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Vudú urbano
A mediados de los años 80 se publicó en España Vudú urbano, primer libro de narraciones de Edgardo Cozarinsky. Susan Sontag lo definió en el prólogo como "la descripción escéptica, semialucinada de la irreductible extrañeza de la vida ciudadana moderna" y como un "tratado sobre el exilio".
Guillermo Cabrera Infante habla de un libro "converso, diverso, perverso por no seguir la corriente". Cifra del libro entero, el hallazgo tardío de un pasaje de avión Buenos Aires-París, París- Buenos Aires y la comprobación ¿no por sabida menos sorpresiva¿ de que el último tramo nunca se usó, definen el carácter oblicuo, sesgado, de estas historias, esbozos y escenas. Nombradas por el autor como tarjetas postales, cada una de ellas atestigua su preferencia por las fronteras y lo contaminado, por la excentricidad y la deriva, tanto como su rechazo por la verdad y la historia con mayúsculas.
Como si la realidad se contagiara de la ficción, la circulación de Vudú urbano fue azarosa y marginal.
Pronto se convirtió en un objeto de culto. Su influjo ha crecido en el tiempo, y su pasar de mano en mano no alcanzó a agotar la curiosidad y el interés vigilante. Oportuna y a la vez extemporánea, la reedición de esta novela clave en la obra de Cozarinsky es un acontecimiento literario y una compensación.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante habla de un libro "converso, diverso, perverso por no seguir la corriente". Cifra del libro entero, el hallazgo tardío de un pasaje de avión Buenos Aires-París, París- Buenos Aires y la comprobación ¿no por sabida menos sorpresiva¿ de que el último tramo nunca se usó, definen el carácter oblicuo, sesgado, de estas historias, esbozos y escenas. Nombradas por el autor como tarjetas postales, cada una de ellas atestigua su preferencia por las fronteras y lo contaminado, por la excentricidad y la deriva, tanto como su rechazo por la verdad y la historia con mayúsculas.
Como si la realidad se contagiara de la ficción, la circulación de Vudú urbano fue azarosa y marginal.
Pronto se convirtió en un objeto de culto. Su influjo ha crecido en el tiempo, y su pasar de mano en mano no alcanzó a agotar la curiosidad y el interés vigilante. Oportuna y a la vez extemporánea, la reedición de esta novela clave en la obra de Cozarinsky es un acontecimiento literario y una compensación.
- GenresFiction
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
3 people are currently reading
183 people want to read
About the author
Edgardo Cozarinsky
49 books40 followersHis family name goes back to his great grandparents, Jewish immigrants from Kiev and Odessa at the end of the 19th century, his first name tells of his mother's infatuation with Edgar Allan Poe.
After an adolescence mostly spent in neighbourhood cinemas showing double bills of old Hollywood films and reading an inordinate amount of fiction in Spanish, English and French (favourite authors - Stevenson, Conrad, some Henry James), he studied literature at Buenos Aires university, wrote for local and Spanish cinephile magazines and published an early essay on James which developed out of graduation work - El laberinto de la apariencia (The Labyrinth of Appearance, 1964), a book he later suppressed. He was barely twenty when he became acquainted with Borges, Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, all writers of prestige whom he saw frequently during his years in Buenos Aires. In 1973 he won a literary prize with an essay on gossip as narrative device in James and Proust. In 1974 he published Borges y el cine, a book enlarged in every reprint (Spain, 1978 and 2002, and translations) which he also does not want reprinted now.
After a first nine-month stay in Europe and a visit to New York between September 1966 and June 1967, he returned to Buenos Aires with the desire and the decision to leave behind his life as a literary idler. After dabbling in journalism, in the culture section of the weeklies Primera Plana and Panorama, he made a first film, an underground feature shot on weekends throughout a year, knowing that it could not pass the local censorship of the period. It was nevertheless screened at festivals throughout Europe and the United States. Its title was already a challenge - ... (Puntos suspensivos - Dot Dot Dot).
In 1974, in the turmoil of political agitation and imminent repression, he left Buenos Aires for Paris. There he embarked into filmmaking that falls roughly into two categories - fiction films and "essays", mixing documentary material with a personal, even private reflexion on the issues raised by the material. The most distinguished of these is La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War, 1981), a confrontation between Ernst Jünger wartime diaries and the French newsreels of the occupation period. At a time when the arts' departments of several European television networks were willing to support such ventures, Cozarinsky was able to develop this approach in a series of very original works.
