A brief Life

This four letter word - life - is having a different content, up to the intellectual profile of the person using it. It could mean to be able to correspond to the basic medical descriptions - breathing, heart beating - or more, at a higher intellectual level, give senses and interpretations of the world around.

For those choosing the world of fiction, reality is never enough. They need to rewrite each moment, to offer them content, to create senses to reunite small pieces and make them turn around, as in a kaleidoscope. By reading, you could offer yourself - because the writer aimed himself the same - a brief instant of life, other people's life. In "A brief life", Juan Carlos Onetti
is playing with times and lives, with the limits between dreams and his reality, consistent only with what he considered as real. He's the one who shouted "start" and who decided the story must stop.

At the beginning of our brief ride we are all new-born, with various chances and opportunities to became something. At the end, we all die. In between these thresholds it is a brief life, we could let a trace or not. In comparison with the whole universe, is almost nothing and memory is a very subjective notion, mostly a hope about ourselves we ought to live with.

Mr. Nathan Zuckerman is leaving the stage

"Nathan Zuckerman is sick. I've read this, is in the book. He recently underwent a prostate surgery, perhaps Alzheimer is waiting to share its part too...". "Oh, you mean Philip Roth? Impossible. Can believe is true...And he's not even 70. It will be such an incredible loss". "Yes, they are not too many people like him these days. You know, he was involved in Operation Skylock, the Demyanuk case". "Illness don't spare anybody. I undestood him so well after reading the story of Alexander Portnoy. Psychanalitically speaking, I can understand a whole lot how his life is now".

And the dialogue could continue, be enriched and diversified. It's not an exchange of words about weather or the last events from the life of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. It touch the abuse of biography in interpreting the fiction and yes, in many cases, the "elitist" interpretation of a piece of literature is badly and irremediably affected by a narrow focus on the life of writer. I can guess the hidden smile of Thomas Pynchon while reading - I can bet he's connected to Internet - the desperate efforts to identify him. Nobody saw him for almost 20 years, no interviews, public readings, we don't know how his personal life is going on. For sure, his works are cryptic and only the stubbornness of a detective-skills literary critic will help us to reveal the inner personal substance of his wonderful novels.


The first chapter of Exit Ghost