There will be no forgetting for Osvaldo Soriano

Osvaldo Soriano

intervened three times in the life of Ángel Berlanga.

The first was around 1988, when the journalist from

was studying Architecture: he wanted to quit his degree and the momentum to finally make up his mind was reading

, bought at a used bookstore.

In September 1997, the

It was commemorating the first anniversary of the writer's death and Berlanga contacted Juan Forn, offered material that he had already compiled and with that letter of introduction he entered the newspaper shortly after.

And now he has just published a book dedicated to Soriano that he does not want to call a biography, which he defines from the title as "a story" and imposes itself as an exhaustive reconstruction of life and work through a remarkable set of sources.

Berlanga edited and compiled two books from the

:

(2006), texts dedicated to soccer, and

(2012), articles, chronicles, portraits and interviews unpublished in a book.

He also composed the additions to the reissues of the novels with sections of interviews with Soriano, criticism, comments and opinions from other writers.

A more than solid base to which he added interviews with relatives and other writers, journalists and editors, friends from different eras and also enemies, a photographic archive, unpublished correspondence and other unknown papers.

–In part of his work, Osvaldo Soriano reworked biographical episodes through fiction.

"Writers always lie, I lie myself," he warned.

What was it like to rebuild a life in that framework?

–The title of the book has a drop, “a story”, which seeks to relativize the weight of the word biography.

When comparing voices, documents and approaches, it is sometimes not possible to strictly determine how things went.

In many sections of Soriano's story there are contradictions between what he told and what the witnesses say.

That was an important jerk in the process of the book: from the narrative point of view, many times I found that his version was more attractive, likeable and loaded with narrative power, and telling the trick or dwelling on each detail could do more. tense reading.

When he writes on a back cover for

who is in Chile as a soccer player, “in my first international match”, and then friends say “no, we went but we didn't play any games”, the myth disarms but there is also a certain ambiguity because these stories are not journalistic texts, mix fiction and reality.

– Do you prefer to avoid the conventional idea of ​​a biography?

–I do not pretend to say that this is Soriano's life.

The interpretations can be many around the same event.

I have in mind something that Eduardo Belgrano Rawson told me.

He said that he was in a taxi with his daughter and a friend of his daughter, they had just arrived from a trip and attended a crash.

They were detained for a few minutes, then resumed their journey and began to comment on what they had seen.

Within ten minutes the four had different versions of what they had witnessed.

This is what happens with memory, and especially at a distance.

–Soriano divided opinions in the literary environment and starred in polemics.

Did the weather calm things down?

–I keep noticing rejection for the work and for the character.

It interested me as one of the searches for the book, because the character he was and his contribution to journalism and literature are not dimensioned.

Since he landed on Primera Plana, of which there are different versions, with his time at

project , Página 12

, the profession of journalism is strongly intertwined with his narrative.

I don't see it as present in the field of culture, but people have an affective and acknowledging relationship with it and enjoy reading books.

–Soriano claims his arrival in literature from journalism.

But it doesn't put you on an equal footing.

He wants to write, he wants to make fiction, and yet all of his work is that of a guy who sometimes writes journalism and sometimes the materials that come from that quarry end up in a novel because of the way of narrating.

That is why I emphasize the communicating vessels between literature and journalism.

–The cult of cats and soccer were part of his author image.

But one might think that they are anecdotal things.

Why do you dedicate specific chapters to them?

–Because they were important and decisive in his life.

The relationship with cats is enormously powerful, and so is football.

In exile Soriano is aware of the time difference to see what time San Lorenzo plays and thus calls at halftime and then at the end of the game to see how it went, or he asks his friends and mother to send him newspapers , particularly when San Lorenzo is about to go downhill.

In the same way that he feels guilty towards his father, when he says that he does what he wants to write, cats, San Lorenzo and politics, when he seemed contraindicated, are in his narrative.

–You also mention sports stories as an important element in your training as a writer.

–Another thing that interests him and is present in his books is emotion.

At some point they fall for that emotion in the skin of his characters.

He has many texts regarding radio drama and soccer broadcasts and I think that those stories carried a type of narration that included emotion.

Soriano said that he was more interested in soccer than literature;

I don't know if that much, but without a doubt he occupies a huge place in his life.

At an early age he intends to venture into sports journalism, which is what he absorbed in his childhood and adolescence at Cipolletti.

– Is that link with popular culture also what was rejected in Soriano?

-Yeah.

In fact he is a guy who comes to readers with deep issues.

And he is one of the first writers to put soccer in fiction.

Graham Greene and football, computer advances and his love of cats could all be part of his literature.

He liked them a lot because he didn't seem educated enough, because there were no educated references in his novels.

It does not seem to me a sufficient argument to read his literature in a pejorative way.

Soriano put readers in contact with vital issues to understand the country.

He was not a passing writer but someone very lucid to read politics and also the economy, and to show the springs of the functioning of society.

–He argued with other writers around exile, he hated Ernesto Sabato and he was reciprocated, he fought with editors and was the subject of a harsh posthumous debate.

In the book the equanimity is noted when exposing the arguments of all those involved.

–Each of these controversies can occupy many pages.

I didn't want them to have so much space, but I did want to display the central arguments.

The controversies express tensions between sectors of culture.

