"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."&nbsp; 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."&nbsp;

Forgotten Manuscript

Literature & Fiction

CHEJFEC, SERGIO

Essays & Correspondence

Charco Press

Approaching his fiftieth birthday, the narrator in "My Two Worlds" is wandering in an unfamiliar Brazilian city, in search of a park. A walker by inclination and habit, he has decided to explore the city after attending a literary conference--he was invited following the publication of his most recent novel, although, as he has been informed via anonymous e-mail, the novel is not receiving good reviews. Initially thwarted by his inability to transpose the two-dimensional information of the map onto the impassable roads and dead-ends of the three-dimensional city, once he finds the park the narrator begins to see his own thoughts, reflections, and memories mirrored in the landscape of the park and its inhabitants. Chejfec's "My Two Worlds," an extraordinary meditation on experience, writing, and space, is at once descriptively inventive and preternaturally familiar, a novel that challenges the limitations of the genre.

My Two Worlds

United States

Open Letter

A 2013 Best Translated Book Award Finalist
When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator's thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.
Sergio Chejfec's The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance, and friendship by one of Argentina's modern masters.
Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. He teaches at NYU.
Heather Cleary is a translator of fiction, criticism, and poetry. In 2005, she was awarded a Translation Fund grant from the PEN American Center for her work on Oliverio Girondo.

The Planets

"Early in Sergio Chejfec's The Dark, the nameless narrator describes his disorientation when looking over a landscape as 'the vertigo of simple things.' This phrase describes the experience of reading Chejfec's novel. . . . These moments, when Chejfec combines exquisite prose with the human yearning for truth and beauty, keep us reading, weighing the novel's contradictions, sifting through the narrator's abstract reflections in search of his life’s meaning."Rain Taxi
Opening with the presently shut-in narrator reminiscing about a past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker, The Dark employs Chejfec's signature style with an emphasis on the geography and motion of the mind, to recount the time the narrator spent with this multifaceted, yet somewhat absent, woman. On their daily walks he becomes privy to the ways in which the working class functions; he studies and analyzes its structure and mindset, finding it incredibly organized, self-explanatory, and even beautiful. He repeatedly attempts to apply his 'book' knowledge to explain what he sees and wants to understand of Delia's existence, and though the difference between their social classes is initially a source of great intrigueif not obsessionhe must eventually learn that there comes a point where the boundary between observer and participant can dissolve with disarming speed.
In a voice that favors erudite distance, yet simultaneously demands intimate attention, The Dark is the most captivating example of Sergio Chejfec's unique narrative approach, and a resonant novel that calls into question the necessity, risks, and fallout behind the desire and attempt to know another person.
Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. Among his grants and prizes, he has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in 2007 and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2000. He teaches at NYU.
Heather Cleary is a translator of fiction, criticism, and poetry. In 2005, she was awarded a Translation Fund grant from the PEN American Center for her work on Oliverio Girondo.

The Dark

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Translated by Whitney DeVos. Argentine poet Samich moves from the provinces to the outskirts of Buenos Aires and decides to turn his life into a work of art. Fumbling through a world constructed of intuitions and beliefs, he has scant preparation and few firm ideas about how to do this. Nonetheless, he develops a cult following. Fiction writer and essayist Sergio Chejfec offers a series of numbered notes as an outline of Samich's thinking-in-process, investigating the pamphlet form as a "megaphone" for the dissemination of "views" bound by "a situation of existence" of a poet who "aspired to a voice permanently lowered." As if to say: by means of the pamphlet, the biography becomes the work.

Notes Toward a Pamphlet

Ugly Duckling Presse

“Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed.”
The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day’s events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour―from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator’s transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix’s stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel’s labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city’s public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions.
Each character carries within them a secret that they don’t quite understand―a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge, haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just outside our reach.

The Incompletes (Open Letter)

Literary

Fiction. Latinx Studies. Art. "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 Baroni is a real person. Baroni is a fictional character. This novel demonstrates that the two statements are not contradictory. The real person is Rafaela Baroni, a renowned popular artist who lives in a small town in the Andean foothills of Venezuela. There she devotes herself to carving wooden figures, almost always religious, to curing the sick, to predicting misfortunes, to dying. Baroni dies and returns to life: twice a year she performs her own death. The fictional character is a vague and multifaceted being who is transfigured into memory, landscape, and communal experiences. BARONI, A JOURNEY is the evolution of an ever-changing gaze, which goes from the main character to the country she inhabits, from the unknowns of popular religion to the no less mysterious conditions for artistic creation. As in all of Sergio Chejfec's books, in Baroni, a Journey the representation of thought occupies a central place in the writing. And once more, his doubts and digressions, together with the marginal beings he chooses to display, are the hallmark of a very personal style. "On first reading Chejfec, we recall many admired authors, but at a later moment--a more solid and lasting one--we realize that he resembles no one, and that he has chosen an unusual and quite distinctive path, one that reveals itself slowly because of the demanding and very personal searches the author himself carries out in his narrative." --Enrique Vila-Matas

Baroni, a Journey

Almost Island Books

Modo linterna

Contemporary

Candaya SL

Este relato es la crónica de un caminador. De paso por una ciudad del sur del Brasil, el escritor celebra haber encontrado el parque ajustado a su situación anímica; pero poco a poco irá reconociendo que son sus propias impresiones y pensamientos, no precisamente halagüeños, los que personalizan el paisaje y sus habitantes. Aquello que empezó siendo una experiencia de hiperpercepción, que aspiraba sobre todo a la exactitud y al matiz, se convierte en un arriesgado ejercicio de hiperconciencia, que oscilará entre la lucidez y el delirio. Metáfora de otros viajes y cifra del tiempo vivido, Mis dos mundos despliega desde el Sur una incisiva mirada sobre las condiciones del presente y del pasado cercano: el efecto desintegrador de la mundialización y su apuesta por los paisajes clónicos, los extrarradios sin amparo y los habitantes indeterminados, el peaje de vacío que conllevan ciertas migraciones, la convivencia urbana con las ambiguas formas de lo natural... En voz baja y de modo aproximativo, Sergio Chejfec va dibujando un cierto estado del alma (entre la decepción y el miedo, la confusión y la incertidumbre) en el que no resulta extraño reconocerse.

Mis dos mundos

Baroni : un viaje

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