Sergio Chejfec - Combining the documentary insight of Sebald with the fanciful flights of Calvino: to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity

Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds, Trans. By Margaret B. Carson, Open Letters Books, 2011.


"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."

"Lean, thoughtful, and keenly observed, the Argentinean Chejfec's first work translated into English packs a great deal of insight into 102 pages. The narrator, an unnamed Argentinean writer, wanders a city in the south of Brazil. He is a great enthusiast of walking, going so far as to claim that it saved him, although from what he's uncertain: "maybe from the danger of not being myself... because to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity." Recently, however, the act has become less meaningful--or perhaps less mysterious--to him. He seeks out a park "too large not to have the air of abandonment which so appeals" to him. He is self-conscious, worried about being ignored, and sure he's being judged; that the judgment of others remains opaque bothers him. Of ultimate concern, finally, is that walking has stopped giving him real insights. The book he's brought with him doesn't interest him nearly as much as boats shaped like swans, the meaning of time, or any number of other observations rendered in fascinating detail. Carson's magnificent translation of Chejfec's latest work should be treated as a significant event." - Publishers Weekly

"During long walks through an unfamiliar Brazilian city, where he is attending a literary conference, an Argentine novelist free-associates on the nature of writing, memory, surroundings and human interaction.
This first novel by New York–based Argentine native Chejfec to be translated into English is a slim, gracefully discursive work. The unnamed 49-year-old writer, who we assume is very much like Chejfec, is determined to find his way to a park without the benefit of a map—an intuitive, improvisational approach that reflects his thought process. For the narrator, consciousness works like the Internet, one observance or reference point linking to another. But though his walks all begin with a sense of adventure and possibility, they quickly leave him in a state of uselessness and boredom, leading him not to revelations but a "nostalgic anxiety." Word that his new novel is getting poor reviews doesn't help his mood. For all that, the novel never hits a dull patch in reflecting on the duality of writers who exist with one foot in reality and the other in imagination. Chejfec is especially good in analyzing our relationships with simple passed-on objects such as cigarette lighters and watches, which have a penchant for "concealing the history they have witnessed, in complete silence." It's up to writers like him to make them speak. Combining the documentary insight of W.G. Sebald with the fanciful flights of Italo Calvino, the book 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.
A short but penetrating novel about coexisting in the material world and the world of thought." - Kirkus Reviews
"Lovers of prose in these image-dominated times have no greater ally than W.G. Sebald. His four books demonstrate that long works of prose – whether they're called a "long essay," a "novel," or some other descriptive not yet accepted by the gatekeepers of common discourse – remain our best means for meditating through the image-culture that assaults us daily. Sebald's most discursive book, The Rings of Saturn, demonstrates the case. Flipping though its pages one sees such seemingly unrelated phenomena as: reproductions of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson; an illustration of a quincunx drawn by Thomas Browne; an extract from some German manuscript; a pastoral image of the British coast; what appears to be a photographic negative of Somerleyton Hall and Gardens; and so on. Yet the experience of reading Sebald is not overwhelming, quite the opposite: critics praise and detract from Sebald for his slow rhythms, which stand in sharp contrast to our iPhoned days. Sebald responded to the late 20th century's turbulence with a rare, almost 19th-century repose.
The encyclopedic impetus was, of course, one of the great links of twentieth-century literature, capable of bridging the rationality of Thomas Mann and the ribald id of James Joyce. Sebald's contribution is to place the idiosyncrasy of a mere human personality on par with vast, suprahuman forces – the ancient epic myth (Ulysses) or transnational, Illuminati-like conspiracy (Pynchon) – that encyclopedia novels typically bring to organize the world's multitudes. With Sebald, one imagines the great enterprise of modernist literature reaching the end of the day, staring into the melancholy sunset, and seeing in that dimming disk and its inflected lavender clouds more truth than could be wrought from the elaborate, bureaucratic structures excreted by the humans laboring beneath them.
An astonishing moment in The Rings of Saturn comes when Sebald gives a reading of The Anatomy Lesson. After establishing that autopsies, like the one the painting depicts, are usually understood as a significant step in the transition from the darkness of medieval science to the light of Western rationalism, Sebald elegantly undercuts that theory. He invokes "the enthusiastic amateur anatomist René Descartes," said to be present at the autopsy, and tells us that "Descartes teaches that one should disregard the flesh, which is beyond our comprehension" – the consummate Enlightenment figure, so decidedly against science. After striking this discordant note, Sebald continues in the same spirit with an extraordinary reading of The Anatomy Lesson, discussing the mis-drawn hand of the cadaver at the painting's center:
Now, this hand is most peculiar. It is not only grotesquely out of proportion compared with the hand closer to us, but it is also anatomically the wrong way round: the exposed tendons, which ought to be those of the left palm, given the position of the thumb, are in fact those of the back of the right hand. In other words, what we are faced with is a transposition taken from the anatomical atlas, evidently without further reflection, that turns this otherwise true-to-life painting (if one may so express it) into a crass misrepresentation at the exact centre point of its meaning, where the incisions are made. It seems inconceivable that we are faced here with an unfortunate blunder. Rather, I believe that there was deliberate intent behind this flaw in the composition. That unshapely hand signifies the violence that has been done to Aris Kindt. It is with him, the victim, and not the Guild that gave Rembrandt his commission, that the painter identifies. His gaze alone is free of Cartesian rigidity. He alone sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man's eyes.
Identifying with a dead man is a strange enough gesture, yet it is matched in audacity by the claim that, of all the intellects there, only Rembrandt could see beyond the mind/body duality. But more yet! – that he, the artist, is the only one to see the body as human, that humanity consists of more than as what science and religion can interpret it. Per Sebald, we see it here in Rembrandt's gaze – which might just be available to anyone who looks at his painting as did Sebald.
It is this gaze, crashing through rationality as much as it crashes through the bounds of mortality, which characterizes Sebald's omnivorous books. It is a logic that speaks of subversion and revision, that makes new again a work of art made moribund by acres of erudition. It does this with the simple audacity and calm confidence of a writer who will simply point out what is standing right before him, yet to which we have all become blinded.
It is ironic that we still require writers of Sebald's caliber to gaze for us. We live in a world more obsessed with images than ever before. We are all such well-trained, persistent gazers – why do we not see these things too? With the blob-like absorption of Western culture by reproductive technologies, we are finally capable of realizing our love of all things visual. It is an affair that has been long in consummation: we might recall that, for centuries before common people could read the Bible, the key myths were communicated by art created by the greatest geniuses available to civilization. As the familiar story goes, this all changed when the printing press liberated the Word – at least for the eyes of the middle class – and then words found themselves disseminated far and wide. After a good century or two on top, print was obliterated by an even greater explosion of images, beginning with the perfection of the consumer camera.
It is remarkable that the photographic medium – which, Sebald informs us, Kafka called "monstrous" – has in less than 100 years become a ubiquitous fact of life. In addition to the camera, we live with photography's world-shaping descendants as well: television, film, and now, most of all, the Internet. They are conquerors and we live in their world; pace Kafka, what we would now find "monstrous" would be not the capacity for photography but rather the deprivation of the effortless possession of any image, whenever and wherever we want it.
The prevalence of images in our culture lends a certain flavor to the ever-present prediction of literature's death. Although predictions of prose's demise are easy enough to find throughout history, such claims in our era are distinguished by a common depiction of prose as the lumbering, pathetic recipient victim of the sleek, powerful image. In a world ruled by the economic values of speed, ease, and utility, the requirements of prose that we consume it slowly and laboriously are mere liabilities.
How strange then to find the last great writer's writer from the Twentieth Century making an intimate partnership with images. Not only did Sebald place images in his books, they also thrive with text masterfully. Even more, Sebald frequently in interviews spoke of the great importance of images to his work as an author. "I believe that writing and photography are also very intimately linked with the art of recherché," he says in one instance. "That's something that today's writers neglect for the most part." This was not just a writer who could wield a clever photo – Sebald absolutely needed photography to produce the work that he did. In addition to noting photographs' value as "aides-memoire," Sebald used a peculiar photographic metaphor to describe Kafka's writing, saying it had a "photographic" quality: "the smooth surface of Kafka's work has remained an enigma in spite of what his interpreters have managed to dredge from its depth." Sebald's texts emulate Kafka in that smoothness of surface, recalling the smooth face of a photo.
Sebald fixed his gaze on the visual so as to almost annihilate it with the textual. This gaze is the predominant aspect of his work. Sebald developed his own unique category of gaze that could only exist in print. His camera was his pen. In print, Sebald most powerfully realizes his vacuum-like stare at everything from high art to consumerist artifacts to personal snapshots and random discards. He overcomes the very images on which he bases his work, proving the necessity of text in a culture of images. Under Sebald's gaze, various phases of life are telescoped together, overlaid into a single presence. The texts resonate with a photograph's uncanny power to make a reader want to draw herself into them. Take, for instance, Sebald's description of fellow travelers waiting in the antechamber of the German consulate:
. . . among them a family of artistes who seemed to me to belong to an era that ended at least half a century ago. The head of this small troupe – for that was undoubtedly what they were – was wearing a white summer suit and extremely elegant canvas shoes with a brown leather trim. In his hands he was twirling a broad-rimmed straw hat of exquisite form, now clockwise, now anticlockwise. From the precision of his movements one knew that preparing an omelette on the high-wire, that sensational trick performed by the legendary Blondel, would have been mere child's play for this grounded tightrope-walker whose true home, one felt, was the freedom of the air. Next to him sat a remarkably Nordic-looking young woman in a tailor-made suit, she too straight out of the 1930s. She sat quite still and bolt upright, her eyes shut the whole time. Not once did I see her glance up or notice the slightest twitch of her mouth. She held her head always in the same position and not a hair was out of place in her painstaking crimped coiffure.
The details that Sebald dwells upon – the "extremely elegant canvas shoes," the "broad-rimmed canvass hat," the "tailor-made suit" the "crimped coiffure" with "not a hair out of place" – are all details one might seize upon in a snapshot. Sebald presents these particularly photographic minutiae to get beyond the surfaces of the things he observes. They are photographic, and they pull us into the scene even as they hold us at an observational remove.
I begin this essay by dwelling on Sebald's gaze because it is the best context for a reading of Argentine novelist Sergio Chejfec's novel My Two Worlds. Chejfec's publisher, Open Letter Books, has perhaps unwisely permitted this to be the first of Chejfec's twelve works to appear in English. I say unwisely because this book, Chejfec's latest in Spanish, is clearly a sort of summation and distillation of the decades of hard thought since (and undoubtedly before) he published his first book in 1990. Its daunting intelligence and clipped language create a situation of near-hermeticism that begs for some point of entrance. Whereas Spanish-language readers of Chejfec might turn to one of his earlier, surely less-perfected works, we who lack access to Chejfec's Spanish works (or cannot read them) must turn to writers to whom we do have access, such as Sebald.
