Los Genios

An often irreverent, fictionalised account of the stalled friendship between the two Nobel-winning contributors to the 💥 era. 

It begins (and ends, though I am not quite there yet) with the most famous morongazo in the history of Latin American literature.

This pair of ‘genios’ had been drawing apart prior to the terminal incident, largely because Gabo refused to sign up to a complaint against Castro’s persecution of a Cuban poet, which the likes of Rulfo, Cortázar, Fuentes, and Sontag had been happy to put their names to. (Even those notoriously slippery characters, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, had scribbled their signatures at the base of the letter.)

V has read Jaime Bayly's first novel, No Se Lo Digas A Nadie. Not really my cup of 🫖 I then determined. 

The Peruvian writer and commentator is one of those people who seems to do the opposite of growing on one over time. His increasingly whingey, monotonous monologues are the audio component to the mediocre public intellectual persona that this region may or may not deserve. And when he starts off about 'Shaky', he very quickly descends to performative self-parody. 

Westminster school seemed to produce his like almost on a production line. One would run into them out in London and one's first thought would be "oh, here we go..."

Occasionally, passages of this prose adhere to the pattern of Bayly’s public persona: unnecessary repetition and too many words overall to drive the narrative forward. 

That said, this is fun in spite of a core inbalance. With Vargas Llosa his observations have more of a fly on the wall quality. When it comes to Gabo there’s a lot many probably already knew, if not me specifically. 

For instance, that Gabo used to don the blue overalls of a mechanic before sitting down to write El Otoño del Patriarca in his Barcelona study on the calle Osio número 50, where he had set up a high end hi-fi-system and his ‘fabulosa’ collection of records. 

For me it was fascinating that the jovial tropical author was producing serious novels at this time, and that the rather more ‘square’ writer from gloomy Lima was dedicating himself wholeheartedly to rumbunctious comedy.

@lupulodraftbar