Sergio Pitol - His writing – the way he constructs sentences, inflects Spanish, twists meanings and stresses particular words – reflects the multiplicity of languages he has read and embraced –and perhaps, too, the many men he has been. Reading him is like reading through the layers of many languages at once

Sergio Pitol, The Art of Flight, Trans. by George Henson,Deep Vellum, 2015.


Winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2005 (the “Spanish-language Nobel”) and considered one of Mexico’s greatest living authors, Pitol makes his English-language debut with The Art of Flight. Also the first book in Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” which Deep Vellum has signed to publish in full, this collection of essays and stories blends the genres of memoir and creative essay in an imaginative swirl of reflection and contemplation as Pitol looks back on a life lived through literature and travel. 

The Art of Flight, originally published in 1997, is the first book in Sergio Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” a collection of essays and stories that blends the genres of memoir and creative essay in an imaginative swirl of reflection and contemplation. Pitol, considered Mexico’s greatest living author, was honored for his lifetime achievements with the 2005 Cervantes Prize, considered the Spanish language’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. From the 1960s through the 1990s Pitol worked as a cultural attaché in Mexican embassies throughout the world, and served as ambassador to Czechoslovakia. An erudite scholar of literary history and world culture, Pitol is also renowned for his translations from Russian, Polish, English, and German into Spanish, including Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, and Witold Gombrowicz. A unique, timeless, international literary voice in the mold of Henry James, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, Pitol’s work has been translated into more than ten languages.  The Art of Flight is Pitol’s first book published in English.

Sergio Pitol’s stories, essays and novels do not only travel through his many places of residence. His writing – the way he constructs sentences, inflects Spanish, twists meanings and stresses particular words – reflects the multiplicity of languages he has read and embraced –and perhaps, too, the many men he has been. Reading him is like reading through the layers of many languages at once.
It isn’t easy to explain the reason why Pitol’s imagination takes hold of his readers. Perhaps it is the way he’s able to delicately tap into the most disturbing layers of reality and turn our conception of what is normal inside out. Perhaps it’s because he’s always telling a deeper, sadder, more disquieting story while pretending to narrate another. Or perhaps it is merely that strange gift which very few possess: a voice that reverberates beyond the margins of his books.

