Author(s): Sergio Chejfec; Jeffrey Lawrence (Translator)

Literature | Charco Press | Translated fiction | Argentina | Writing | Read our reviews!

"Sergio Chejfec is an admirable writer." --Patti Smith

"Could anyone possibly believe that writing doesn't exist? It would be like denying the existence of rain."

The perfect green notebook forms the basis for Sergio Chejfec's work, collecting writing, and allowing it to exist in a state of permanent possibility, or, as he says, "The written word is also capable of waiting for the next opportunity to appear and to continue to reveal itself by and for itself."

This same notebook is also the jumping off point for this essay, which considers the dimensions of the act of writing (legibility, annotation, facsimile, inscription, typewriter versus word processor versus pen) as a way of thinking, as a record of relative degrees of permanence, and as a performance. From Kafka through Borges, Nabokov, Levrero, Walser, the implications of how we write take on meaning as well worth considering as what we write. This is a love letter to the act of writing as practice, bearing down on all the ways it happens (cleaning typewriter keys, the inevitable drying out of the bottle of wite-out, the difference between Word Perfect and Word) to open up all the ways in which "when we express our thought, it changes."

Praise for Sergio Chejfec
"Sergio Chejfec is an admirable writer." —Patti Smith

“Chejfec's latest work should be treated as a significant event." —Publisher's Weekly

"It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who, marrying true intellect with simple description of a space, simultaneously covers so little and so much ground.” —Times Literary Supplement

"I'd locate My Two Worlds among the rarae aves of recent fiction, among those books still capable of blazing new paths on the perilous trajectory of the modern novel." —Enrique Vila-Matas

"This first novel by New York-based Argentine native Chejfec to be translated into English is a slim, gracefully discursive work….[My Two Worlds] allows us to enter the thoughts of a restless intellectual whose streams of thought involve the reader in his quest to find meaning in everything he sees and does." —Kirkus Reviews

"If genius can be defined by the measure of depth of an artist’s perception into human experience, then Chejfec is a genius." —Coffin Factory

“Sergio Chejfec’s The Incompletes is a masterfully nested narrative where writing—its presence on the page, its course through time, its prismatic dispersion of meaning—is the true protagonist. Heather Cleary’s flawless translation adds yet another layer to this extraordinary palimpsest of a novel.” —Hernan Diaz

"This was one of Sergio’s great gifts as a writer: his ability to take the small, the fragmentary, and to reveal the worlds contained within." —Heather Cleary, Lit Hub

"A beautifully baffling book about the peripatetic wanderings of your own mind through the hotels, hallways, and postcards of the protagonists, or about the instability hiding in every apparently solid building, or maybe even how you don’t know an event is significant until some disconnected and celestial phenomenon illuminates it." —Josh Cook, Porter Square Books

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
Chejfec considers his sturdy green notebook essential to his writing, even though he doesn’t often write in it. The notebook represents to him all the things that he has not written and it preserves the possibility of writing them. “The notebook becomes the evidence of what one has failed to write rather than of what one has already written,” he says, or, rather, writes, not in the notebook but in Forgotten Manuscript, a printed book, though it was not yet printed when he wrote it. What is the process by which text comes into being, and how do its various states affect its meaning? The sturdy green notebook is Chejfec’s most precious object, he is a writer after all, and uses the notebook, somewhat talismanicly, if that’s a word, to make contact, somehow, with the “quiet textual mass that lurks behind the whiteness” of its pages. Anything that he writes upon the pages of the notebook is by definition unfinished, embryonic, tentative. This is what Chejfec likes most about being a writer and this is why the sturdy green notebook is his most precious object. “Does this mean that the things we cherish most are the things that are most indeterminate?” he asks. The printed book entitled Forgotten Manuscript is full of speculations by Chejfec on the contrasting merits or functions, or propensities perhaps, of the various states, as we have called them, somewhat presumptively, of literature, so to call it, or text, rather, perhaps, if that makes any sense (the book perhaps makes sense where the review perhaps does not (we can only hope)). Why is it that a manuscript has “come to represent the auratic and irreplaceable source of the work”, when it is inherently incomplete, fluid and tentative? The manuscript is seen as the quintessential expression of the author’s intention, but really the author intends to be relieved of the words, which happens only when they are made immutable and printed (however much they may then be regretted). Nothing otherwise is ever finished and we can be relieved of nothing. Maybe I take a negative view of writing that is not shared by Chejfec, but there is much good thought to be had when reading Chejfec and much further reading or thought that can lead outwards from that reading. Sometimes I was not sure whether the ideas I had when reading Forgotten Manuscript were Chejfec’s or my own, and this is how it should be, this is what reading should lead to, the reader immersed in the work finds themselves subject to and the generator of ideas (so to call them), what more could you want? Chejfec has several things of interest to say of the differing functions of printed (material) and digital (immaterial) texts, their effect upon both reading and writing, what we could call the writing-reading complex if we wished to be obtuse) and on the kinds of literature (or literary experiences, perhaps) that they enable or constrain. “Immaterial writing (represented paradigmatically by the computer screen) encodes a friction between immutability (the promise of perpetual presence and the absence of material degradation) and fragility (the risk of a sudden collapse that would destroy the archive, and the constant danger of variation). There is an afterlife suggested by immaterial writing that is different from the afterlife suggested by material writing. Material writing persists as an inscription upon reality, on actual objects, and therefore it exhibits or prefigures its eventual death.”