Make no mistake – though Chejfec's work gains much when it is described in relation to Sebald, it is in no way derivative. Slim as it is, My Two Worlds stands on its own as a vast and complicated work of literature. The book is a substantial achievement, clearly the most interesting, original new work of literature I have read this year. The more I read this book, the more it devours me. One senses a fixed meaning at its center, but even as the book directs one's attention toward that meaning, the reader is rushed further and further toward its constantly shifting peripheries.
My Two Worlds is a dance, a seduction that draws us right up to the palpable center and then fades away to the margin, drawing one back toward that center before fading into another marginal space – back and forth, round and round. It is that same haze of thought one feels when hovering around an idea that remains unelucidatable. Yet the book is merely Chejfec's thoughts over the course of a walk. It is two hours of serpentine meditation, that same maddening dart and weave between significance and insignificance, transcendence and babble.
The best description for the book – one that might also be suitable for Sebald – is to call My Two Worlds a fragmentation of gazes. As with Sebald, mundane objects play a central role in provoking the narrator's curiosity: the action of the book gets underway when, looking at his map and preparing to make his trip to the park, the narrator becomes fixated by "the great green blotch, as I called it." On the map he sees "a small black 9 printed at the heart of the park . . . it strengthened my resolve to visit the park." These are just the type of everyday, slightly obscure details that might become the object of anyone's irrational fixation, giving the book an odd realism.
Curiosity about the mundane, of course, is a common enough quality in a writer. What distinguishes Sebald and Chejfec is how thoroughly they wed mundanities with defamiliarization, and its handmaiden, the uncanny. Sebald repeatedly demonstrates that the camera is an ideal tool for this: representations of everyday life that are at once realistic and unrealistic. Able to pause what we normally see in motion, photographs peel back motion's invisible mask, showing us familiar things in unfamiliar ways. "I always have the feeling with photographs," Sebald wrote, "that they exert a pull on the viewer and in this entirely enormous manner draw him out, so to speak, from the real world into an unreal world." Chejfec likewise shows things that are only glimpsed on the margins of experience, when the mind has wandered far from the motion of normal human life. It is this speed that he at one point terms "the lethargic scale of banal discoveries." Chejfec's perspective is like our view when, looking at The Ambassadors, our eyes slip to the skull at the bottom of the painting.
One of these banal discoveries is discussed in the middle of the book, where Chejfec relates a short anecdote about finding a watch that runs backward in a German novelty store. Performing a characteristically modern activity – measuring time – in an uncanny way, the watch exhibits a double nature that comes to embody two tendencies core to My Two Worlds. The first is like straining to hear a murmur that we could comprehend but can never quite hear; Chejfec calls it "the ambiguity and the indifference with which reality speaks as it advances in its unbridled race toward the future." It is seen in the watch's indifference as it counts off each second in its disturbing, backward manner. The second tendency that the watch contains is "that unique zone where history was linked to a zone of my own identity" – as if, looking at a photograph in a history book, we suddenly recognize an uncle years younger than we ever knew him to be. This tendency is evoked by the way the canny and the uncanny are neatly unified in the backward sweep of the watch. This backward sweep stands at the center of My Two Worlds, a book that unfolds "in real time," yet that constantly undercuts that sense of time as we normally experience it by imbricating it with uncanniness.
The strength of Chejfec's gaze on the backward watch is typical of the gaze he brings to bear throughout My Two Worlds, making each item and interaction, no matter how mass-produced and common to everyday life, feel wholly its own. This sensation of singularity is related Chejfec's special attention to the great idiosyncrasy that objects attain when they become our possessions. Discussing the backward watch, Chejfec parodies the idea of passing down such a device to his uncomprehending next of kin – who but its owner would understand what the watch means? He contrasts leaving the backwards watch with bequeathing a cigarette lighter and ivory binoculars, items that are easier to situate as new possessions and gifts.
Chejfec writes that they "offer no lessons, despite being excellent heirlooms." As opposed to the backwards watch, whatever knowledge these objects might possess will be granted by their owners. Pondering the lighter, Chejfec concludes that such objects "conceal the history they have witnessed" and that "an entire industry has sprung up around making what's silent speak." In this way Chejfec touches on a concern central to both My Two Worlds and the postmodern reality it depicts: the ways in which the gaze – and thus our memory, our comprehension – has become subject to standardization and mechanization as images and memory have entered the realm of mass production and dissemination.
In contrast to this reified, institutionalized variety of memory stands Chejfec, who gives voice to what is silent throughout My Two Worlds in a way that resists becoming too concrete. Chejfec will gaze, but his gaze will be of the kind that cannot be mass-produced. This idea is made flesh late in the novel when Chejfec admits to his obsession with the artist William Kentridge, who places into his paintings dotted lines that emanate from his subjects' eyes, representing "the gaze in the process of continuous renewal." He continues, comparing himself to one of Kentridge's subjects, saying he feels like
someone versatile set adrift in history and the course of the economy, but at the same time exaggeratedly indolent in the face of what surrounds him, things or individuals, to the point where he succumbs with no sense of shock to the consequences, at times definitive, of his actions.
As with Kentridge's subjects, Chejfec at once feels himself devouring the capitalistic world through his gaze and yet equally devoured by that world. It is this transit between the outside and the inside of this gaze from which My Two Worlds derives its title, and which Chejfec evokes as he describes his meandering through the park. We begin to wonder, Which world better represents the truth? It is an uncertainty that Chejfec magnifies by continually letting his reminisces die off just before reaching a conclusive statement of their significance.
The cumulative effect of the book's style is to make memory into a living thing: that final, unstated conclusion only exists in the act of reminiscing, and memory's transcription onto the page necessarily lacks that final element.
The past, like myself an itinerant, acted like a meander, with no precise, let alone predetermined, direction, which could absorb all our free time, or might simply leave us cold. What's more, like a sleep walker who's forgotten his dream and doesn't know whether he's awake.
My Two Worlds achieves a sort of apotheosis of defamiliarization in a pivotal scene when Chejfec narrates the terror of being gazed at by animals. Toward the end of the book he is walking along the park's lake when he notices that he has attracted a group of fish and turtles, who stare at him in rapt attention. "I found it impossible that this situation should be occurring," he writes, "and nevertheless that's what was happening." He covers his face with his hands "to hide myself," but then imagines that a human observer would mistakenly think he was "weeping." Finally, he comes up with an absurd conclusion to this experience:
I knelt before the water as a means of getting out of the situation. My plan was to lift my hands suddenly from my face and give them a scare; once they'd been frightened off I'd go on my way as if nothing had happened. But it didn't work. I waited a short while, the silence growing predictably deeper, and then all of a sudden I threw open my arms, gave a shout, leaned still farther over the water, and attempted to make a scary face. The front rows of the orchestra didn't blink, as if each one of them had been sure of what to expect. Nothing was keeping me from turning my back on them and returning to the path, but we'd established a communication, and I didn't want to be the one to put an end to it. Finally the solution came from someone also natural to the lake. First I noticed the waters roiling, and my audience as well; afterward I found out it was caused by a swan passing, though making its way relatively slowly. On board rode a father with his daughter, or so I imagined.
Although Chejfec experiences several instances of miscommunication with fellow humans in My Two Worlds, this one with animals is of a different character entirely. He goes beyond the boundaries of normal adult interaction; he treats these animals as one might a child, yet he is also threatened by them as an adult never would be by a child. This mundane void so commonly overlooked – the constant gaze of animals into our daily lives (matched in its ubiquity only by the unceasing gaze of the state) – is here made palpable by Chejfec in all its impossibility. It sits uneasily alongside the other subjectivities that dominate our daily lives – of the past and of other humans – to which we of course feel more entitled to supply answers. Chejfec does attempt to penetrate all of these subjectivities throughout My Two Worlds, but the purposely provisional, ironic nature of these depictions indicates that deep down Chejfec knows that they are all finally impossible to discern.
Chejfec uses the gaze of virtually any thing as a springboard for reflection. He links these gazes to contemplation, even writing that the light our eyes absorb when we gaze at something shows, "contemplation can itself become material." My Two Worlds generates a panoply of linked theories from this single, simple action that its narrator unceasingly performs.
It is, of course, our destiny as denizens of the postmodern world to gaze. But how often do we ask: why do we gaze? What are we really looking at? My Two Worlds is written as though the idea of the gaze had become a concrete thing, taken on its own reality, and become conscious of itself – had become capable of asking itself just these questions. And I believe Chejfec is headed somewhere with his answer.
What Sebald and Chejfec have most strongly in common is the point where their gaze leads, toward something that Kafka called the "indestructible." In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom equates this indestructible with "the spiritual center in Kafka," or, more expansively, "a personal god . . . a metaphor for one's sense of indestructibility, a sense that unifies us despite ourselves." Drawing on Kafka's aphorisms, Bloom has Kafka define the indestructible thus:
Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or more accurately, being indestructible, or more accurately, being.
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.
Sebald and Chejfec both express an undeniable belief in that indestructible element, that core, despite living in times that do everything to persuade them that only peripheries exist. Theirs is a search for truth despite the knowledge that truth is not of this world. They bravely reason their way out of Beckett's abyss with those instruments of futility, irony and ellipticism. Sebald and Chejfec's common drive toward the indestructible begin with a vague sense of discomfiture, pushing them toward a hidden aspect of themselves. They are scarcely aware of the indestructible's presence in their lives until some minor incident ruptures their calm existence, soon taking on the force of pathology. Chejfec writes of his ambitions to find "a place where a person, moved by who knows what kind of distractions, withdraws, turns into a nobody, and ends up being vague," to "discover an important book . . . that would allow me entrée into a rather difficult and half-guarded store of knowledge." This sense of becoming nobody, of being vague, of discovering the knowledge that no one thinks to guard, is to look for a realm of suggestion. Objects start to appear not seen as they usually are but rather skewed, as though seen from a tangential gaze that only strikes them in the most obscure places.
My Two Worlds can be looked at as a series of such tangential readings of everyday occurrences in the life of one postmodern subject. It is the realism of the distracted, determined mind, of those two hours we have all spent obsessing over some matter that turns everything we encounter into another aspect of it. Chejfec bravely reveals to us a world seen all askew, wherein we will gaze at everyday objects, and perhaps glimpse their invisible, indestructible core. Reading this book is an indoctrination into this logic, showing for a short time a world of Kafka's infinitely deep "smooth surfaces" – a necessary meditation in any time, and perhaps more than most in these days." - Scott Esposito