During the rest of the seventies and the eighties his literary career was mostly dormant. But his only published work of the period became an instant cult book - Vudú urbano (Urban voodoo, 1985), a mixture of fiction and essay not unlike his film work, with prologues by Susan Sontag and the Cuyban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
In the same year, after the end of the military regime in Argentina, he visited briefly to Buenos Aires. Three years later, he made a film in Argentina, in the far South, a "Southern" - Guerreros y cautivas (Warriors and Captive Women). From that date on he started visiting his native country more and more often, occasionally shooting there material for his European "essays". His most adventurous later films were Rothschild's Violin and Ghosts of Tangier, both made between 1995 and 1996.
In 1999, he spent a month in a Paris hospital for a backbone infection, a period during which a cancer was diagnosed. In his own words, he felt the ringing of a bell telling to stop wasting his time - "I always wanted to be a writer, and had not dared publish, even finish what I started..." It was in hospital that he wrote the first two stories in his prize-winning book La novia de Odessa (The Bride from Odessa). From that date on, his film work became sparse and he started publishing "all the books I had not put on paper", fiction mostly but also essays and chronicles. He became immediately established as a writer to reckon with in the Spanish language, and was translated into English, French, German and several o
After an adolescence mostly spent in neighbourhood cinemas showing double bills of old Hollywood films and reading an inordinate amount of fiction in Spanish, English and French (favourite authors - Stevenson, Conrad, some Henry James), he studied literature at Buenos Aires university, wrote for local and Spanish cinephile magazines and published an early essay on James which developed out of graduation work - El laberinto de la apariencia (The Labyrinth of Appearance, 1964), a book he later suppressed. He was barely twenty when he became acquainted with Borges, Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, all writers of prestige whom he saw frequently during his years in Buenos Aires. In 1973 he won a literary prize with an essay on gossip as narrative device in James and Proust. In 1974 he published Borges y el cine, a book enlarged in every reprint (Spain, 1978 and 2002, and translations) which he also does not want reprinted now.
After a first nine-month stay in Europe and a visit to New York between September 1966 and June 1967, he returned to Buenos Aires with the desire and the decision to leave behind his life as a literary idler. After dabbling in journalism, in the culture section of the weeklies Primera Plana and Panorama, he made a first film, an underground feature shot on weekends throughout a year, knowing that it could not pass the local censorship of the period. It was nevertheless screened at festivals throughout Europe and the United States. Its title was already a challenge - ... (Puntos suspensivos - Dot Dot Dot).
In 1974, in the turmoil of political agitation and imminent repression, he left Buenos Aires for Paris. There he embarked into filmmaking that falls roughly into two categories - fiction films and "essays", mixing documentary material with a personal, even private reflexion on the issues raised by the material. The most distinguished of these is La Guerre d'un seul homme (One Man's War, 1981), a confrontation between Ernst Jünger wartime diaries and the French newsreels of the occupation period. At a time when the arts' departments of several European television networks were willing to support such ventures, Cozarinsky was able to develop this approach in a series of very original works.
During the rest of the seventies and the eighties his literary career was mostly dormant. But his only published work of the period became an instant cult book - Vudú urbano (Urban voodoo, 1985), a mixture of fiction and essay not unlike his film work, with prologues by Susan Sontag and the Cuyban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
In the same year, after the end of the military regime in Argentina, he visited briefly to Buenos Aires. Three years later, he made a film in Argentina, in the far South, a "Southern" - Guerreros y cautivas (Warriors and Captive Women). From that date on he started visiting his native country more and more often, occasionally shooting there material for his European "essays". His most adventurous later films were Rothschild's Violin and Ghosts of Tangier, both made between 1995 and 1996.
