship’s arrival, but this is the only one Gombrowicz mentions in Kronos.
He sees it as a first defeat. They call him a ‘humour-ist’, his novel a ‘potboiler’. Gombrowicz was already Gombrowicz when he arrived in Argentina. But over here in Argentina no one knew that.
His arrival in Argentine
The book opens with Gombrowicz arriving in August 1939, escaping the war. A group of Polish people has arrived in Argentina, including the young Witold Gombrowicz. He is a writer; his first novel, Ferdydurke, came out to much acclaim in Poland. What follows is how he tries to keep his head above the water in Argentina, he always struggles with the language but is drawn into the literary circles of the country, but as a gay man he is often an outsider as the title says. He gets little pieces of work from Europe. The book draws from those who knew him and his epic diary of the years he spent there.I did read and review his diary here when it came out in 2012. What is cpatured is the lit scene in Buenos Aires and how they viewed Gombrowicz, a writer who was full of opinions and also was a true one off and even this is seen by those that knew him; some like Piglia considered him an Argentine writer, he knew Borges, Piglia, and Pla, and many more of the leading figures in the Boom era. Burt, it also captures how he lived hand to mouth, with help from the very small Polish community there.
If Gombrowicz liked anything even more than he liked arguing, it was playing chess, which is a kind of argument through other means. During his time in Argentina, his main café was the Rex, which had a big salon and chess club on the first floor. Every afternoon, religiously, Gombrowicz shows up at this location between Avenida Corrientes and Calle Emeralda, less than 200 metres from the Obelisk, and stays until night. Emblematic moments of his life in Buenos Aires will take place there.
A good number of his most loyal friends come from that intellectual training ground, including fellow Pole and internationally renowned chess master Paulino Frydman, who founded the salon in 1941. Interestingly, he had come to Buenos Aires at the same time as Gombrowicz but on a different ship. They became very good friends.
HIs group is a mix of lit types , posh polish women and men
Now, to be honest, I read the diary many years ago and intend to read more by Gombrowicz. But in the following 14 years, I have yet to return to him. I have two other books by him to read. I would also like to reread the diary, especially since I feel I will know more about the writer and the world he was talking about. The diary forms the backbone of this book. But there have also been several other projects related to Gombrowicz’s time in Argentina. Halfon also draws on other writers’ accounts of their interactions with Gombrowicz, which gives us an account of a man who is now, in a way, considered between the canons of Poland and Argentina as a great writer in both. even a modern writer like Cesar AIRA later on is quote about his love of Gombrowicz books talking about rereading all his books. There was something called the Gombrowicz marathon in Buenos Aires, where great modern-day writers like Neumann and Kohan read a minute of his works. I love this type of book it reminded me of a writer i should know better in Gombrowicz. Have you read anything by Witold Gombrowicz