“In general, I know that when speaking of private and opposing worlds, one tends to refer to divided, sometimes even irreconcilable facets of personality or of the spirit, each with it corresponding secret value and in psychological, metaphysical, political or simply practical—even pathological—content. But in my case there was neither a moral nor existential disjunctive, what was more, I saw that my two worlds weren’t separated in an equal or reciprocal way; neither did one linger in the shadows or in private as the flip side of the other, the visible one, who knows which . . .”
Sergio Chefjec’s novel My Two Worlds is a tale that is part stream of consciousness and part self-reflection, a surfacing and resurfacing of a narrative vacillating between the outer world and the inner one. After leaving a literary conference the narrator, of whose inner and outer worlds the reader rides the waves, takes up his habit of walking while searching for a kind of contentment that has eluded him so many times before.
Reflecting on all things from street vendors and old men to the nature of emotional and philosophical inheritance (in the form of a wristwatch that ticks backward) the narrator phases out between different kinds of consciousness. Chefjec’s prose, lush with characteristic imagery, maintains its flickering style as it flows from the present circumstances to recollections of the past.
At first frustrated by his difficulty transposing a map’s two-dimensional representations to the three-dimensional world, the narrator eventually arrives at the city park he has been searching for. Coming up on another birthday and in between novels—the last of which an anonymous email tells him is doing poorly—the narrator sets out to find a sanctuary and further than that, a sense of self.
Trying to blend in and acting almost suspiciously casual, he seeks to become one of the denizens of the park, to be one of its natural and habitual citizens though it is his first time in the Brazilian city. As the narrator further weaves himself into the park’s framework—mimicking his bench partner, speculating on the nature of swans, faking familiarity in an interaction with an elderly woman—the two halves of his experience begin to come together. The reconciliation is not within the narrator’s adjustment to the park around him, but as it becomes clear in the landscape’s mirroring of his memories and impressions the narrator reconciles the gaps between his inner and outer perceptions, one no longer separate from the other.
Chefjec’s setting of the park situates his tale in a world within a world, with the quiet nature scenes and somnolent people sheltered from the city outside. In a subtle balancing act My Two Worlds conjures the art of mimicking itself and is an impressive foray into a new contemporary literary style." - Julianna Romanazzi

"Sergio Chejfec is among the most promising and distinguished of contemporary Argentine authors, though this is his first book to be translated into English, adroitly accomplished by Margaret B. Carson. It is a strange choice for a first translation, because the book is essentially a meditation on his career as a writer, and as such, a reflection that might be better understood by readers familiar with his earlier works. The tone here is one of utter exhaustion: walking toward and then around a large park in a city in the south of Brazil, the narrator ruminates on the futility of his vocation. At one point, he encounters a few fish and turtles and considers speaking to them because, he says, “the realest audience is the one that understands the least, I mean, when it flaunts its deafness, or at least a bit or resistance, when it indicates our uselessness, etc.” It is this final “etc.” that in many ways defines My Two Worlds:an etc. that suggests exhaustion, an abbreviation meant to stave off the inevitability of a longer list. In the first pages of the book we read: “By then I was dragging my feet due to fatigue and the sensation of having paced up and down the streets of the city far too long.” This “by then” actually means something like “from the very beginning.” There is nothing in the text of these first pages that lets on what, exactly, has taken place beforehand. All we know is that the narrator has been invited to give a reading, and that he has escaped the literary conference in order to set out exploring on his own, on foot. If, as the narrator says, walking is “the corporeal experience with the best syntax to accompany one in life,” then the weary, plodding language of this book, from cover to cover, is ideal sccompaniment for those readers feeling ruminative, nostalgic, or just plain tired.
Much is made in the novel of the narrator’s impending birthday. Birthdays, of course, invite reflection on the passage of time as wellas the changing nature of the world (the years come and go, and things aren’t what they used to be). Technology, for one, has begun to batter life’s perfect syntax: “The places or circumstances that have drawn my attention take the form of Internet links . . . On a walk an image will lead me into a memory or into several, and these in turn summon other memories or connected thoughts, often by chance, etc., all creating a delirious branching effect that overwhelms me and leaves me exhausted.”
In a 2009 interview with Revista de Letras, Chejfec talks about how literature is always in dialogue not only with the world but also with literature itself. And in this particular book, he nods to “The long tradition of writer-walkers . . . from Sterne all the way up to Borges, with Rousseau, Kafka, Benjamin, Pessoa, Handke, Sebald, Joyce, etc., along the way.” “Being a walker,” he goes on to say, “appears to be the condition for being a good writer” so much so that “as a trope . . . this has produced its own commonplaces. And it strikes me that it is difficult to advocate the literary walk without trying to distance oneself from those other writers.”
Is the novel intended to be another striding labor under the anxiety of influence? Chejfec’s narrator despairs and rejoices at the prospect of never being able to come out of the shadows of his literary antecedents, wallowing jubilantly in these shadows, particularly in Proust’s. And, indeed, My Two Worlds featureselegiac circumlocutions that move haltingly around the perimeters of prose traditions he can’t quite make up his mind about; if kinship with these authors promises the narrator some sort of literary uplift, he also is intent to have his own work overshadow everyone else’s. How, then, does Chejfec propose to get out from under Sterne and Borges? “To walk and nothing but” is the ruminative refrain of the book’s narrator. “Not to walk without a destination, as modern characters have been pleased to do, attentive to the novelties of chance and terrain, but instead to distant destinations, nearly unreachable or inaccessible ones, putting maps to the test.” What he wants, then, is not a series of literary intersections, but rather to attain altogether new literary paths, putting “maps,” and with them the prescriptions of genre, “to the test.”
But his narrator is too tired! Too tired to get out from under anyone! He spends many of the pages of the book trying to hide from passersby and, in occasionally dense thickets of prose, from the reader. Hiding from the reader is a constituent part—perhaps even the core—of the test he lays out before the craft he loves. As the Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo notes in her review of the original Spanish edition of My Two Worlds: “One has the impression of being in the presence of a writer who is completely free of calculation, who trusts he will find readers without going out of his way to seek them out. Impassive, Chejfec writes.” Perhaps there is something, then, to the notion of the impassive walker as a reigning trope? The narrative that goes nowhere, but in a manner so expansive that “nowhere” becomes “something new,” breaking free of the constraints of past literary forms, as in John Barth’s 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”?
Perhaps this book is less a novel than it is a “superficial archaeology,” as the narrator of My Two Worlds tells us, a tripping-over—rather than unearthing—of ephemera. As the narrator says in a particularly arresting passage:
Generally, when I walk I look down. [. . .] Walking is, in part, a kind of superficial archaeology, which I find greatly instructive and somehow moving, because it considers evidence that’s humble, irrelevant, even random—the exact opposite of a scientific investigation. […] [W]hen I walk on paths I’ve been inclined to leave behind faint, minimal marks—the proverbial initials or the name drawn in the dirt with a stick, ephemera that vanish quickly from the ground or from walls, like sodden footsteps on a rainy day or shoe prints. Not because I believe someone will decipher them in my wake, but because the action implies an innate impulse, one can only hope to leave fleeting traces.
My Two Worlds is both a resignation (a wistful sigh of a book) and an endorsement of the instinct to giving oneself over to felicitous discoveries. The narrator is passive, then, as well as impassive, stumbling along the surface of an exhausted literary life. But the etceterae of this exhaustion somehow manage to maneuver the positions of writer and reader around, like the hands of the watch the narrator sees in a German town completely rebuilt after the war to move counterclockwise, and thus achieve the counterintuitive: the reader of My Two Worlds is being challenged to follow in the narrator’s footsteps—to make something of his amblings—while the narrator himself just drags his feet. It is the reader, then, who has to carry this novel; the reader who does most of the looking backward and reflecting—all the while also advancing to the novel’s close. The reader is pulled in two directions by Chejfec’s forking prose—looking back and moving forward—and so must struggle to make progress along various tines at once. A feat, for sure, but one that may well result in a sort of remapping, a displacement and replenishment of ideas. Yet Chejfec’s notion of the “fleeting traces” of literature is proven right: the near-insurmountable challenge he poses for his reader brings about no literary sea change. The effects of the book are evanescent, even readily forgettable—arguably by design. Its tensions, while initially intriguing, cancel each other out upon final reflection. Chejfec's wandering, "humble, irrelevant, even random," is a pleasure to join along on for a few blocks; sticking with him for longer stretches risks succumbing to some of his own exhaustion." - Jennifer Croft

"There are those who would argue that a translator should avoid reading the text or author he or she is translating in the target language, to avoid contamination by exposure. I have to confess that I showed no such restraint when my copy of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds – the first of his novels to be published in English – arrived in my mailbox: I ravenously tore open the package and read the first twenty pages while standing in the doorway, finishing the rest in one sitting, as suits the compact volume. As a fellow translator of Chejfec’s work, I was not only drawn in by the narrative, but was also curious about Margaret B. Carson’s approach to the meandering yet precise reflections that define his style. Beyond the familiar word or turn of phrase that would offer the comfort of continuity (his) or solidarity (mine, with her), I wanted to get to know this other Chejfec, who emerged from the pages of the novel like one of the parallel realities he explores within it, and I’m glad that I did. Not only does he show his dexterity at weaving together observations that seem connected only by chance, My Two Worlds reveals something often overlooked in the discussion of his work: as it turns out, he has quite the sense of humor.
The plot of My Two Worlds is deceptively straightforward: a few days before his birthday, the narrator attends a conference in an unfamiliar Brazilian city; bored by the proceedings and driven by his penchant for walking (his preferred means of enacting “the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity”), he decides to go off in search of a large park located nearby. As far as the events of the narrative go, one might add that he receives word of a negative review of his last novel in the form of an anonymous email, that he gets lost and witnesses an injustice on the streets of the city, and that he eventually finds the park and takes part in a series of sometimes uncomfortable encounters with its scattered occupants. If one were to chart this path (that of the physical experiences recounted) through the novel, there would be little more to tell. But while the story, as simple as it appears to be, draws the reader along with surprising tenacity, what makes the novel so extraordinary is the way Chejfec uses the finest of brushes – reflections sparked by what might be called a sequence of mundane events – to sketch the outline of something much larger.
In many ways, it would be a diminishment to name that something; at the risk of sounding coy, the beauty and the power of My Two Worlds is the way in which the narrator’s varied reflections – like the color blocks of Kandinsky’s “Thirteen Rectangles” – hint at the depth of the space in which they interact without ever inscribing its borders. As Enrique Vila-Matas puts it in his introduction to the work, Chejfec is “one of those contemporary writers who have mastered, with utmost skill, both the art of digression and the art of narration”; though his work demands that we immerse ourselves in the deep furrows of his meditations, it rewards our diligence. Carson, for her part, has risen to the challenge of maintaining the internal tensions of the prose, allowing it to teeter on the brink of impenetrability and then dart back into the concrete, as it does in the Spanish, while negotiating the interconnected clauses that evoke the inner workings of the narrator’s mind (this is no small feat, given the grammatical differences between Spanish and English, which is much less conducive to this sort of nesting.
What impressed me most, though, about the translation – the same thing I love about the novel in Spanish – is the carefully calibrated sense of humor that runs throughout. For all the accolades Chejfec’s work has received, few mention the measured wryness that, to a greater or lesser extent, creeps into many of his books and which plays a particularly important role this novel: in many ways, it is the mooring that anchors the abstract to the human. Caught somewhere between pathos and irony, the humor that exists at the point where the commonplace meets the profound emerges at unexpected moments (the feeling of persecution sparked by a paddleboat shaped like a swan, for example) and often point directly to that larger something that, among other things, suggests the delicate balance between one’s inner and outer worlds and – in the simulacra and unbalanced but undeniable symmetries that haunt the narrative – the limits of literary representation. As is the case in many of Chejfec’s novels, underlying the narrative is an attempt to come to terms with the conditions and consequences of narration itself. Balanced deftly between Chejfec’s subtle wit and the suggestion of these larger themes, one of my favorite passages in My Two Worlds describes the receipt of the anonymous email I mentioned earlier. It’s a moment – like so many others in the novel – that resembles those floating rectangles of Kandinsky’s: as part of the foreground, it is a diminutive, self contained unit; as part of the background, a vast field of color that presses through from the depths.
The review was rather negative; it said the book was a failure whichever way you looked at it. I pondered the arguments and judged them weak. Then I responded to the sender in two lines, wrote other emails I had to send, read the news from Argentina for an unnecessarily long time, and went up to my room. In all likelihood the anonymous messenger had sought to mortify me, thinking I’d collapse or would give up literature because I’d published failed novels, or novels that aren’t novels, I don’t remember my exact thoughts. It was strange, because even though I should have been sad that someone wanted to humiliate me and had easily found the tools he believed would be useful for achieving his goal, I was above all comforted by the fact that I’d come across a person evidently worse than me, because that idea would never have occurred to anyone better." - Greg Gerke

