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Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec.

New York's High Line Park runs between Gansevoort Street and 34th Street;

It was established on a disused railway track and conceived as a green walkway from which to enjoy views of Chelsea and the Hudson River.

Sergio Chejfec and I walked it together on one occasion without realizing that, in doing so, we were not very different from the narrator of

, his 2008 novel, who walks “without doing anything else”: not to bridge any distance or to access the kind of transcendent experience to which the

modern [walker], but only to "test the maps" and himself.

Naturally, neither Sergio nor I knew that this would be our last meeting and that the emails and the shared plans and the readings that we would both do of each other's work in the following years would be a way of saying goodbye.

Born in Buenos Aires on November 28, 1956, Chejfec died in New York on April 2.

He was therefore 65 years old.

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Sergio Chejfec, gravity without perplexity

"For a long time, literature was dominated or crossed by the axis of the real and the non-real," Chejfec told Silvina Friera in 2008, later adding that he, for his part, was more interested in "considering it in terms of truth and falsehood”.

“That is a very productive hesitation for literature, and for us as part of the human race.

We are constantly vacillating between the true and the false, we even try to find out what is the true within the false and what is the false within the true in the most important facts and circumstances of life and in the most insignificant things, simple and casual.

In my literature there is that type of game that has the effect that the narrator questions or relativizes what has previously been considered eloquent, feasible or real.

At the same time,

In some way, all of Sergio Chejfec's literature was an attempt to bridge the gap that separates the way we live from a kind of truth experienced firsthand about whose existence, and our ability to access it, doubters harbor doubts. narrators of

(1990),

(1999),

(2007),

(2012) or

(2019) and

(2021), his latest books.

It is no coincidence that these books find it difficult to fit into the established repertoire of literary genres: rather than articulate on a clear and editorially attractive distinction between "fiction" and "non-fiction", these books, which we could call "essay fiction" if not outside because they are also very poetic, they show how a first-rate intelligence addresses the problem of the truth and falsity of certain experiences, converting reading into experience as well;

as Enrique Vila-Matas wrote, in “nothing happens, it just happens that they are exceptional”.

The amazing thing about them, and the reason why they are unforgettable for those who read them, is that, despite all the musings and doubts of their narrators, the "real" and transformative truth of matters like walking through a park in southern Brazil , meeting someone to talk, waiting for an elevator, reading or buying a blank notebook does manifest itself in all its irrepressible intensity in them: they usually end with a dazzle that can hardly be put into words, but its author always managed to overcome that difficulty.

Discreet, elegant and curious

Chejfec lived in Caracas with his wife, the extraordinary Argentine essayist Graciela Montaldo, starting in 1990, and in 2005 they both settled in New York, where Chejfec taught in the Creative Writing Program in Spanish at New York University.

It must not have been easy for him to adopt the role of someone who knows how to write in front of his students, for him, who knew very well that, as Marguerite Duras wrote, "writing is trying to know what we would write if we wrote", but also taught at the National University of Rosario and in the Creative Writing department of the National University of Tres de Febrero, both in Argentina.

Perhaps teaching was another of his ways of practicing generosity;

for the rest, he was discreet, elegant, curious: walking next to him, like that afternoon in New York,

, his 2015 essay) what scared him the most was “finishing”, “having” a book.

His is like a long map-testing walk that his readers would have preferred, as I did on the High Line, not to end at this point.

Sergio Chejfec

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