Part autobiography, part literary criticism. I was a bit skeptical at first, and maybe to a certain extent throughout the entirety - while most of it is beautifully wrought, there is a tendency for Pitol just to simply start listing off names and places and books and works of art. Worse than that, they are lists of names of which I recognized only a small amount, and read even less! So basically both pretentious and an insult to my intelligent wordliness. (Reading the translator’s note at the back, I discovered that the description of a man he saw in a bar in Barcelona as “the little black princess of the heaths” was in fact a reference to the nineteenth century novel Das Haideprinzeßchen? Which has a German wikipedia page, but no English one.) Unlike, say, Terry Pratchett, this is not an easy read.

What kept me going from the start were on one hand sparks of insight, turns of phase, and most of all, just really curious choices around jumping from place to place and time to time in what is, after all, the pretty fascinating life that Pitol has lived. At one point he reports - to the hypnotist he enlisted to help him cure his nicotine dependency - that he feels “incapable of describing any action, no matter how simple, in a direct way”. And so with this book, and apparently two more after it that I must soon lay my hands on, he compiles and orders a life’s worth of work, action, belief and words in a totally roundabout way.

I enjoyed it when I got the first pun, he spends his life flying from place to place, living in Mexico, Spain, Italy, Poland, Beijing, literal flying and also fleeing the past, and but also the words are flighty and there is an art to it, mercurial circumlocution. And so the art of flight is his life and his work, and then again also just the broad art of writing becomes a flighty art which he dives into time and time again - this autobiography has a much larger section full of straight-up literary criticism than really seemed expected.

(Apparently there are two more puns lost in translation, where la fuga means both “flight” and “fugue”, where the structure of the book as a whole parallels a fugue and then contrives to references a fugue of that name by Bach)

And then finally, somehow while wading through fascinating interpretations of literary works of which I have little to no prior knowledge, some themes start to come together and a worldview begin to get clearer. Like all flights it eventually must come to land…a collection of journal entries around the time of the founding of the Zapatista movement? That does in fact feel like an emotional and logical cap to the project?

In the end, Pitol and this book, or this book and Pitol, are inspirational and astounding and maybe a bit tedious, but I admire the way with which he relates to art, and that is what this all about, anyways.

I thought it was quite good, guess now I have to add all the books he references and has written to my ever-growing to-read pile.