“Approaching his fiftieth birthday, the narrator in My Two Worlds is wandering in an unfamiliar Brazilian city, in search of a park.” When I read that on the back of this book, I really couldn’t pass it up. A few of my favorite books have just such a wandering motif: Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (my review here) and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (my review here) come first to mind. I’ve also wandered my share of Brazilian cities and have loved that country’s parks. So it was with great anticipation that I sat down to read My Two Worlds (Mis dos mundos, 2008; tr. from the Spanish by Margaret B. Carson, 2011).
This is a short but slow book. I mean “slow” in a good way, though I certainly wasn’t expecting to take as much time to read it as I did. It begins as our narrator is about to turn fifty and is going to deal with it, in part, with a book:
Only a few days are left before another birthday, and if I’ve decided to begin this way it’s because two friends, through their books, made me see that these days can be a cause to reflect, to make excuses, or to justify the years lived.
He is in Brazil to attend a literary conference following the publication of his most recent book. However, he has just received an anonymous email that his book has been getting bad reviews. He’s going to deal with this by doing what he has always done: go for a walk to the park. That will offer just the right mood:
For me parks are good when first of all, they’re not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through space that’s at once alien and familiar. I don’t know if I should call them abandoned placed; what I mean is relegated areas, where surroundings are suspended for the moment and one can imagine being in any park, anywhere, even at the antipodes. A place that’s cast off, indistinct, or better yet, a place where a person, moved by who knows what kind of distractions, withdraws, turns into a nobody, and ends up being vague.
But initially his plans to walk to the park are frustrated. His map shows the roads and paths but doesn’t take into account hills, barriers, retaining walls, etc. Just when the thinks he’s closing in, he finds he’s directed another way. It’s an intriguing set up to a book that will take place almost exclusively in the park and in the narrator’s head as he sorts through a variety of thoughts, many taking him in the opposite direction. This process of switching back begins early on. The narrator loves walking, or, at least, the narrators walks; it had “become one of those addictions that can mean either ruin or salvation.” We expect him to build on this some kind of nostalgia for a heightened state of being, particularly when he comments on the pace: “it was optimal for observation and thought.” However, we may be surprised when he speaks personally and says that ”for some time now walking has been losing its meaning.”
This walk in the park, then, becomes almost the exact opposite of what we’re lead to believe (and what walking often represents in literature and life).
I allowed myself to be carried away by clichés of living ruins and well-preserved artifacts, and the experience must have left me with the kind of sensibility that is conditioned, I suppose, to search wherever I’m walking for traces of forgotten days, even when finding them is rarely worth the effort.
Our narrator, rather than searching for some heightened state of being, seems to be longing for the opposite. Throughout the book, he frequently undercuts what he’s saying with noncommittal phrasings, like a teenager saying “or whatever.” He’s no great success with people, as is particularly noticeable with women who always have and continue to ignore him: ”Something about the way I speak must cause this; it’s probable that my lack of conviction in saying even the most obvious things, or the things I most believe in, works against me at times.” Walking is a way out of himself; interestingly, he says walking has also protected him from “the danger of not being myself.” This does make sense as it explains him even as it shows him trying to get away from the past. This attempt to become “vague” or get away from the past comes up often, and the narrator explains what he thinks he’s getting at when he goes for a walk:
I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia. Nostalgic anxiety would be a state of deprivation in which one has no chance for genuine nostalgia.
He then begins to list his faults (a long list) and sums it up this way:
[I]n short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind.
To walk and nothing but.
The book and the narrator become “gloomier and more fatalistic” as it goes on, but there’s much else to it, a sense of presence and of discovery. The narrator finally finds the park, and as he wanders, considering the nature of his wandering, he’s also commenting on what he’s seeing around him (though he mostly likes to look at the ground, which give a great sense of the present). Some of my favorite parts of the book are his descriptions of the Brazilian park and what’s going on around it. In particular, when he described the men playing their multiple games — and, therefore, endless game — of dominoes, I was taken to the place and realized just how much the narrator’s ring true.
I must say that when I finished the book (it’s been a little over a month now), I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It’s meandering (obviously), sometimes feels pointless (deliberately), and takes longer than one would expect to go a such a short distance (which works perfectly with the book’s plot), and sometimes while reading the narrator discuss the Internet or his convoluted thought process I found myself drifting away from the book. But, as time has passed and I’ve had a chance to think about it more and to reread quite a bit of it, I find its power growing. This is Chejfec’s first book to be published in English. He seems to be well known in respected circles of Spanish-speaking writers, and I say let there be more! I’ll read whatever comes right when I get my hands on it — it’s that kind of slow-building power I’ve found here." - The Mookse and the Gripes

"Like the narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s novel My Two Worlds, I am an inveterate walker. Never to be confused with a hiker, city walkers are an entirely separate category who delight in the organized, the man-made, the carefully choreographed. We choose “To walk and nothing but. Not to walk without a destination, as modern characters have been pleased to do, attentive to the novelties of chance and the terrain, but instead to distant destinations, nearly unreachable or inaccessible ones, putting maps to the test.” While I have explored most of the major U.S. cities on foot – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, etc., my international resume is limited. I have never been to Brazil, yet Sergio Chejfec so thoroughly captures the essential place-ness of the park through which his narrator travels that I feel I could add it (my guess is Parque Farroupilha/A Redenção in Porto Alegre?) to my Top 10 list of best walks. Ev-er.
Because reading My Two Worlds is the literary equivalent to taking a leisurely, meandering and companionable walk with a new friend. He talks while you enjoy the scenery (sorta’ like a bad date! ). Quickly you learn that our anonymous narrator is male, an author and a few days away from turning fifty. He is shy. He is in the habit of greeting people he does not know and who do not return his greeting. He’s also a bit paranoid. We learn few specifics about his background such as that he has friends, but no children and is not currently in a romantic relationship. He talks about a niece and two nephews of whom he seems vaguely fond of (or is he just fond the idea that he is fond of them? Like some people are in love with the idea of being in love?). He tells you that his last novel is not being reviewed well, but can only cite his own dissatisfaction with his writing and a malicious email containing a link to a bad review as evidence of this.
This new friend is in the city attending a literary conference. As is his habit when traveling, he has obtained a map from the hotel front desk and carefully planned his walk the night before. He carries his writing supplies with him in a backpack. Other than his compulsion to walk he’s not particularly quirky or strange (as far as narrator’s go he’s amazingly tame). While his thoughts trend towards the philosophical and the introspective at no point did I detect self-pity. Just an underlying dissatisfaction. I do not want to give the impression that My Two Worlds is depressing – it’s not at all! Probably due to the narrator’s dry sense of humor – which pops up frequently and unexpectedly. And also because the narrator/companion/stranger is easy to like. He’s oddly endearing. Someone I find myself wanting to spend more time with than the 103 page book allows for.
As the author moves us from one section of the park to another we listen to the narrator’s opinions of himself and his surroundings. It’s a fine park – the star of the novel. It has an aviary, a fountain, a labyrinth, a lake filled with aquatic life (fish, turtles, frogs), paddle boats for rent and a little cafe with a lovely view. The writing shines in the descriptions of these landscapes. Somehow Chejfec has struck just the right note: providing enough detail to place his reader on the path beside his narrator, but avoids becoming bogged down by minutia. He beautifully recreates the sense of discovery that occurs while wandering through a well designed park – the wonder of turning a corner and stepping in front of a carefully planned perspective. The narrator is constantly projecting his emotional state onto these environments. (As we all do to a greater or lesser extent). Chejfec uses this interaction between man and terrain to explore how the interior and exterior worlds reflect each other. The narrator seems to feel he must be, or is, constantly choosing between them. What he does not realize is that they are one in the same.
As had happened several times earlier on this outing, before long I spotted a light area toward the end of the path; and when I drew closer, some ten minutes later, I glimpsed a tableau that at first disturbed me, I don’t know why: over there a good-sized, tranquil lake lay hidden, and from where I was approaching I could make out some unexpected, gigantic swans, stock-still and arrayed as if in regimental formation. As I drew nearer to the water and the scene grew better lit, I felt a mixture of wariness and wonder. Wariness owing to something quite primal, for which I realized I wasn’t prepared: simply the size of those pedal boats in the shape of swans, which one associated more with some monstrous scale than with any idea of a replica or an amusement; and wonder because of the illusion of standing before an inanimate army, but one that seemed subject to a latent vitality, ready to awaken or be activated at any moment.
Whether you approach it at a symbolic level, or go with a more superficial interpretation, My Two Worlds is a deeply satisfying read. It is easily my favorite novel of 2011. Wonderful, charming and intelligent – I believe Sergio Chejfec is a master. What I love most about this book is probably what many reviewers have found frustrating: how atypical it is of the majority of what is published by the larger houses. It is less a story than it is an experience. Because of that, and the high quality of the writing, I am impatient for more of this author’s work to be translated into English. (Note: I vaguely remember hearing at BEA that Open Letter Books, the publisher of the English translation of My Two Worlds, is planning to release a second book by Sergio Chejfec. I still need to confirm that information)." - book sexy review