Just as the parts of his book are both autonomous and interconnected, so are the experiences contained within them. The key Pitol required to unlock full understanding of his own life is a traumatic memory—the death of his mother—released from the dark corner it was sent during childhood, something he describes as “a source of agony, but also, secretly, the most extraordinary creative stimulus.”
This particular recollection offers perhaps the most personal understanding of Pitol as a person. Oddly enough, however, we do not learn of it until much later, while he is under hypnosis in an attempt to quit smoking, and is confronted with a repressed memory of himself as a child; “I feel possessed by the little boy I was and who is before my eyes,” and he realizes that beneath all his experiences resides “a nucleus of agony.” While The Art of Flight is infused with humor, self-effacing modesty, and sharp critical commentary, brief insights such as this offer us the most sincere sense of who Pitol is. Thus my hesitation to describe the book as wholly autobiography or memoir; throughout, we learn who influenced Pitol’s writing, what he thinks of Chekhov, Faulkner, and Joyce, the literati he has known, where he lived and so on, but seldom does he offer real personal closeness to the reader. As such, when intimacy is proffered, its scarcity makes it seem all the more sincere.
As Pitol weaves together memories, dreams, literary criticism, brief histories of twentieth-century Mexico, and odes to writers he regards as exemplary, The Art of Flight circumnavigates neat categorization. In trying to situate this book both culturally and historically, Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives makes for an obvious if imperfect comparison, alongside Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part quasi-fictional bildungsroman My Struggle, Ben Lerner’s mesh of fiction and autobiography in Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, and, with Pitol’s fixation on place, even Hemingway’s memoir-cum-love letter to Paris A Moveable Feast. But despite attempts to locate the book among these, it resists comparison; The Art of Flight has none of the obsessive, Proustian detail of Knausgaard, or the metafiction of Lerner. It resists the light-heartedness of Bolaño’s depictions of youth and escapades, and the moroseness of Hemingway. Instead, it resembles a cloudy gemstone: at once glimmering and opaque, layered and precise.
All of which emphasize a book as unique and remarkable as its author. Born in the Mexican city of Puebla in 1933, Pitol served in the Mexican Foreign Service before embarking on a writing career in the ‘60s, and has since authored over two dozen books. Awarded the Herralde Prize in 1984, he later presented that same prize to Bolaño for The Savage Detectives. Pitol received the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2005. He has also managed to make his name as a highly esteemed Spanish language translator. Enrique Vila-Matas—“perhaps Spain’s greatest living author”—wrote the foreword to this book. It is a late arrival on the English-language scene for Pitol; he is in the strange position of being compared to Latin American contemporaries such as Vila-Matas, Bolaño, César Aira, Valeria Luiselli, and Álvaro Enrigue, all of whom came to fame in Spanish after he did. But even this anachronism cannot mask the simple fact that The Art of Flight is sui generis; his publisher’s claim that Pitol is “quite simply the greatest living Mexican writer to have never been translated” is not without substance.
In his essay Why Write?, Sartre explores how a writer uses literature in order to “manage his escapes and conquests.” He describes how each writer “has his reasons: for one, art is a flight; for another, a means of conquering.” Such motivation as based partially in the writer’s belief that they are “essential in relationship to the world.” Giving permanence to an experience of our world through writing is a consequence of the writer imposing unity between their mind and the things they depict. “The operation of writing,” Sartre proposes, involves “an implicit quasi-reading which makes real reading.” An author does not see the words he writes as a reader sees them, as the words existed to him before he wrote them, while the reader’s perception of these words is unique.
This is apparent in The Art of Flight, as the elements of memoir are located in Pitol’s belief that everything in his life has been connected to literature, and they capture his attempt to give permanence to memories through the “operation of writing.” He explores how the creative act is shaped when one’s state as writer andreader are inseparable, and the ways in which this duality influences how a writer “recreates” what he or she reads. Pitol’s writing captures Sartre’s essential authorial relationship between mind and representation not only in the recollection of his life through detailed memoir, but explicit commentary on how these experiences informed his writing practice. For Pitol, “writing meant the possibility of embarking toward an elusive goal and fusing—thanks to that dark, inscrutable, and much talked-about alchemy one comes closer to the process of creation—the outside world and that subterranean one that inhabits us.” As his words travel from page to reader, they transform, and we experience unfamiliar places, people, and books. His writing brings us close, drawn in by vivid description and detail, while keeping us at arm’s length, for by definition memoir is personal and, in its very nature, ‘other.’”
The theme that imbues The Art of Flight most distinctly and consistently is travel. Pitol believed “writing in the same space where he lives was for most of his life equivalent to committing an obscene act in a holy place,” and found the basis for such conviction as a child, when reading Jules Verne “fuelled . . . a certain desperation to travel and become lost in the world.” Pitol takes us, in his book, from Venice to Warsaw to Rome, then New York, back to Mexico City, and on to Barcelona, a city that under Franco’s dictatorship invokes an almost comically negative reaction:
Each place leaves a distinct imprint on Pitol, inking not just his memory but also his writing. Similarly to Bolaño, his recollections of mid-century Mexico City are of a lively, politically charged, turbulent place, with a bubbling undercurrent of radicalism and revolution. Here, his recollections include countless references to other Mexican writers, sometimes to excess; readers not conversant in Mexican literature may feel alienated despite the writers’ cultural importance. In contrast, Pitol effectively reconstructs plazas, streets, cafes, taquerías, and bookstores with such detail that we feel we are accompanying him as he darts from place to place. However, the execution by firing squad of revolutionary Rubén Jaramillo, his pregnant wife and sons in 1962 by the Federal Police was the turning point for Pitol, who grew disconnected from the country that allowed such an atrocity to happen. He left, and would not return again permanently until 1988.
