Passes just because | profile

Three people whose tastes I trust recommend a recently published book. This much enthusiasm overwhelms me a little because I tend to distrust unanimity. I also distrust my contrera mind, which sometimes prevents me from enjoying something that I would see with better eyes if I were the first to discover it. The book in question is entitled “Lives in Transit” and the author is Lucas Mertehikian, a man from Buenos Aires with studies, professorships and curatorial work abroad in various fields. I like the latter, and Mertehikian talks about it in the book when he tells, in a very funny passage, that in order to apply for a fellowship, job, or grant in the United States, the applicant must prepare a statement of purpose, a story whose moral is that the project for which he is asking for money has always been the ultimate meaning of his intellectual life. And if at some point he decides to change fields (and Mertehikian has moved from Latin American literature to anthropology and also to botany), he must repeat the argument but apply it to his new interests, even if the true meaning of his life has changed.

Mertehikian does not lack humor, nor elegance, nor erudition, nor style in this essay that deals with passports: their history, their importance in the diplomatic and geopolitical order, the world of passport collectors (alongside spies), and his own relationship to this particular instrument. Among the passport covers and other items appear a figure who claimed to be the inspiration for “Around the World in Eighty Days,” choreographer George Balanchine, a propaganda poem by Mayakovsy, the films “Casablanca” and “Strmboli,” the Polaroid company, a family dedicated to displaying Mussolini memorabilia, and even the problem of foreigners (also documented) under the Trump administration. I recognize the reasons for other people’s admiration for the book, and at the same time I find it difficult to pinpoint exactly why it irritates me. I don’t know if it’s because it’s missing something or because something is superfluous.

There are two phrases that seem crucial to explaining “Life in Transit.” The first is a quote from Silvina Ocampo: “Nothing is more important than another.” The second is an ironic description that Mertehikian makes of his own work for the book, as if it were that of a “detective who has no crime to solve and focuses on mysteries that the imagination works on.” With these sentences as an axis, I focus on my own mystery, namely the book’s possible flaw. And finally I find two. One is that this scattering of stories that have no common factor other than the passport suggests a certain frivolity, a certain gratuitous display of ingenuity and data that is not entirely relevant (under Silvina’s protection). The other is that this essay is a perfect example, outside of fiction, of the literature of the self: Mertehikian seems to believe that it is the autobiographical passages that give the book power and authenticity, hiding its coldness and its cumulative excesses. And so he constructs it as a statement of intent addressed to the reader, who is the judge of the sincerity of the text. It must be admitted that Mertehikian writes it with skill, but he fails to convince me that it is not an empty book too adapted to the techniques of the moment.