"The main character of Sergio Chejfec’s third novel, we assume, is himself: a South American man leaving a literary conference and taking a walk. He’s just published a novel. It’s almost his fiftieth birthday. His writing is getting bad reviews. He’s getting lost in a strange city on purpose, without purpose, and writing about it.
Nothing happens to this guy. As soon as something does happen, a woman approaches him, a noise rustles in a bush, it dissolves into a confused analysis, a series of realizations. By the time the realizations subside the main character ends up where he started: nowhere. In short, he seems overepiphanated. This is a condition that’s like being over-caffeinated except instead of coffee, the substance abused—which must boil down to some kind of chemical in the brain—is transcendence. Some symptoms of over epiphanation include:
“feeling unequal to any kind of enthusiasm: incapable of believing almost anything, or frankly, in anything at all; disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success; suspicious of the benevolence of charity and self-improvement; oblivious of the benefits of procreation and the possibilities of biological continuity; oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle; unable to work up enthusiasm for any impracticable profession or scientific vocation; inept at arts or at crafts, at physical or manual labor, also intellectual; to sum up, useless for work in general; unfit for dreaming; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm; too shy or incompetent for an enthusiastic sex life …”
Etc. Now imagine reading a novel about a guy like this taking a walk. (Cue eye roll.) I hear what Enrique Vila-Matas is saying in his laudatory introduction when he praises this book as a revolt against what Proust calls the cinematographic parade of things, how this careful line between narration and essayistic thought where nothing happens portends the novel of the future. And I imagine that the Spanish version, translated by Margaret B. Carson, might be intriguing because the style is so spare and flat that it intelligently belies the spirit of that language. But English is something else, and this book was annoying.
Yet something about it haunts me. I was reading a Foucaultian analysis of modern philosophy and spirituality recently (as any postmodern, overepiphanated person might) and I found the following passage: “spirituality … postulates that for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself.” I wrote in the margins, “Chejfec is making fun of this. Of us.”
This made Chejfec’s book way more interesting to me: we have a tradition of thought and narrative that tells us we need to be freed from the mundane to arrive at meaningful experience. This is modern spirituality at its best. To truly be alive we have to leave behind the vulgar, everyday stuff of life and transfigure ourselves somehow, have a transcendant experience and become something other than we already are. The transcendental, we’re told, is the truth—and the truth sets us free. Chejfec’s book is annoying, definitely. Nothing happens to this overepiphanated writer. He’s just walking around, thinking somewhat esoterically. But what if this annoying character is a demonstration of how—deep down—freedom, truth, and everything modernity promised us from transcendental experience is what’s annoying? What if the result of a life lived in epiphany really just amounts to alienation from anything genuinely exciting or alive? From life itself? In this light, Chejfec’s My Two Worlds is a brilliantly crafted delineation between the living (existing) and the annoying (thinking about existing).
Of course, if you’re a fan of interesting stuff happening, don’t waste your time. But if you’re someone who gets the feeling sometimes that writing, reading, and transcendental experience might be a sham, this book is for you." - David Backer

"There is a tone of hysteria that comes into many voices when we start to talk about the influence of the Internet on our brains, on art, on literature, on the way we process information. Surely the Internet is making us all incredibly shallow, as we click from link to link, reading the first two paragraphs of each news story before escaping elsewhere. Surely this is doing irreperable damage, and the inevitable result is widespread cultural decay.
“I’m a victim…of the early days of the Internet,” the narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds tells us, “when wandering or surfing the Web was governed less by destiny or by the efficiency of search engines than it is today, and one drifted among things that were similar, irrelevant, or only loosely related.” The narrator is an unnamed writer of unknown books, and he’s in an unknown town in southern Brazil, attending an unnamed literary conference. His last book is not getting fantastic reviews, and he knows this because he’s also the victim of the latest days of the Internet, where you can instantly read what other people are saying about you in other countries, where people take spiteful glee in sending you links to bad news.
But there’s something lovely about the structure of My Two Worlds, that relates back to those early Internet days. As he walks around this town, frustrated to find that the map only loosely correlates to the actual physical landscape, he allows his brain to shift from location to location. The fountain in this Brazil park reminds him of a German fountain which reminds him of a watch he found in the window which…He’s nearing his 50th birthday, and this sort of sifting seems appropriate for the landmark, looking back on what felt like chaos but looks patterned from a distance.
The narrator stops and starts, and occasionally it’s difficult to tell if the story’s he’s telling is happening in front of him, or in another city at another time. “That touched off a long train of thought not worth summarizing,” he says at one point, shifting from one subject to another. And like a day of online reading, there is no real satisfying end, just a moment when the author decides to stop. It’s fitting that this mental meandering is happening while on a walk across a foreign city—the pace suits it, and Chejfec’s prose authentically resembles the free associations that can happen on a slow, distracted tour of a city. But it also suits the structure, as the story loops and folds rather than continuing in a linear thrust. Chejfec reminds us what browsing can remind us—it’s the journey that matters, not the destination." - Jessa Crispin


"Wordsworth wrote poems while walking. Coleridge too. Poe and Baudelaire canonized the stroll as the archetypical urban experience. Guy Debord invented the concept of the dérive, an aimless meandering through the city, and for Michel de Certeau to walk was to push back against the abstractions of maps. Rebecca Solnit wrote a whole book (Wanderlust) about the peripatetic life. Modern literature, clearly, is full of walkers.
Add to this abbreviated lineage the name Sergio Chejfec, whose novel My Two Worlds was recently published by Open Letter. In it, a man walks and thinks and not much else. As a walker, he is hesitant, mostly about his place in the unnamed and unfamiliar city in southern Brazil where he finds himself; as a thinker, he is unhindered, his thoughts pouring forth like sand through an hourglass, both dry and fluid at the same time. The connection between walking and thinking has a long history, stretching at least back to ancient Greece. Here that relationship is not harmonious or even dialectical. It seems rather akin to that of an image and its distortion, the one a poor reflection of the other.
Born in Argentina in 1956, Chejfec is the author of a dozen or so novels, of which My Two Worlds is the first to be rendered in English. To call them novels, however, is to tell a half truth. Enrique Vila-Matas, in his introduction, proposes as much. For him, Chejfec “creates artifacts, narrations, books, narrated thoughts rather than novels.” The book’s narrator admits something similar about his own literary trajectory, calling himself the author of “failed novels, or novels that aren’t novels.” That last formula seems an apt description of My Two Worlds itself; it is a novel that resists the genre’s usual trappings, veering instead in the direction of the autobiographical essay. And if in the process it fails, it does so brilliantly.
There is a connection between the centrality of walking in My Two Worlds and the ambition to write a novel that is not exactly a novel. Chejfec, it seems, aspires to evade the symbolic significance of any given incident, tracing rather an itinerary among particularities that could just as well be any other itinerary. The sight of an artificial swan making its way across a lake is nothing more than that: a flickering image registered by the narrator’s eyes. This is not to say that images like this don’t represent occasions for thought. Much to the contrary, the narrator obsessively recounts his reflections on the world around him. But even his thoughts seem not to be the expression of an interior life. They are, rather, incidental moments in the chain of events that comprises the book. My Two Worlds abounds in reflection, interiority, and consciousness, but all these seem to be strangely removed from the character of the narrator. It is as if the task of the novelist (or non-novelist) were to take thought and render it material, to be encountered in the same way that we encounter a path or a person in a park.
Another way of putting it is that My Two Worlds acts as an index. It often seems not to want to communicate or signify, but rather simply to say, this was here. This is the same thing that a fingerprint or a strand of hair tells us before the police arrive and cull the evidence into the story of a crime. And it is what footprints on a path tell us as well. Of course, humans are bad at leaving things alone in their mute materiality. We want meaning, and the narrator is no different. Which is why he looks at the ground when he walks:
Generally, when I walk I look down. The ground is one of the most revealing indicators of the present condition; it is more eloquent in its damages, its deterioration, its unevennesses, and irregularities of all sorts. I’m referring to urban as well as rural ground, difficult or congenial. And I’m specifically referring to the ground of paths, to ground altered by humans in general, because ground in the abstract, the ground of the world, speaks different, near-incomprehensible languages.
He wants the world to speak to him in the language of traces and paths. His world is the humanized world of roads and parks. Beyond it lies the silent, or rather the inscrutable, “ground of the world,” the palpitating, unrestrained earth.
Places like that are few and far between. The world is smaller than it used to be, and there are few places untouched by human hands. Chejfec is insightful on this point, and the bulk of his narrative unfolds in a park, an exemplary case of nature transformed for human purposes. In parks, the classic opposition between nature and culture reveals its emptiness. Hence the way My Two Worlds places on display the tenuous line between the natural and the artificial. Of the plastic or wooden swans floating on the lake he writes, “these artificial models seemed mysteriously alive to me, in their own fashion eloquent and mute at once.” He wonders whether the attendant also notices the “presence of a flickering or secret life in them.”
These beings that are as natural as they are artificial, as alive as they are lifeless, demand that we ask big questions. For instance, how can we humans address the environment we have irrevocably transformed, the built ecology of parks and cities, to say nothing of the atmosphere and the land? This is a central question in My Two Worlds. And it is a question that asks after the place of literature in the world, its responsibility to speak and listen. At one point the narrator humanizes an audience of fish and turtles, addressing them in an odd soliloquy:
I immediately felt united to these people, if I can call them that, since I’d never manage to know how they’d receive my words, or if my words would affect them in any way. They were, therefore, an ideal alibi, because thanks to their incomprehension I would address the world, all the species of the universe and their own materiality.
Incomprehension allows the writer to address the world, all of it. Human language, in its deceptive simplicity and infinite complexity, is not enough. What’s called for is a deeper and at once more shallow way of speaking: a language that registers, that touches surfaces without penetrating them, and that ultimately evaporates and disappears.
My Two Worlds is not written in such a language. How could it be? It is, however, a timely and ambitious volume that advances with the immense gravity of the incidental. If this description seems contradictory, it is because this book suspends the traditional opposition between the ephemeral and the weighty. Like the walker-narrator himself, it grapples with serious questions while at the same time tracing a path that, in the very act of its passage, disappears." - Craig Epplin