Inextricably linked to place are the books read during his time spent there. For Pitol, “travel was the experience of the visible world; reading, on the other hand, allowed me to undertake an inner journey.” Venice in particular inspires strong literary opinions; within the “store of fiction set in Venice . . . it is considered more than just a setting; rather, it becomes a character.” The same could be said for the places in which he has spent his life, so connected are they to his motivation to write. In the same way, Pitol stresses that his personal development is linked directly to what he has read, perhaps akin to Sartre’s proposal that the act of writing involves “an implicit quasi-reading.” This belief is epitomized in his realization, after visiting New York’s Museum of Modern Art,
It is clear in celebratory essays such as An Ars Poetica? and The Dark Twin that reading did not just hone his skill as a writer, but was the very foundation of his career. This is of course neither unsurprising nor unusual, but what Pitol explains in The Art of Flight is precisely how, in detail,his favorite authors and books influenced his writing practice. The reader actually learns relatively little about the substance of his own work—a pity, since this is his first book to be translated into English.
While most of these essays—for lack of a better word—are informative and excellently written, there are times where the temptation to skip ahead could arise. Perhaps this comes from a lack of familiarity with, or passion for, certain figures in discussion; the piece on Benito Pérez Galdós’s The Court of Carlos IV is somewhat unengaging, unless one is as passionate about the book as Pitol clearly is (and I am not). Perhaps this “dryness” is emphasized in comparison to Pitol’s lively examinations of Chekhov, which made me eager to revisit The Steppe, andthe German painter Max Beckmann, in addition to numerous Latin-American writers previously unknown to me that I am now keen to read. So numerous are the references to his influences, it becomes difficult at times to keep up, or feel that much is being added by their inclusion. However, the majority of his readings would stand alone as pieces of critical writing, and add insight to the life of a writer relatively unknown in the English-speaking world.
In his discussion of Thomas Mann’s short bildungsroman Tonio Kröger, Pitol proposes “writing a novel solely about one’s own life, in most cases, is vulgarity, a lack of imagination.” The Art of Flight certainly adheres to his conviction. With this in mind, at times it appears Pitol is wary of talking of himself too much. On the one hand, he states, “I cannot imagine a novelist who does not use elements of his personal experience, a vision, a memory from childhood or the immediate past, a tone of voice captured in a meeting, a furtive gesture glimpsed by chance, only to incorporate them later into one or more characters,” while on the other, he displays an “insidious anxiety” regarding his own writing:
More affectionate self-deprecation is found in my favorite anecdote from Pitol’s early attempts at love poetry: “My guardian angel protected and saved my literary future: I misplaced the poems. When I reread them thirty years later, I was petrified; to say they were atrocious would be to praise them.” Highlighting this disparity is not a criticism. The inclusion of essays and commentary enrich the book, evincing Pitol’s claim that reading has influenced his writing as much as experience. Indeed, Pitol’s readings have given creative energy to his own work. And we, as readers of the readings, are both twice removed from, and directly in contact with, his writing. Of Chekhov, he suggests, “the knowledge of the craftsmanship that he employed to write his remarkable stories surely intensifies the pleasure of reading them.” The same is true of The Art of Flight.
Returning to Sartre’s “why write?”, in Pitol’s case the answer could be: to find freedom, escape, or a sense of belonging. Bolaño wrote that “books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in the memory.” Perhaps Pitol’s sense of disconnection with his native Mexico encouraged him to seek a home elsewhere, without ever being satisfied enough to settle in any one place—a state, as Vila-Matas says in his foreword, of “being Mexican and at the same time always being a foreigner.” Instead, Pitol found comfort in the walls he constructed around himself with books, which both protected him from rootlessness, and exposed him to the lives and minds of others.
Despite the literary essays and deep readings contained within The Art of Flight, what ties the book together is the glittering thread of himself that Pitol has sewn thoughtfully throughout. Although we meet him as a grown man, it is when recollecting his youth that Pitol seems most vulnerable, and consequently most open to identification. When triggered by the memory uncovered through hypnotherapy, realizing, “many things had become coherent and explainable: everything in my life had been nothing more than a perpetual flight,” it becomes clear for both Pitol and the reader that, while his mother’s drowning may have cast darkness over his life strong enough to hide the memory for decades, once exposed it reveals what he has been running away from for so long, and allows him to stop and take stock of his life.
Although this revelation lends a subtly melancholic undertone, the overall sense is not one of gloom but of vibrancy and vigor; Pitol describes the book as “an attempt to allay anxieties and cauterize wounds,” and indeed the overall feeling is celebratory, of a life fully lived. While disappointing that Pitol’s fiction currently remains unavailable in English translation, Deep Vellum is scheduled to publish the two subsequent volumes of this collection, which will hopefully serve as impetus for further translation of his work. The Art of Flight is rich with Pitol’s impassioned interrogations of others, woven into an intricate, if convoluted, web with memories, anecdotes, and confessions. Not all writers make great critics, nor the converse, but in Pitol’s case, one cannot exist without the other; to quote Borges, “we are all the past, we are our blood, we are the people we have seen die, we are the books that have made us better, we are gratefully the others.” - Rosie Clarke 

I’ve just finished reading Segio Pitol’s The Art of Flight and my head really hurts. I’m not talking about one of those standard issue migraine headaches, with temples throbbing like they’re about to burst through my skin while I fumble with the child-proof cap on a bottle of painkillers, desperate for relief. No, this is something different, something a tad on the painful side, but mostly pleasurable in nature. My brain feels as though it’s literally expanding inside my skull from the sheer weight of the massive amount of knowledge that’s been imparted to it by this book. I love this feeling. I want to make it last for as long as I can. I’m also about to physically collapse in exhaustion from it. Beware the side effects.

How am I supposed accurately describe the contents of this book to people? I feel that other kind of more traditional headache muscling its way in as I agonize over this very thought. Perhaps it’s a task best left to the book publishing professionals and their publicists, but even they seem to struggle with this, placing the work squarely on the shelf labelled unclassifiable. Surely there has to be a way though? Once, for lack of anything better, I referred to as a historicaltraveldiaryessaybiography, but now, having finished the book, I realize that classification doesn’t even begin to do it justice.
What Pitol does over the course of 400 some odd pages is invite you, the reader, to inject yourself directly into his brain to explore his vast landscape of thoughts on a myriad of wide ranging subjects, as captured in brilliant essay-like snapshots that span decades of his life. The literary works of Thomas Mann and Antonio Tabucchi are analyzed. Reflections, hopes, and fears related to the 1994 Zapatista Uprising are chronicled through journal entries. The political merits of José Vasconcelos’s vast output are debated. Pitol’s own work as a translator and writer of fiction is explored in great detail. And on and on, with each subsequent piece being just as engrossing and engaging as the one that came before it. The sum achievement of the gratifying effect induced by these efforts is best described by the following quote: 
We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen, the music we have heard and forgotten, the streets we have walked. We are our childhood, our family, some friends, a few loves, more than a few disappointments. A sum reduced by infinite subtractions. We are shaped by different times, hobbies, and creeds.
Yes! Go ahead and call the Art of Flight unclassifiable if you want, call it a historicaltraveldiaryessaybiography if you must, label it whatever or however you want to, but what it really is, pardon the alliteration, is a love letter to literature lovers everywhere. Even the most voracious of readers and most learned of scholars are bound to come up against some unfamiliar names within the pages of this book, but it doesn’t matter how familiar you are with the subjects or subject matter being discussed. Pitol—and let’s give credit where credit is due—translator George Henson have a rich command over language, one that keeps you enthralled through it all. You’re never spoken down to, you’re never handheld or held back by endless footnotes, and you’re never meant to feel ashamed for any literary shortcomings you might possess. Instead, The Art of Flight reads like a long overdue celebration for a timeless art form that is constantly changing, constantly reinventing itself through the years, but rest assured, will never die.
As much as The Art of Flight pleases, it also frustrates, but in the best possible way. Not because of what it doesn’t contain within its pages, but because of what’s shamefully unavailable for the dazzled reader to devour next. Where are the English language translations of Pitol’s novels and short stories? How are we to reconcile his thoughts on life and literature without being able to properly examine and critique his complete body of work as well? This volume serves as the first in his Trilogy of Memory series and publisher Deep Vellum is committed to releasing the next two (which can’t arrive soon enough) as well, but here’s hoping that someone out there also takes the time to get the rest of this Cervantes Prize winning author’s literary output translated and published sooner rather than later. - Aaron Westerman



Sergio Pitol, The Journey, Trans. by George Henson, Deep Vellum, 2015.

The Journey features one of the world’s master storytellers at work as he skillfully recounts two weeks of travel around the Soviet Union in 1986. From the first paragraph Pitol dislocates the sense of reality, masterfully and playfully blurring the lines between fiction and fact. This adventurous story, based on the author’s own travel journals, parades through some of the territories that the author lived in and traveled through (Prague, the Caucasus, Moscow, Leningrad) as he reflects on the impact of Russia’s sacred literary pantheon in his life and the power that literature holds over us all. The Journey, the second work in Pitol’s remarkable “Trilogy of Memory” (which Deep Vellum is publishing in its entirety), which won him the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2005 and inspired the newest generation of Spanish-language writers, represents the perfect example of one of the world’s greatest authors at the peak of his power.
 

 George Henson on the Linguistic Puzzle of Translating Sergio Pitol's The Art of Flight