“I never showed up at Sunday mass,” admits Héctor Cudemo, the Beat character in Héctor Libertella’s 1968 literary debut The Way of the Hyperboreans, who returned thirty years later for Memories of a Demigod. It was the return of the writer’s alter ego that made uncertainty, rewriting and dreams a way to penetrate reality and national spirits.
An essay novel, sometimes a sabotaged museum of memory, built in the manner of a schizoid policeman, in which politics and crime become passions of our daily life: “And it was the desert: a palace, more perfect and more intact than any other work of humanity, because the Indians had not touched a point or a comma to its natural order. Perhaps the enormous enclosure of what I would like to call a homage to my Cudemo Museum,” enthuses the narrator, who shot out of the film Pampa, more precisely the Quilombos of Buenos Aires, to the most important leagues in North America. The impossible wife, the family that is strange because of their distance, the troubled lawyers and the mafias combine tenses and verbs, spaces and future tenses.
Not only does Cudemo return, but there are also several spaces of the soul that Libertella revisits, such as the Brassens bowling alley in Mar del Plata or the “asexual monkey from head to toe” that recurs in his texts, for example in the anti-device “Saussure’s Tree”, his philological and Macedonian utopia of the 2000s. In a world tending toward the disappearance of the sign and its replacement by the zeros and ones of commerce, the novel convulsively explores subjectivity under “the evil light of a moon that has drained the color of roses,” “in other words, giving things no more than a kind of suspended attention, so that the ripples and ripples of this space, I don’t know if it is ether, but invisible, wandering and fleeting, now supply my blind spot with at least two of them.” “These properties (I chose: “floating”, “volatile”) without the need for mental concentration,” Cudemo concludes, to say, old law, bye, that’s it.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
Libertellian writing is a permanent suspicion of systems and authorities in the remnants of a lost world. Even a response to the identifications and interpretations of the moment, paragraph by paragraph, which is one way of reading it. Is the setting of this supposedly accessible novel by the author “The Unbelievable Cavemen!” It was the Menemato and the omnipresent force of Alfredo Yabrán, among today’s nightmares remains the surprise of a letter without pins: “Let’s see what the common people see about us.” For Libertella, the reader is not only unpredictable, but also another tool of creation.
The first edition of Memoirs of a Demigod was published in Perfil. And it was part of Héctor Libertella’s collaboration with this editor, adding two anthologies that represented the canon and counter-canon of Argentine literature. In between there is the Libertella effect.
Memories of a demigod
Author: Hector Libertella
Genre: novel
Other works by the author: The Way of the Hyperboreans; anger diary; Saussure’s tree; Cavemen! Adventures of the Mystics; The place that isn’t there; The architecture of the mind. An Autobiography; People in fighting pose
Publisher: Blatt & Ríos, $24,700
About The Author