"My faith in reading — shattered by texting, an increasingly illiterate America, and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — has been restored by a book about a walk in the park.
Sergio Chejfec‘s My Two Worlds (Open Letter Books; 120 pages), translated by Margaret B. Carson, concerns itself with one walk in one park: a green expanse in the unnamed Brazilian town where Chefjec, a visiting Argentine academic, is attending a literary festival where he imagines himself looking “like a fugitive trying to blend in.” Consulting a map, seeing that green spot, he feels his heart race:
“For me parks are good when, first of all, they’re not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers… who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused.”
Chejfec is a walker. Not in a cardiovascular sense but for the sheer archaic thrill of wandering. Even as a child able only to walk around his own block, he already keenly “sensed that the main argument in favor of walking was its pace; it was optimal for observation and thought, and furthermore, it was the corporeal experience with the best syntax to accompany one in life. But I’m afraid I can’t be sure.”
It is passages like that, right down to their slightly affected uncertainty, that find me staring rootedly down at the pages of this volume, half-convinced that I wrote them myself. This book reads my mind. Chejfec and I are both authors, both walkers, both loners, both dreamy watchful space cadets who trust only those aspects of the world (if even those) that can be seen from sidewalks. Even a short stroll is for us a valiant pursuit of history:
“Searching through urban landscapes for traces of the past [is] a great and irresistible weakness.” Wandering a world built and rebuilt ever more soullessly, “I go looking for things that can’t be found, are basically invisible, or don’t exist.” In this strip-mall-and Big Mac world, he and I ache over the vanquishment of history by a particularly vicious present bent on first making the past look ludicrous and cruel, then erasing it without a trace.
Reaching the park, Chejfec roams its paths, gazes at its fountain, mulls the origin of species at its aviary, and suspects that the swan-shaped pedal boats in its lake are watching him with ill intent. He and I, antisocial at heart, know all too well that inanimate objects think, watch, wish and plot.
As Chejfec wanders, he wonders. Circling again and again those ever-shifting clues to the meaning of life, he speculates. Watching strangers gives him the almost holy opportunity “to glimpse the net weight of a normal life, of my life” and examine “the skein of a person’s acts, whether unnoticed, essential or absurd, which range from the unconfessable to the naïve.”
The park is real, yet it’s a stand-in for the larger world, including both heaven and earth. As in real life, now and then phantasms intrude: a seeming ghost scrambling away under a tree, carp rising to the surface of the lake when Chejfec speaks.
Watching the fountain makes him feel omniscient. He deems a palm tree “autistic.” Everything intrigues him, which is why (again) we are twin souls.
He writes the way a walker walks: gliding. Halting. Gliding again. Aimless. Absorbed. You’ve heard of slow food. Chejfec advocates, without quite saying so, slow life. At a wanderer’s pace, impressions conjure memories, philosophies, epiphanies. This book is an instructional manual for the human mind as it was when we had attention spans.
These days we are no longer permitted to wander aimlessly, except online. But even then, impressions arise not spontaneously but by corporate design, forced on us full-strength, rapid-fire by those who want our money and our minds.
All too aware of this, Chejfec yearns for “the past, when walkers felt reunited with something that was revealed only during the course of the walk. … I never discovered anything, only a vague idea of what was new and different, and fleeting at that. I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia.”
For all its perverse, profound magic, this book is not without its annoying affectations. Chejfec pocks his narrative with “or so I thought” and “at least that’s how it seems to me” so frequently that it becomes pretentious. First-person writing is tricky this way: Catchphrases quickly cross the line from spontaneity to self-indulgence.
In its last few pages, the narrative wanders off into a memory that feels irrelevant and removed — and never comes back. This too grates, until you realize that walks themselves work out that way sometimes: Reaching an anodyne or ugly destination, you ask: Why? Then you remind yourself: It’s all about the journey, all about the walk.
These days I find myself saying a lot that books are vanishing. Books like this which allow obscure authors in distant lands to detail what the world would call completely insignificant events are virtually obsolete. Yet My Two Worlds leaps into your hands like a living artifact, a refugee.
Any book that matters boils down to What’s the meaning of life? The answer almost certainly lies in long walks down dusty paths deep inside cities, there among the palms and swan-shaped pedal boats." - Anneli Rufus

Excerpt

"My Two Worlds is Sergio Chejfec’s first novel to be translated into English. In the novel, the narrator, an unnamed Argentine writer, wanders a city in the south of Brazil. He views his walk as a deeply significant act, going so far as to claim that it “saved” him, “maybe from the danger of not being myself… because to walk is to enact the illusion of autonomy and above all the myth of authenticity.” Chejfec’s narrator is a man trapped between the physical, urban reality of his surroundings, and the boundless, nebulous world of thought.
We sat down with him last week to discuss his novel—its translation, its meandering motifs, its desire to remain or disappear. What follows is a transcription of that conversation.
Guernica: I only read My Two Worlds in English, and so I don’t have much to compare it to. What did you think of the translation?
-I thought it was excellent. Margaret [B. Carson], the translator, lives in New York, and over many months we would meet up and talk about it. My questions for her were very open because translation is necessarily a flummoxed process, and, really, what’s at stake is so much more than simple, didactic or denotative meaning. The question is how to make the translation not only faithful, you know, because the meaning of the text depends on so many other things. There are other texts that need a denotative, literal, “faithful” translation, sure, if only in order to revive a certain type of tone, or vibe, that permeates the text. There are others that require more originality in order to revive this sort of range, tone. Margaret’s translation really illustrates this—she revives a tone that at times requires some instances of literal deviation from the original. It doesn’t happen very often. But she needed to access certain very difficult, very Spanish ways of saying things, she felt, because there are certain paragraphs that are argumentative, or pointed, and secretive. And she needed to find a way to access this.
Well yes, because for me the text, the literal meanings of the words are important, obviously, but the text develops in such a way that—well, for example, at one point the narrator is in the park and is watching a man who is very similar to him, that perhaps could be him in a different phase of life. And what’s important, what’s so crucial in this passage is not so much the specificity of the details, that he’s sitting on a park bench or the age of the men, for example, but instead the onda, the vibe, the connection between the two men, and what that means. Or doesn’t mean.
- Yes, yes, and because of this, I feel that Margaret captured it very well in her translation. She felt it was very important to follow the tone, the environment, and how it was very important to remain faithful to that species of interaction.
In your reading at McNally-Jackson, you spoke about this idea—the idea that the text “walks.” It meanders a bit, it strolls, it creates the tone in this way.
-Yes, definitely—and I know Margaret at first was a little apprehensive about this. She was wary of standard English, of “literary” English. She wasn’t sure how to use it—with all its stops and starts, and its specific phrasings, to “walk” in the same way the Spanish did. So she worked in anticipation of this idea, realizing that it would be crucial to capture this effect in the translation. She felt that the language had to be at once literary and conversational. But the English narration was so successful thanks to her work, her skill. Because it happens in the original as well—I’m not sure if you can speak of a native, or innate link between walking and narrating. But there’s definitely an idea of flux, right? An idea that the narration functions more than a mere description of a particular action, but as a reflection of it, too. The narration itself can be seen as an instance of a reflection, or a reflection of an instance. The elements of language that work together develop, or provide an illusion, that is partial, sort of like features on a face: at one point it’s superficial, a surface reality, but at the same time they work to convey something of greater depth. Anyway, the idea was to do away with the idea of a fixed “thesis” or “argument” and instead let the argument unfold, meander. There is, again, this idea of flux, of flow.
One is often betrayed by the city, right? There is a strong desire to come into contact with the environment, even though it may never truly happen.
Can you talk a little bit about the text as a sort of index of the walker, of the very act of walking? Because I feel like the text proposes a certain idea of the novel. At one point, it says that the narrator writes “novels that aren’t novels,” and in your own writings and in this novel especially, you speak about the idea of the index, a raw impression, of not losing oneself in abstractions or symbols.
- Novels with a “thesis” don’t interest me. They just don’t—novels that want to “show” something, that want to “argue” something specific. I don’t read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. I believe that literature needs to be a machine of illusions. What’s more, in this case, in the case of My Two Worlds—the walk is a trope that permits the illusion of superficiality, the illusion that the narrator is exposed to, and is thus experiencing, all sorts of things on the surface. But then must interpret them then in flux with his own impressions, illusions, emotions. Motives.
We might compare it to a fingerprint—a direct mark that doesn’t have a symbolic level, doesn’t have abstraction.
- The walk is like a matrix, like a diffuse, vague happening. It’s like—imagine a play, a work of theatre, that is totally vague, almost devoid of details that consists in one person going on a walk. And as a consequence, there is a necessary tension between the determinacy and indeterminacy, the definite and the indefinite, of possibility. And at one point I felt a tension between objects, their real, physical lives, and the idea of meaning: the physical, material reality of a book, and the totally intangible experience of reading it. A word, and all the infinite fluctuations it may possess. Like that moment when you know you have something to say, and you know you're speaking, even, but you still have no idea how you will say it. Or the moment when, as a reader, you’re reading, and you are understanding what you are reading, but still have utterly no idea what will come next for you, what precisely the author wants to say. For me, that is the ultimate level of literary depth, of literary density. Like when you pick up a book and you don’t realize what type of text it is—it could be an essay, a novel, a biography—and at one point you realize you don’t know where, as a reader, you want to be. Where are you going with this text? What is the goal? How are you supposed to interpret what you're reading? And people’s responses vary—some dislike it, and are put off by the confusion, the lack of comprehension. But at times, there can be pleasure in it. I wanted to find a sort of equilibrium between this indeterminacy and structure, expectancy. That’s what I wanted to do with My Two Worlds. It was an excuse for me to play with various things, talk through various thought processes, and use the medium of the park as a way to access them.
And I was thinking—for example, in the novel there are two distinct levels, two worlds as the title suggests—two worlds within the narrator. One, is his surroundings, of course, but also his thoughts and reflections within them. I was thinking, for example: are the specific details even important? Is it important that the narrator is in Brazil? That he’s attending a literary conference? That he’s a man? Is it for a frame of literary reference? Which level is more important—his reflections, his inner life, or the fact of his surroundings?
- Look, I don’t even know—for me, it’s difficult to decide which is more important—the things or the thoughts. It seems to me that certain things came up more or less naturally. For example, the fact that he’s a writer is important, right? Because the novel is built on a level of self-reflection, thoughts about his work, his words, the writing process. It permits him the ability to divulge. But also his work, writing, is very intimate, secretive, clandestine. The fact that the novel takes place in Brazil, well, apart than the fact that Brazil is a very huge place in Latin America, it’s a place of difference, both culturally and linguistically, on the South American continent. In that regard, it’s a country that is immense, physically and otherwise, that carries a multitude of meanings, of truths. It is a country that is more than a country. In other words, the choice to set it in Brazil was deliberate, but maybe not important. It wasn’t chosen randomly. Because with Brazil, one can feel that strangeness, the feeling of distance that the narrator feels in regards to the city. He’s divided by a language barrier, within a country where he feels sort of alien, even while remaining in Latin America. I wanted to capture this. I had no intention of using Brazil as a way to make any sort of political commentary. I wanted to point to a much more general, a more literary sense of difference, of strangeness.
Building on that, I was thinking about this question of determinacy, because to walk alone in a foreign country is to be open to surprise. And chance. It seems like that perhaps this is the experience of the narrator, which made me think of artists that work with this concept of chance—John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, who work with that species of unpredictability. How did you come to this sort of narrator, one whose journey is fueled by indeterminacy?
- What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing. Not to say that the process assumes anything of “greater” or “lesser” importance, though: it’s just more graphic information. Take the surrealists, for example, or a work by Cage. For me, there’s a great value in doing this with literature. There’s a certain form of dependence; process and product inform each other, depend on each other. I consider myself a writer who doesn’t write with a style, almost. I begin with tension, with a vibe, a character. In My Two Worlds, the narrator's walk is a form of mobility that one can compare to a trip, which is, for literature, is a commonly used form of character mobility and development. It creates displacement. The walk is a way to focus on this. Because to walk through the city also, I think that it’s a way to walk, to be a flâneur, and a way for the character—and the reader—to lose himself or herself. All walkers are consumed by their own literature, their own cultural history, the capitalist or urban economy. Thus I find as a way to write, it is a way to access the same urge as the contemporary, urban walker—the urge to know, to see that type of frustration, of weariness, of unease, of deception. Because the city promises you many, many things, but in reality is doing no more than showing you their possibility. Because the time has already passed in which the city was machine, a factory of revelations, of self-awareness. One is often betrayed by the city, right? There is a strong desire to come into contact with the environment, even though it may never truly happen.
Does the narrator have a name?
- No, it isn’t mentioned.
Other than Brazil, there is a noticeable lack of proper nouns.
- There’s also the name of a South African artist in there, but, really, not many proper names. I wanted to work with as few proper nouns as possible—like what we spoke about earlier, there’s a sort of indeterminacy I wanted to uphold. There aren’t incidental proper nouns: I used them purposefully to identify people or characters or places, and thus convey all the sensations that may accompany those associations. It’s like what we spoke about before: there exists this dialectic between determinacy and indeterminacy. Sometimes I like to have narratives that are completely indeterminate, characters that could, really, be anyone, and thus leave the reader more open to that experience. But then again, when I use a name or place, I want to leave the reader open to the waterfall of determinacy that it may provoke. And I don’t know, but I must mention the name Borges. I try to mention it in every one of my works. It's a mark, a stamp, a sort of homage to Argentinidad. But it's an homage that works through pat phrases, those stock images that populate his work: the night, labyrinths, libraries. That is, I don’t want simply to pay homage to Borges, but rather the contrary: to recall his commonplaces.
My Two Worlds is a text that has no desire to remain, to leave a trace. I want readers to remember these scenes, those shifting environments, as one limitless thought.
Something else I noted in the text, something that interested me, was the narrator’s experience with nonhuman things, and things that are untraceable. You mention well-trodden paths that have been walked countless times by other human beings. And at one point you say “the ground of the world speaks different, near-incomprehensible languages.” Could you talk about instances like this, instances your narrator experiences that don’t belong to the realm of human experience?
- Yes, for me, this speaks to the stuff of life, the unnatural stuff of life, which is quite distinct from the life of nature. One must distance oneself from the idea of strict realism. It seems to me that real nature doesn’t exist anymore, this idea of “the wild.” This is why I love parks, and why I chose to use them in my work—they are beyond nature. I see nature as a resource. We can speak of politics, ethics, and in this way, speak about the world. But at the same time, it’s always in a way that is totally nebulous and abstracted, this way of thinking about reality. And that’s why I write the way I do—it’s an almost immortal way to show dependence on the biological, the political, the moral parts of us. I say immortal because we now have to find new formats, new eloquences, and resolve within ourselves this “constructed” life, a life that is incomplete, imperfect. I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It’s similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don’t like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you’re not speaking about real things. There’s a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.
And after Don Quixote, it’s impossible anyway, right?
- Yes, yes. For me, it’s a way to find a fiction within a fiction. To find a way to uncover that blunder within the “lie,” because when you look closer, every “lie”—and I say that with quotation marks—can be much more complicated. Because that is what fiction is: it’s probably the least important thing in the world. It’s rich, but it is put-on, it passes the time. It borrows from the world, but it does not invent it.
With the Internet, it’s possible to arrive immediately at what you’re looking for. At one moment in the text you mention the old days, when you had to browse in order to find what you wanted.
- Yes, this may have been before your time, the nineties, there was a primitive sort of Internet, and there weren’t good search engines. So there was this search, a quite literal “search”—you had to search through many, many things. Now, search engines are more streamlined, more pointed—you find things without that long, capricious quest. And this, I think, produces a bit of nostalgia that makes the user—all of us, now—less open to chance. To the idea of chance. It used to depend on the concept of imperfection. But in reality, in the early days of the Internet, the word “navigation” had this ingrained in it. There really was a sensation of the cyber-flâneur, as you really would have no idea where you would end up. You would end up on pages that had nothing to do with what you wanted, experiences that were totally unanticipated. You had to connect the dots, connect the parcels of your experience. It was totally open to randomness. And now, thanks to Google and other search engines, things are more perfect. There’s less surprise, more efficiency. But I think to use this word “navigation” is a way give this metaphor to this experience. But I like to compare the first experiences of the Internet—the fortuitousness, the chance—with reality, with the experience, for example, of being in a city that you don’t know. Many times—and I don’t know if I can totally defend this argument—I’ve found that the way one experiences the world, and daily life, we are constantly dealing with these perceptions. And it seems like it works, this superficial perception of determinacy, but it’s completely ridiculous. And that’s what one must do—navigate between what works well and what is ridiculous. Like when you click on something in a search online—you filter out the ridiculous, to make room for the sane. And with literature, one finds a way to communicate both. That’s why it can be so productive.
One final question about traces, because those early days of navigation left traces, a path. It seems to me that in the novel, there’s a tendency to speak of leaving traces intentionally, or reclaiming lost ones. When you talk about the German city that was destroyed in a bombing and then rebuilt to resemble its old self it seems there’s a sort of virtue in that, in leaving or discovering a trace.
- For me, it’s a type of nostalgia. Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There’s an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It’s a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text. And it’s present throughout the novel. My Two Worlds is a text that has no desire to remain, to leave a trace. I want readers to remember these scenes, those shifting environments, as one limitless thought. I don’t care about having a thesis." - Interview by Carmen García Durazo and Craig Epplin