Soriano was not someone who shunned them, he was interested in them, he activated them, and many times he had to do with feeling humiliated or cheated.

He vindicates himself as a stone thrower and that arouses reactions.

As Sonia Freites, one of the interviewees, says, he does not present himself as a "good" guy: the controversies also account for that, he is a seasoned guy in his opinions.

–It is striking how adverse criticism mortified him.

At one point he talks about Argentine literature like a soccer team where he thinks of himself as an isolated player.

–Yes, but at the same time his desire to be there is present.

It hurt that they didn't recognize him and at the same time it's clear that he didn't need anyone's permission.

At some point, he comments to Rodrigo Fresán that he wants to read young writers and tells him "bitch, my old man didn't make me study English, look what I'm missing."

He is a guy who commands himself but has doubts all the time, and he is not the same as someone who grows up among books and leans into literature from a very young age as someone who comes, as he says, from the Far West.

Despite the fact that he does not deny his origins, he felt that he was not educated enough.

–However, he was not isolated but rather participated in a tradition, as it is exposed in the book.

Soriano is referenced in Roberto Arlt and in journalist writers, Tomás Eloy Martínez and others, right?

–Also on the police side.

While he doesn't write strictly in the genre, Mexican Alfonso Fierro Obregón casts Galván in the role of the detective in Winter Quarters, as he confronts the police and tries to uphold a losing cause.

In letters to Tito Cossa about the writing of that book, it is noted that he is hyper-influenced by Raymond Chandler.

So he has a tradition and he has recognition, as you can see when he dies.

– "We come to honor a socialist without a party, a man of the left," said José María Pasquini Durán at the farewell.

How do you analyze the political in Soriano?

It's a defining trait.

And very significant regarding the depoliticization of the society of his time.

The political is always present: in Tales of Happy Years with the country as a backdrop, in No habrá más penas ni olvido with the pull of Peronism, in Cuarteles with the dictatorship, in A lion surrendered to his plants the theme of Malvinas in an imaginary African country, the dissolution of the country in the 90s with Una sombra ya pronto serás and characters who are lost in a devastated landscape, in his latest book the memory of the father in times of the first Peronism.

Pasquini says that he is a patriot, a mangled word at the time.

Soriano is thinking about the country all the time, also in exile, and that is another distinctive aspect of his narrative.

Osvaldo Soriano

, Angel Berlanga.

South American, 528 pages.

$7,999

The "Gordo" and the stove

by Osvaldo Aguirre

Ángel Berlanga chooses two quotes from

as epigraphs for his book: “When writing, take care of me.

They are my memories;

I don't want to appear as a grumpy old man who idealizes his youthful years”;

"Have no pity on me: memory, if voracious and violent, is an exquisite matter."

In the tension that these claims inscribe is condensed the challenge that he assumes, and also an aspiration of a certain fidelity towards the writer.

Soriano, a story

is the result of years of reading and research dedicated to the author of

and the reissue of his books in Seix Barral.

Berlanga covers the different stages of his life, his initiation into journalism and projection into literature;

he not only follows the route of the work but also displays its historical and cultural context based on exhaustive documentation.

Telling Soriano's story is here to observe, among other issues, the projections of the relationship with the father, the way in which the journalistic experience works as his training space as a writer, the definition of literary and political positions.

And also to notice the mythical plot that surrounds it, in particular due to the constant intersections between biography and fiction that Soriano made with full awareness in his texts.

There are pertinent clarifications.

"That image of Osvaldo, of the 'good fat man', is the most false thing I've ever heard," warns Sonia Freites, one of the interviewees.

But in another order, the myths are not at odds with the veracity of the story: when Soriano talks about his conditions as a soccer player, he reveals a central aspect in his creative world.

Soriano built an author's image associated with night writing, love of cats, passion for soccer, and rejection of job demands unrelated to literature.

He was questioned by specialized critics and returned the courtesies.

The controversies that he sustained are part of the past;

By reviewing the texts and interviewing the protagonists, Berlanga rediscovers the character and the medium with which he confronted in a different light.

Journalism appears in this framework as a refuge and as a sniper post.

Soriano retreats to that terrain when he is attacked, but there he rediscovers his weapons as a writer: the demand for rigor and expressive economy, the search for style under the pressure of closing hours, the concern to maintain the interest of the reader and to communicate (“The primary function of a novel is to transmit an emotion”).

These are also the virtues of Berlanga's story, which fluently and accurately follows the constant fluctuations between journalism and literature and cuts the interests and narrative forms that underlie the texts.

The material aspect of literature is not usually investigated.

Soriano exposes it in a prominent way with the sales figures, the amounts received as an advance for the books and the discussions with the publishers.

If these data rewarded him for the lack of critical recognition, Berlanga shows that Soriano did not stop questioning himself about his own writing and putting himself to the test even when he already had a work and could feel consecrated.

Soriano said that “fiction, when it works, creates a ground, a kind of pact similar to that of a conversation or – badly despite many – to that of a story told next to a bonfire”.

Berlanga takes this practice to biography;

His version of the story convinces the reader for the affectionate but non-concessive tone with which he narrates, for the way in which he composes the character and the time, and particularly for a very successful balance between affective closeness and reflective distance.

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