In 1999, he spent a month in a Paris hospital for a backbone infection, a period during which a cancer was diagnosed. In his own words, he felt the ringing of a bell telling to stop wasting his time - "I always wanted to be a writer, and had not dared publish, even finish what I started..." It was in hospital that he wrote the first two stories in his prize-winning book La novia de Odessa (The Bride from Odessa). From that date on, his film work became sparse and he started publishing "all the books I had not put on paper", fiction mostly but also essays and chronicles. He became immediately established as a writer to reckon with in the Spanish language, and was translated into English, French, German and several o
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 14, 2016
Vudú Urbano se publicó originalmente en 1985 por Anagrama. En 2014 se volvió a publicar, pero esta vez en la Serie del Recienvenido dirigida por Ricardo Piglia para el Fondo de Cultura Económica. Se trata del primer libro de Cozarinsky. El prólogo de Piglia es absolutamente exacto en mi opinión. Vudú Urbano forma parte de una especie de canon -contra su voluntad- de libros argentinos de fines del siglo XX que se proyectan sobre los modos de leer del futuro. Sus claves estéticas se centran en una narrativa figurada al estilo de Henry James, en una narración de montaje cortado, conciso, denso, e hiperconectado. Cozarinsky es escritor y cineasta. Su mítica película conocida como Puntos Suspensivos, pero que en realidad no tiene título por lo que se nombró simplemente con tres puntos donde debía figurar algún título, genera una perplejidad fascinante por su melancolía furiosa, su preferencia por imágenes de transición como el anochecer o el viajar, de lugares vaporosos que ya no existen y de valientes exploraciones de los extremos. Opino que en Vudú Urbano se producen los mismos impactos sobre el lector atento. Es un libro fuera de lo común, de culto para quienes aceptamos sus guiños e insoportable para quienes no comparten su visión del mundo. Opino que este libro de Cozarinsky es muy recomendable. Creo que su lectura resulta óptima si se lee junto con El Silencio y sus Bordes de David Oubiña y se combina con la visión atenta de su película Puntos Suspensivos. La forma breve, íntima, personal, a veces amable, a veces áspera, de su Vudú Urbano es en mi opinión una maravilla literaria. Es una extraña combinación de conmoción poética hipnótica con furia de exiliado, pero no de un país en particular, sino de cualquier tipo de concesión.
January 16, 2021
3.5
Qué grato descubrimiento Cozarinsky. Qué moderno se lee, con razón Piglia comienza su prólogo diciendo que es del tipo de textos que son siempre contemporáneos. La primera mitad de estas "postales" , como las denomina el autor, me parecieron deslumbrantes.La segunda mitad si es un poco repetitiva y su prosa pierde esa energía, aunque por ahí uno encuentra una que otra perla de frase. Eso no quita que tenga ganas de seguir leyéndolo, tal vez por sus "Cuentos reunidos" que editaron hace poco.
Lo de captar el espíritu salvaje y bárbaro de la urbe es lo mejor sin duda.
Qué grato descubrimiento Cozarinsky. Qué moderno se lee, con razón Piglia comienza su prólogo diciendo que es del tipo de textos que son siempre contemporáneos. La primera mitad de estas "postales" , como las denomina el autor, me parecieron deslumbrantes.La segunda mitad si es un poco repetitiva y su prosa pierde esa energía, aunque por ahí uno encuentra una que otra perla de frase. Eso no quita que tenga ganas de seguir leyéndolo, tal vez por sus "Cuentos reunidos" que editaron hace poco.
Lo de captar el espíritu salvaje y bárbaro de la urbe es lo mejor sin duda.
December 29, 2024
excelente. el tono melancólico es similar al que encuentro en How German Is It de Walter Abish, también de 1985, en el cual se reconstruyen de forma oblicua las experiencias y derrotas políticas de un país, en ese caso, de alemania.
October 23, 2023
Releer. Lo lei hace tiempo pero creo que no le cogi el punto.
March 26, 2024
Este libro no me dejó absolutamente nada, cosa que rara vez me pasa. Y eso que soy de Buenos Aires y emigré a París. Creo que es una cuestión generacional
June 20, 2015
A excepción de un relato o dos, destaque para "El Viaje Sentimental, lo demás es pura tonterïa, escrita en un lenguage que no llega a ser hermetico, pero sí cifrado y, pues, ininteligible. Una pierda de tiempo con tanta cosa mejor que leer...
October 15, 2024
No sé muy bien cómo describir este libro. Solo sé que me hizo sentir y pensar muchas cosas. Y que me quedo con un par de citas geniales y una primera postal deslumbrante a las que siempre vuelvo.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews