Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill
Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941 - Buenos Aires, Argentina , 2010
Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill was a very influential writer –his work is considered one of the most important in Argentine literature in recent decades. He studied Medicine, Philosophy and Sociology, and taught for a while. He worked in advertising and marketing, fields in which he had a very good reputation (and which clearly influenced his books). When he was 39, after winning an important prize for his short story Muchacha punk, he decided to write full-time. Author of poems, short stories and novels, all his work is characterised by a style that is forceful, versatile and very personal. He set up his own publishing house, Tierra Baldía, Fogwill –that's how he wished to be called, just by his surname– promoted the work of poets and fiction writers who were then unknown but today have considerable reputations, such as César Aira and the brothers Osvaldo and Leónidas Lamborghini. Over his career, he won multiple awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Argentina’s Premio Nacional de Literatura.
- "One of the most original and richest forces in Argentine literature of the last thirty years." Gabriela Cabezón, Clarín
- "Fogwill, a writer with a strong personal charisma, anticipates - both in his short stories and in his novels, which are always thrilling, always challenging - perspectives and manners that many fiction writers of later generations were to make their own. And he always took care to encourage and guide, with limitless generosity, these writers for whom he continues to constitute an unattainable model of insubordination, of daring, of a healthy unease and moral honesty." Ignacio Echevarría
- "An exceptional storyteller, he practised provocation as a way of thought." El País
- “For enthusiasts of authentic literature that abandons timeworn territory, stays away from clichés, repairs mediocrities, and is audacious.” Joaquín Marco, El Mundo
- “One of the most original storytellers in Latin America.” Julio Ortega
Bibliography
Novel
La introducción - 2016
La novela que Fogwill estaba escribiendo en el momento de su muerte. Una historia íntima que cuestiona, como hace siempre el autor, al lector y a los críticos de la literatura argentina.
La última novela de Fogwill -probablemente la que estaba corrigiendo antes de su muerte- es La introducción, una suerte de preámbulo para un epílogo. En ella se presenta a un narrador en una etapa avanzada de su vida, que visita dos veces por semana las Termas de Flores, un espacio de descanso suburbano donde practica diferentes actividades.
Nada en una piscina climatizada, hace gimnasia con un grupo de mujeres, toma algo en el bar, camina por el campo de golf. Pero el ejercicio y el esparcimiento no son solo un pasatiempo, sino que sirven sobre todo de excusa para reflexionar sobre la vida y para introducirnos, a través de la escritura, en la conciencia del otro, la del lector.
«En ningún momento, aunque escriba en prosa, Fogwill deja de ser un poeta. Es un placer leer en voz alta sus textos aliterados, cacofónicos, polisémicos. Después de escuchar Sobre el arte de la novela, Jorge Luis Borges lo definió como un maestro de la elipsis.» Federico Bianchini, Letras Libres
Nuestro modo de vida - 2014
Los protagonistas, Fernando y Rita, tienen un buen nivel económico. Él es gerente del área de informes técnicos en una gran empresa y aspira a un cargo en la dirección; ella, ama de casa, llena sus tardes con actividades sociales. La novela narra su vida cotidiana, las inquietudes algo infantiles de Fernando (quiere cambiar de coche solo porque el color azul del nuevo auto le gusta más), la confortabilidad de su hogar, en contraste con los controles militares en el exterior... Forman una pareja arquetípica dentro de una sociedad burguesa, egoísta, superficial e hipócrita.
Un guión para Artkino - 2009
A script for Artkino, Fogwill´s «last» novel, is one of his funniest works, though an extremely unfunny truth lurks behind the obvious jokes, behind the laughter. An irrelevant writer, also called Fogwill, writes his life’s work, a film script, for a future/past Soviet Hollywood, where Argentina and a good part of the world have united as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics against the rest of the world: the capitalist countries with headquarters in New York. In this hypothetical Socialist Argentina Pravda is read, Russian tobacco is smoked and Russian cars are driven, but the betrayals are as they have always been: political in appearance, but very human in reality, that is, more connected to the human character than to the political standards through which they attempt to organize themselves: vanity, passion, jealousy, ambition.
If in Help a él (Help Him) the real Fogwill rewrote Borges’s «The Aleph», here he seems to revise –that is, correct, amend or repair– novels such as Orwell’s 1984.
Help a él - 2007
Una una novela corta, extraña, que se mira en el espejo de El Aleph de Jorge Luis Borges. Fogwill ofrece un retrato distorsionado por las drogas de una pasión que devuelve a la vida a una Vera Ortiz Beti que es tanto la Beatriz Viterbo del cuento borgiano como todas las mujeres de los cuentos de Fogwill. Y al fondo, como espejismo más que como reflejo, la guerra de las Malvinas.
Urbana - 2003
In Urbana, investors knowledgeable about the real estate world and the intricacies of state permits inaugurate an apart-hotel during the Buenos Aires summer. Out of season, and despite the neighbourhood's resistance, the inauguration party is attended by second-tier celebrities, semi-known models, and a variety of curious onlookers, among whom is a rather shady character lurking around the pool. A summer storm disrupts the plans, and the plot begins to unfold.
Runa - 2003
"With a prose of strange purity, almost like a fable, the short texts describe the customs of an almost extinct civilization: beauty is always doomed. [...] Not all men are fit to give things their proper names, but Fogwill is, because passion makes his gaze sharper and more severe." TXT
"It is one of those books that can only be understood many years after its creation. That is why it is written, for the potentially infinite duration of its quasi-story." Página/12
"Until the appearance of Runa, most of Fogwill's novels and stories made history. Runa, on the other hand, invents prehistory. Here, things are done with words, and not only that, but also the tribe that uses them, their techniques, their festivals, their sexual regulations." La Voz del Interior
En otro orden de cosas - 2002
La novela trata sobre doce años en la historia de Argentina: de 1971 a 1982. Es decir, sobre Lanusse, Cámpora, los montoneros, Perón, Isabelita, la dictadura y su transición concertada. La vida de los personajes se entrecruza con la historia colectiva, lo íntimo con lo social. Porque esta es una novela sobre las conductas argentinas, con el consumo como motor del deseo, el triunfo laboral como imperativo ético, la ingenuidad como coartada permanente. Y todo en un mundo hecho de empresas transnacionales, globalización y edificios fastuosos.
La experiencia sensible - 2001
En los años sesenta, una familia argentina pasa sus vacaciones en un típico hotel-casino de Las Vegas (Nevada, Estados Unidos). Mientras tanto, en su país suceden cosas. Claro que en todas partes suceden cosas. De hecho, una simple llovizna, un golpe de suerte en la ruleta o un desfile de moda pueden ser síntomas, avisos de una tragedia.
Vivir afuera - 1998
With a subtle plot and an overlay of dialogues as overflowing as they are precise, Fogwill needed only eleven hours in the lives of six characters to explore, in this novel originally published in 1998, one of Argentina's most emblematic and contradictory crises.
A mosaic of marginal characters, hustlers, well-off but uncomfortable women, a combatant from Los pichiciegos (1983), an arms dealer, and even an alter ego of the author—Gil Wolff—interact blindly and randomly, driven by sexual desire and the impulse to survive, in a wild itinerary from the suburbs to the capital. The abuse of power, prostitution, the vicissitudes of Buenos Aires nightlife, violence, and drugs intertwine in an atmosphere of fascination and a death drive besieged by the aftermath of the Falklands War and the threat of HIV.
Beyond the law, General Paz Avenue, and good manners, Vivir afuera is not only one of Fogwill's most insightful, raw, and provocative novels but also a stark counterpoint to the great illusion that forever marked the 1990s.
Cantos de marineros en La Pampa - 1998
Este es un fresco casi infinito de La Pampa. Trata sobre las gentes de una caravana que pretenden iniciar una rebelión. Después de haber sufrido todo tipo de inclemencias, su peripecia acaba cuando una inundación arrasa las vidas de los protagonistas y sus pertrechos. Finalmente encuentran un pequeño fuerte lleno de jefecillos, contables y miseria que se ofrece a acogerlos. Bajo su triste amparo, vuelven a ser soldados rasos. “Los oficiales son un mal necesario”, se consuelan.
Una pálida historia de amor - 1991
Turning history into literary material and emerging victorious is a challenge that reveals great writers. Fogwill had that gift, as demonstrated by this fascinating novel in which he dissects one of the great mysteries of the 1970s: Who was María Estela Martínez de Perón? How can it be explained that a formidable leader of men, Juan Domingo Perón, chose her as his sentimental companion and even propelled her to the presidency? Definitively, the most improbable things can happen in Argentina.
La buena nueva - 1990
An exceedingly intelligent, joyful, and centrifugal verbal artifact, *La buena nueva* traces the steps of a wanderer through a journey that is simultaneously a spoken portrait: an elusive center, surrounded by vigor and fascination, that reads itself in search of the author.
La buena nueva de los Libros del Caminante, a kind of shadowy autobiography originally published in 1990 when Fogwill was approaching fifty, is also a distant biography of an era, a social class, and an Argentina seen—according to Elvio Gandolfo—through "itinerancy and digression."
Lavish, torrential, and extravagant in its resources and adventures, it is a book filled with veiled hints about Fogwill's own youth in Quilmes and his family's belonging to a small, conventional, and prudish bourgeoisie: a universe from which its protagonist, the author's alter ego, escapes to literally wander the world.
Los pichiciegos - 1983
Los pichiciegos (Malvinas Requiem), one of the great masterpieces of late 20th-century narrative, tells the story of a group of Argentine soldiers (“pichis”) who, following the construction of an underground shelter, desert right in the middle of the Falklands War (April-June 1982) to create a community with its own laws. Everything will then revolve around their basic needs: to eat, keep warm, see in the dark, and not be discovered. To achieve this, they will trade with both their own side and the English.
“Malvinas Requiem has a well-earned spot as the major literary piece on Argentina’s only twentieth-century war.”—Buenos Aires Herald
Short stories and novellas
Memoria romana y otros relatos inéditos - 2018
"Memoria Romana y otros relatos inéditos" includes eleven texts by Fogwill dated from the seventies, eighties, and two thousands. Ten of them were rescued from among his belongings, personal papers, and correspondence, and are part of the Fogwill Archive. The other, titled "Un cambio de orgánico," was stolen from the author by one of the editors of this book.
Those dated from the seventies, before "Mis muertos punk," his first collection of short stories, show a young Fogwill experimenting with the short story genre, which would establish him as one of the best Argentine writers of the 20th century. "Memoria Romana" is a novella, interrupted but not unfinished, written during the Falklands War; it takes the form of a diary and is contemporary with "Los pichiciegos." In the texts dated from the two thousands, we see a more mature and confident Fogwill.
Some more autobiographical, others more delirious, always sharp, sometimes provocative, in all of them shine the power of language and imagination to weave stories, voices, perspectives, and phrasings that readers recall when they read the word Fogwill.
La gran ventana de los sueños - 2013
Durante buena parte de su vida, Fogwill tomó notas de sus sueños para no olvidarlos. En este libro los narra, explora, ordena, compara e interpela desde ángulos diversos, reflejo de sus múltiples intereses y pasiones. Barcos que vuelan, Natación, Humanitos, Sueños eróticos, Calvicie, Cosas perdidas, Las pipas o El ojo, son algunos de los sueños que el autor describe con una lucidez y una sinceridad ejemplares.
Cuentos completos - 2009
“If you were to design an anthology of the thirty best Argentine stories, compiled by an impartial jury, free of cronyisms and obligations, Fogwill would be up there, on the first step, sharing space with Borges, with Arlt, with Roberto Fontanarrosa.” Elvio Gandolfo
"Some of the most resonant short stories and novels of the past 30 years that captured the violence and unpredictability of life in Argentina.” Nick Caistor, The Guardian
Restos diurnos - 1993
La obra exhibe una frondosa trama de voces: femeninas, masculinas, transvestidas, analíticas, testimoniales o delirantes, se intrincan con un tono solamente al alcance de uno de los narradores más originales de los últimos años.
Muchacha punk - 1992
Este libro recopilatorio incluye seis relatos escritos entre 1978 y 1979: Dos hilitos de sangre; Japonés; Muchacha punk; La liberación de las mujeres; Cantos de marineros en las pampas; y La larga risa de todos estos años. En todos los cuentos se atisba la sombra de la última dictadura militar Argentina (1976-1983).
Pájaros de la cabeza - 1985
Fogwill made his mark as an author of short stories and brief narratives, establishing himself as an undisputed master of late 20th-century Argentine literature. The stories in this volume transcend common, conventional techniques. Fogwill imposes his tumultuous, torrential personality, crafting narratives that overwhelm the unsuspecting reader.
Ejércitos imaginarios - 1983
“Político y popular, fiero y silvestre”. La definición que Plutarco hizo del Dios Jano, también es aplicable a Fogwill cuando escribe. Su prosa tiene, a la vez, consistencia y desequilibrio. En esta obra, una pareja intenta aislarse del terror que los envuelve centrándose en ella misma, pero acabará repitiendo los esquemas y los sutiles recursos del Estado.
Música japonesa - 1982
Los relatos de Fogwill tienen un protagonista exclusivo: su voz. Con una maestría infrecuente, esta suele hablar sobre sexo, droga, política, música, violencia o amor. Todos esos temas están ahí como zonas de anclaje, espacios discusivos que propician ensayar el tono.
Mis muertos punk - 1980
Fogwill became known as an author of short stories and brief narratives, a field in which he was an undisputed master of late 20th-century Argentine literature. In his short narratives, Fogwill reaches a tremendous, almost unsurpassable level. The machinery of his stories runs at a thousand miles per hour, fuelled by a feverish prose that leaves the reader breathless.
Poetry
Poesía completa - 2016
All of Fogwill’s poetry together in one volume for the first time, including a prologue by Arturo Carrera and an unpublished book, Gente muy fea (Very Ugly People).
If his stories and novels dissected Argentina’s stereotypical middle class, Fogwill’s poetry offers a space of greater serenity and introspection that has accompanied him since adolescence and culminated in the publication of his own books of poetry. In the meantime, Fogwill founded the Tierra Baldía publishing company, which introduced significant authors such as Osvaldo Lamborhini and Néstor Perlongher.
This volume brings all of Fogwill’s poetic works together for the first time, and also includes the unpublished book Gente muy fea. The book’s title seems to distil, once and for all, the crushing force of Fogwill’s writing. Impious but serene, brilliant but thoughtful, this book consolidates Fogwill as the greatest trafficker of knowledge into literature.
Últimos movimientos - 2004
Contiene poemas escritos entre 2002 y 2004.
Canción de paz - 2003
Contiene poemas escritos a lo largo de los años 2001 y 2002.
Lo dado - 2001
Es, seguramente, uno de los textos más importantes de Fogwill, quien nunca antes se había preguntado tan a fondo por cuestiones esenciales. Quizá por eso mismo asoman una y otra vez palabras como “azar”, “sueños”, “límites” o “bienestar”.
Partes del todo - 1990
Reúne y resume buena parte de la obra poética de un escritor que ganó visibilidad y reconocimiento por su narrativa, pero que siempre dejó claro que su primer (y último) amor era la poesía.
Las horas de citas - 1980
Fogwill escribe un tratado sobre la utilización de las palabras por el poeta y de su resultado impredecible.
El efecto de realidad - 1979
Ópera prima del escritor, en ella transmite qué lecturas han influido en su identidad y en su estilo.
Non-fiction
Estados alterados - 2021
In Estados alterados, Fogwill revisits themes and issues that obsessed him throughout his writing career: the democratic emergence as the final stage of the so-called process of national reorganization, the place of art and literature, and new forms of writing. It is, as the author repeatedly insists, an essay on literature. This text is Fogwill's last major intervention and was written at the request of the magazine El Porteño in 2000 but was never published.
This edition is accompanied by a prologue by Silvia Schwarzböck, who provides an account of Fogwill's work as an essayist and insightfully places his production within the field of Argentine thought.
Journalistic Work
Los libros de la guerra - 2008
Los libros de la guerra es la suma del trabajo en torno a la escritura y el pensamiento crítico del autor.
A lo largo de veinticinco años publicaciones de distinto signo dieron cabida a intervenciones críticas, crónicas, reflexiones y fabulaciones de Fogwill, o del personaje que este narrador y poeta lanza a la escena pública para interpelar al poder y al establishment literario. Alfonsina, Clarín, Diario de Poesía, El Ojo Mocho, El País de Madrid, El Porteño, Fausto, La Nación, N, Primera Plana, Tiempo Argentino, Voces, y Xul, fueron, entre otras, las fuentes de esta antología de textos compilada por Mansalva y ordenada temáticamente por su autor.
"Poesía, festivales, divorcio, aborto, sionismo, guerra, nuevos autores, universidad, Estado, dictadura, democracia, sexo, lucha armada, tendencias, drogas, medicina y música popular son los pretextos que hilvanan el recorrido de un cuarto de siglo de reflexión sobre literatura y política cultural que es parte indiscernible de la estrategia de imposición de una Figura literaria. Reportajes, crónicas, ensayos sobre literatura argentina donde es posible sondear la operación literaria de Fogwill para instalar un nuevo canon, actualmente vigente, en la literatura argentina de las últimas décadas". Daniel Link
"Artículos como ésos han sido muy debatidos a lo largo de estos años, porque atacaban y atacan la yugular de nuestras ingenuidades. […] Eran reflexiones que, estuviéramos o no de acuerdo, ponían en crisis lo que podríamos llamar nuestras ‘estructuras de bondad’. Así, la literatura de Fogwill habría ido estableciendo un juego que “goza con descubrir las señales siniestras que esconde el pensamiento benevolente, con tramos de extremada belleza y un uso fatal de las paradojas." Horacio González