Sergio Chejfec, The Planets, Trans. by Heather Cleary, Open Letters Books, 2012.

"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."

“A novel that is both unique and opportune.” —Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill

“Without a doubt, Chejfec deserves greater recognition. My Two Worlds paves the way for the novel of the future.” —Enrique Vila-Matas

“Lean, thoughtful, and keenly observed, Chejfec’s first work translated into English packs a great deal of insight.” —Publishers Weekly



Sergio Chejfec, The Dark, Trans. by Heather Cleary, Open Letters Books, 2013.

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 intrigue—if not obsession—he 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. 


Much of the response to Sergio Chejfec’s English-language debut, My Two Worlds, published in 2011 by Open Letter, placed him squarely in a Sebaldian camp. The narrator is on a walk, reminiscing both on his past and the historical past of the landscape around him, and it is a novel of a consciousness, of the interior of a single “I.” Although a grounding comparison for that novel, it does a reader little kindness for his most recent book, The Dark. As I read, I did think of Sebald and other authors, other types of novels, and tried to find that grounding—a language, a basic reading to build off. Each comparison got me lost. Any attempt to use them puts us on a stray path. The text demands we abandon those comparisons and learn how to read this specific novel. That alone is a rarity and, for me, a reading experience worth the effort.
This is a novel entirely of the interior—a solipsistic narrator, isolated and writing alone in a room, recounting his relationship with a past love. We have access only to his thoughts and, more particularly, his perception, which we are trapped in. This in itself is nothing new; the recognition of constant subjectivity is old hat, but the absolute consistency of it is the challenge here. “The dark” of the title is everything he does not care to concern himself with, and nearly the only way it expands is through an object of love, Delia. No other character in the novel receives a name, and of the other ones we meet, their stories are always connected with Delia, allowing the nameless narrator to expound further on her existence, the meaning of it.
In his opening lines, Chejfec’s narrator tells us that “It has always unsettled me that geography does not change with time, with the changes that take place within it, within us.” With one stroke, we have the strange tone that will permeate the book. He is an unsettled man, only at ease in the carefully crafted idyllic memories of his past with Delia, and even those are darkly shadowed by the events—the full truth of which is hidden for most of the novel—that lead to his abandonment of her. Even as she is his only way outside of himself, that way is narrow. And we have his confusion: immediately after denying that geography does not change with time, he perceives changes within it as indiscernible from the interior of himself.
This narrator is one of those infamous unreliable ones, but not as a game where you strive to perceive the truth of events—here it can be hauntingly obvious—nor is he not a cleverly withholding narrator confident in his ability to outsmart the reader. He often contradicts himself, at one point refuting novels that use a character’s clothing to define or reveal them, then later, telling us what Delia’s worker uniform says about her. But Chejfec so carefully organizes the order of thoughts leading up to the contradiction that you are reminded that if you let anyone ramble long enough, and pay close enough attention, they will always reach new conclusions that contradict past ones. When thoughts wander across consciousness as across a landscape and then approached from a different angle, that landscape can appear wholly different than at its last sighting. By making the thought process careful, considered, and something the reader must be pulled along by, Chejfec brings a certain fragility to his narrator, even while he remains vaguely menacing, asking for understanding.
To find this understanding, we must allow ourselves to be pulled into the flow of the novel, to follow the narrator wherever he goes. Yet to not be lost in his confusion, in that unsettled state he lives in, we must remain outside of him. It is a careful balance between being removed at just the right distance, not too far, not too close, to find ways of understanding, to see what he wants us to see, and to see what to him is just the dark. It is a great testament to the skills of translator Heather Cleary that this complex flow is clear in English. She needs to find an even tighter balance and must both give over to the flow of the narrator’s lost, but full of beauty and insight, consciousness, while maintaining enough control to bring it to another language. It is no surprise that her translation of Chejfec’s previous novel, The Planets, was a finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, and The Dark should be another strong contender. This area of borders, of insides and outsides, of knowing but not knowing, is where reading The Dark can come to thrilling life, and it is something Chejfec, and his narrator, through Delia, is aware of: “Now she knew what the object was, but still wondered what its name could be. This renewed ignorance doubled the mystery and increased her fascination.” Or: “Delia also had to perform an archaic task: that of monitoring, though some of the processes and most of the details were beyond her.” Stepping outside, after letting ourselves in, is the best way to process and interpret.
This meandering of the narrator’s writing—and he does carefully express himself as writing, focusing on the physical meaning of the act—is reflected in it being also a novel of walking. He and his lost love Delia spend their evenings together doing little more than walking. The land they walk through is almost entirely empty, and even named the Barrens. The whole physical world of the novel seems to be a void: “The immensity of the territory stretched out before us, an apparently limitless expanse flecked with clusters of shrubs, scattered houses, and gentle slopes. It wasn’t just the size of the surface that gave this sensation: one saw it this way because of its homogeneity, the vertigo of simple things.” There is the factory Delia works at, the area the narrator lives in, those few scattered houses, and the Barrens, with the single shed the two make love in. The workers in the factory are clearly impoverished, borrowing clothes from each other, borrowing money in order to buy soap, so it is possible to interpret this emptiness, the dirt roads, the houses built of whatever abandoned materials can be found as utter, abject poverty. But this doesn’t find grounding. Even trash is rare here.
We are either challenged to imagine a world where there is nothing, where the factory and its workers are almost isolated Platonic originals, or that this is a world of sparseness because it is the narrator’s perception. There is nearly a complete lack of color used to describe the setting (finishing the book, I thought there may be none, but a skimming review found “yellow paper” and black). The description of the landscape is often so minimal that it is easy to envision the set of a play—a few scattered objects, a black backdrop, and two actors walking amongst them, in near silence, with one occasionally pausing, stopping the action, to narrate—a sense confirmed when a character enters “as though she were stepping onstage.”
When the narrator does allow the landscape to enter in from the dark, it mostly comes in abstractions: “Everything built is the promise of a future ruin, even new constructions. We live surrounded by debris; living in a house means inhabiting a ruin—and I don’t mean this only in a literal sense.” Within this the narrator is not only giving his sense of the world he walks through, but also the way that time, and the movements of time permeate the landscape, and throughout his mind, in a way that is almost physical. The newly built house already has its ruin present in it, and the ruin of a house can still reveal its early construction.
The movement of time is endless and endlessly unsettled. There is no straight line from past to present to future. The narrator is unable to settle in the present. Even in recollecting his memories, he does not settle in, but moves again to the future or to a deeper past. This isn’t reflected only in his stated thoughts, but the structure of the narrative. Amongst his many repetitions is the promise to tell a story later on or to describe something: “Later, I suppose, I’ll describe Delia’s scent.” He keeps to these promises, and is also keen to remind us when a point is returned to. He does not want to express himself inaccurately, does not want to be misunderstood, even as we often see more than he wants us to.
This movement both reveals and conceals, though the concealment cannot last. It comes when the narrator slips a shade over a moment or a thought and moves on. It inevitably reoccurs however, or is glimpsed fleetingly, and clarity can be found. Objects are also signs for the narrator, meant to be interpreted, and they too can move and reveal. While standing outside the factory yard, watching Delia from afar, he describes how she rolls down her sleeves, kept up for the workday, and “In the contrast between the protected and the exposed fabric, one could imagine the time she spent at the machines.”A borderland demarking one piece of fabric from itself creates a full scene of space and time. It is in these touches that the brilliance of Chejfec shines, the complexity of ideas is present not just in the direct philosophizing of the narrator, not just in the structure of the book, but in the details.
It is a testament to the depth of this book, and Chejfec’s control over its complexity, that he is able to smuggle into the narrator’s obsession with Delia a commentary on the working class. The only workers we see are factory workers, poor factory workers who know nothing but work and production. We never find out what they produce, only that they exist to do so. The narrator holds up a strange belief, seemingly inverting the Marxist ideas of workers and their connection to work, and making it instead an ideal: “it was only through participating in and leaving his mark on production at the machine that he found a tenuous, but profound, justification for his existence.” Later though, in one of the rare moments of stripped of abstraction, he reaches an alternative conclusion:

