Sergio Pitol, ‘The Art Of Flight’

Sergio Pitol's, ‘The Art Of Flight’  (translated by George Henson, review copy courtesy of the publisher) is, the first lengthy exposure the Anglophone world has had to Pitol. 44 of 2021

A non-fiction work running to around 390 pages, it's divided into four main sections, with each sub-divided further into short (at times, very short) sections.

The first part, ‘Memory’, follows Pitol on trips into the past and far across the seas, sketching out his time abroad, both as a diplomat and as an itinerant writer.  Our initial picture of the great man is as a bumbling provincial abroad, awed by the people he meets (although we suspect that there’s a fair bit of poetic licence taken here…).  As the writer pours his memories onto the page, the focus turns slowly to the idea of memory itself and the influence it has on personality and person; Everything is All Things:

" 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. As I write these pages, I can divide my life into one long, enjoyable, gregarious phase, and another, the most recent, in which solitude seems to me a gift from the gods.”

"The difference between who I am now and who I was then is defined by my passion for reading and my aversion for any manifestation of power."

E.M.Forster's book Two Cheers for Democracy became spiritual guide and always had it by his side. 

"Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark holes and extracts visions that, unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos. "

"Revisiting the past means, among other heartaches, contemplating a world that is, and at the same time has ceased to be, the same."

Tolerance is an act of will. There is no human virtue more admirable. It implies recognition of others: another way of knowing oneself. An extraordinary virtue, says E.M. Forster , although hardly exciting. There are no hymns to tolerance, as there are, in abundance, to love. It lacks poems and sculptures that extol it. It is a virtue that requires a constant effort and vigilance. It has n popular prestige. "We only harm others when we're incapable of imagining them," writes Carlos Fuentes. "Political democracy and civilized coexistence between men demands tolerance and the acceptance of values and ideas different than our own," says Octavio Paz. 

An apt message in today's world - worth pondering over for everyone. Debates are always good for a healthy growing society (except getting into fight). The problem is when you get blinded with your opinion. People sometimes forget that others are also rational beings and opinions can differ...

Next, we move on to ‘Writing’, a section in which Pitol offers the reader insights into his art.  From the origins of his passion, a house of books far from the bright lights of the capital, we follow him as he explores literature, finding like-minded writers in Mexico City before ending up somewhat randomly in Barcelona.  It’s here that he begins a long and successful career, writing in the midst of a cultural boom (one story here tells of his meeting with Jorge Herralde and the founding of the famous Anagrama publishing house).

This part of the book also sees several anecdotes in which Pitol describes the origins of a story, the use of events in real life morphing into the eventual seeds of his work.  He’s all for using life as an inspiration, even if the end result looks nothing like the story which was its genesis, but he does have some words of warning for those who are thinking of seeking inspiration within:

“The narrator-writer delves deeper and deeper into his own life as his novel progresses.  It is not a mere autobiographical exercise; writing a novel solely about one’s own life, in most cases, is a vulgarity, a lack of imagination.” (p.156)

"Being a writer is to become a stranger, a foreigner: you have to start to translate your-self. Writing is a case of impersonation, forging an identity: Writing is passing yourself off as someone else. "

"I knew that I needed to capture that past in order to move freely in the world. It was the marrow neded to sustain the complex being I aspired to be. Without an affirmation of his language, the traveler loses the capacity to aspire to translate the universe; he will become a mere interpreter on the level of a tour guide".

The third section is entitled ‘Readings’.  Pitol shows the breadth of his learning and thinking in a series of lengthy essays on books and writers, among them Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, Thomas Mann’s diaries and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise.  Pitol proves to be incredibly erudite, a multilingual master of words and a translator into Spanish from several languages – these pieces make for fascinating reading.

“Reading is a secret game of approximations and distances.  It is also a lottery.  One arrives at a book by unusual means; one stumbles upon an author by apparent coincidence only to never be able to stop reading him.” (p.293)

Showing there’s more to the man than mere cerebral excellence, though, the last part of the book, ‘Ending’, takes us out into the real world.  ‘The Journey to Chiapas’ is a three-part tale of the Zapatista uprising in the Mexican region in the mid-90s, one which sees Pitol’s journalistic side comes to the fore.  An ardent believer in the need for a better Mexico, the writer takes a journey to the frontline, hoping to learn more about what’s going on in the war zone, and why.

The Art of Flight abounds with mentions of writers you won’t have heard of, and while that can be interesting, and inspiring, there’s always the risk for the casual reader of getting bogged down in a mire of foreign names and works.