After isolating, evaluating, and determining what profit could be drawn from them, it hired them, consumed them, and returned them to a life of repetitive actions. One word gives a particularly good sense of it: ‘exploitation,’ hiring someone in order to squeeze every last drop from them.

By keeping the factory workers so minimal throughout, the product not described, a company never mentioned, they become representative, not of factory workers, but of the vast 99%, workers of all types in a culture of debt, with no retirement in sight, detached from all relation to their work, but reliant on it. This trick, the minimal expanding to the maximal by giving the reader the room to do so, is a wonderful one, and it is managed silently, behind the scenes of the narrator’s consciousness.
Silence is essential to The Dark and the silence that encompasses Delia and the narrator’s walks is central to their relationship. At first, it is his silence, “As with other mysteries from which one can only retreat, it never occurred to me to ask her questions about the strange quality of her skin,” but later on, “Upon finding herself exposed, generally after reacting to something, Delia would close herself off inside a delicate silence tinged with anticipation, like the moment before glass breaks or the hunter attacks.” In fact, throughout the novel, Delia becomes more and more like the narrator. The similarity between the two is essential to him; it is what lets him love her to such desperate degree. It is the only thing that lets her enter his closed off world and expand it. But we only know they are similar through him, his perception.
From the beginning, the narrator admits that Delia is young, and nothing is said about his age. Her age is never specified, and he is not out to suppress it, but there is a sense of shame, of hesitancy to admit. Eventually, while trying to evoke a photo taken of the two, needing to step outside both of them to describe the scene, he admits that they would be perceived as father and daughter. In the interior of his mind though, this is not how she is perceived. His evocations of her are not pedophilic or even necessarily evocative of youth. Returning to his promise to describe her scent: “There was the scent of her body, of course, the most astounding I’ve ever known: to say that hers was an animal scent would hardly express it; it blended the smell of a beast in the wild with the sweat of a hard day’s work.” Unless he lets her go into the dark, he can only express her as he perceived her, and needs to continue perceiving her to protect himself.
He is not out to control our perception of him or Delia. This is not a narrator with the historical authority that Sebald resonates, or the absolute confidence of a Nabokovian narrator. He is a weaker, possibly pitiable, man who in the middle of attempting to put forth a belief with conviction can falter:

Anyway, as I was saying, on those walks through the outlying neighborhoods I confirmed that nature holds greater sway in the dark, just as beauty does. If we employed all our senses, we could hear the crackle of ants marching across the ground, the way the smell of food, indicated what was being cooked inside the invisible houses. I don’t know.

Chejfec trusts the reader to be able to see through the narrator, and lets the narrator admit enough—such as with the hint of threat that surrounds Delia’s silence but not his own—so that we can find glimmers of light that let us create a perspective just outside of the narrator’s interior. The narrator cannot help but reveal this. One of his most repeated phrases is “I’ve read many novels . . .” which he uses to compare to his situation, as something his life can defy or to help prove a point. However, these novels are never named, and they become a flailing, a desperation for support, and it can be heartbreaking, as when, while defending his leaving Delia, he tells us “Though this is no excuse, it there should be an excuse at all, the way we learn about something inspires our reaction, whatever the facts may be. I’ve read many novels in which this happens.” Here it is a plea, begging us to let him off the hook because of something he came across in a novel.

In the end, even without Delia, without his access to another world, the narrator continues his walking: “This is the room I walk around every day. Before, Delia and I used to walk through the city and its surroundings; now I keep to these four walls.” And as he walks in the dark, he also writes in the dark, putting his words down on paper he can’t see, letting it “immediately break free.” Through this writing, he is desperate to break through himself. The Dark is a confessional by someone unable to confess. He is aware of the suffering he put on the girl he loved by abandoning her, by the cruelty of his actions leading up to the abandonment and their aftermath, and unable to hide his cruelty from us. But he cannot take responsibility either, it is yet another thing that is outside of him. The minute he wounds Delia, she must become part of the dark, because if she remains as the reflection of his own thoughts, that wound would become his too. - P. T. Smith

excerpt:
The train had stopped at a remote station. The platform was stone gray with a faded white border, the remnants of a coat of whitewash. The building gave the impression of being low to the ground; the shabbiness of its walls seemed to reduce its height. While she waited, Delia’s friend had ample time to study the platform, which could only hold two cars. The sun set unimpeded, and the few trees that flanked the building caught no light. Their green was starting to fade; they’ve lost their strength, she thought. If someone had suddenly caught a glimpse of the scene they would have thought it had been staged: a girl standing at the window of a train car, looking out. Delia’s friend was distracted by shapeless ideas that were replaced by others before they could be fully formed, or which returned unexpectedly after having been left incomplete. She thought, for example, about how the train’s shadow disregards the tracks. The silhouette of the cars rests on the station floor, sketching out a step as it climbs the platform and continues, uninterrupted, before descending into the wild on the other side. This fact, the forceful contour of a shadow, left Delia’s friend deep in thought for a long time. She sensed that nature tended to be arbitrary, but preferred to reveal itself with caution. Her experience back home had taught her this, and the events that followed—like the dull sun above her, the silence of the station—and the things around her—arranged precisely to appear and break her attention—only confirmed it. She thought: “It’s not so bad, being alone,” or something like that. She was looking out the window and repeating this idea until something startled her: someone was watching her from nearby. She felt she was in danger, but her fear quickly subsided. She was pleased that she had caught the eye of a stranger: at least one thing in this overwhelming, though static, situation was directed at her. Later, she would remember the man’s steps as he approached, without being able to assign them any particular tempo: they were either innumerable or too few, but never the two things at once. She was confused, unsure what her reaction should be, when something else unsettled her even more: the stranger was carrying a small photo, from which he didn’t lift his eyes. She thought she heard a noise, maybe they were hitching another car to the train. The man finally reached her and stood in silence. A silence that said little, but which had the unmistakable eloquence of anticipation.

Delia’s friend didn’t know what to do; from the window she could see the faint shadow of the car, the even line of the roof. Just like trains in stations, people leave traces on one another that almost immediately fade away. The thought appealed to her, since she wanted the man to be gone as quickly as possible. She suddenly remembered stories she’d heard; the people from her neighborhood, all of whom were poor, tended to believe in miraculous scenarios in which millionaires unexpectedly find a long-lost daughter living in anonymity and neglect. Her mind raced, it seemed impossible to focus on the urgent thoughts that filled it. The man finally spoke, though it was only to ask her name. Delia’s friend did not know how to answer something so simple. All questions are difficult, but familiar ones are especially problematic. They involve an act of memory, like when an adult calculates his age based on what year it is. In the end, as she said her name, she realized—though she had been aware of this all along—that she was moving farther and farther from home. She knew that her response, though true, broke a bond that had been strong until that moment. The man, for his part, didn’t believe what he’d heard; “It can’t be,” he said, as he turned the photo around so she could see it. Delia’s friend grimaced. Her solitude had been ambushed at the flank where we are all most vulnerable. She saw her own image in the photo, recognized each of her features from the memory, for example, of her fingers touching her face. She repeated to herself that it was impossible, and wondered what the outcome of this adventure might be. In her innocence she thought that if she had lied, none of this would have happened, that the coincidence lay not between the image and her face, but between herself and her name. It should be said that the matter was never resolved. She immediately discovered a new problem that only made the situation worse: there was another difference, which, although it affected the physical resemblance, also emphasized it. The tone of their skin was not the same. Though this was obvious, the stranger did not notice. For Delia’s friend, seeing herself with different skin meant being transported: not to a future or a past, but to a simultaneous, contiguous time.
Later, repeating the story in Delia’s presence, the friend added that the photograph the man had been carrying was actually of a painting, an oval-shaped portrait with a dark background and a fake gold frame. What she had first imagined to be the photograph of a person, as true as a legal document, became a drawing that dissolved into an unimaginable series of mediations. A turn of the screw, she said in different words, that complicated things further still. Because if the evidentiary proof, as they say, was a painting, the model was less important than the hand that had given her form. It seemed that the artist, whether he was right or wrong, had created a patient prophecy: the encounter with the model would eventually take place; the time and distance that needed to be crossed before this occurred were secondary. And so the episode was fixed in Delia’s friend’s past against a backdrop of confusion. It could not be said that she had forgotten it, but the mystery, which still left her anxious and often on the verge of tears, was such that she did not want to remember.