I recently watched a documentary series called “Evil Genius” by the Duplass brothers, which tells how a group of people in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s concocted one of the most sinister forms of murder I’ve ever seen anywhere. long time. Towards the end, it becomes clear that almost all of the people involved in this terrifying design were compulsive hoarders. The series does not emphasize that: it just caught my attention. Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing something similar for years. Because what else but a cumulative disorder is building a library.
At the beginning of that construction there is a wasteland. I arrived in Buenos Aires when I was 17 years old and had no book on my back. My beloved volumes of the robin hood collectionthe six volumes of the Great Encyclopedia of Little Ones, the novels of the Emecé Great Novelists collection, and those from Seix Barral’s Masterpieces of Contemporary Literature collection, who knows why they regularly came to Patagonia at the end of the seventies, beginning of the eighties, all of that remained in the South, in my family home, as part of a life that I had decided to leave behind. Change houses, friends, career, lovers, phone numbers, haircuts, perspectives, change my name, those were my plans. People and things came to me and followed their course in a type of mobile alchemy that can be explained very well when viewed from the mythologies of the provinces. But now is not the time to talk about that now. What I am going to say is that in that initial stage of my new life, the fascination for dispossession and discarding prevailed. With one exception, because it was just setting foot in Buenos Aires and being captured by used bookstores in which I inevitably ended up in my wanderings through the city of the eighties. I bought according to the pulse of my curiosity, my desire, I had no other system. I even applied that logic to the list of books I was required to read in college, on which luckily there were many titles that intrigued me. Almost without my noticing, with each of the new moves of those times, which were so many and not always desired, not always happy, the number of baskets of books began to grow. Thus, almost without realizing it, I began to put together my own library.
I like that at the beginning there is that wandering, that curiosity, that movement. And I think that what I sometimes reject, what sometimes, when I look at these crowded rows, gives me gusts of overwhelm, is to feel a little further away from all that, is to recognize that in my library there is now also a lot of material linked to the jobs and homework. It goes by fast. It happens with great loves.
I also like that in my library these complementary, contradictory forces coexist: that of spending, that of waste, that of the book bought for pure pleasure, with that of the book associated with discipline, material survival, the demands of the world. Because it is also not true that these forces are so organized according to a linear chronology, as I have just said: it is rather cyclically that I live with them, that I deal with them. In that sense, my books are also my teachers, and I say this even though my nails melt on the keyboard for writing such a pompous phrase.
Nancy. One day, surely after one of those moves, I realized that it was time to order those books according to logic. I did it first by countries or regions of origin: English literature was what abounded. “It’s that I was born in the Commonwealth,” Miguel Brascó told me one day, fixing his tuxedo-type bow tie, and I, who barely knew him and who always preferred to speak as little as possible when interviewing someone, began to mentally guess who which place he was talking about, and I was about to conclude, based on the matte color of his skin, that he was talking about India, when he clarified that it was Patagonia. Someday someone will study how much later English cultural supremacy waned in the South.
In the next move, that organization according to the country of origin, whatever it was, no longer convinced me because it was corseted, because it was nationalistic. I went on to sort them by gender. But then it happened that I had the books arranged by literary genre while, in parallel, my search for writing was delving deeper and deeper into hybridity, mixtures, declassifications, overflows.
And these searches, we already know, not only lead us to find new materials but also to think in different ways about those that we have already read. Even if they are classic, especially if they are classic. So, every time I had to save a book according to the classification by genre that became weaker every day, I spent hours discussing with myself what were the specificities that made me think that, for example, Sarmiento’s “Facundo” could be a essay instead of a novel, or a biography; or Borges’s “Universal History of Infamy”, a series of short stories instead of a series of profiles; or “Cárcel de mujeres”, by María Carolina Geel, a novel instead of a testimonial, or an essay; or “Of elegance while sleeping”, by Vizconde Lascano Tegui, a novel instead of an intimate diary; or “Rooms”, by Emma Barrandeguy, an autobiography instead of a novel, or an urban chronicle.
And, since we already know that discussions with oneself do not exist without other voices beginning to enter, I began to read bibliographies about those books, and many others, as if to have more points of view. I’m talking about a time when doing that didn’t mean an Internet search but a trip to the National Library and its handwritten files. Storing a book in my library then became an experience of digression and a proliferation of readings that I greatly enjoyed, especially since I completed it with long walks, but which began to become tense with the so-called march of the world, with the jobs and the days. That’s when Nancy came into my life. Martín Paz, one of the most lucid archivists I know, told me about her.
From the beginning, Nancy showed me a digital archiving program that seemed supersonic to me, and convinced me that the best order I could put my books in was alphabetical. I admit that it was not so immediate: there was a season in which I felt submerged in chaos, but as the Saturdays with Nancy went by, I began to verify something that today is almost a truism: the distance and the differences between the physical and virtual world. What seemed chaotic on my shelves was organized with impeccable logic in the digital version of my library.
It was at that time that I began to pay attention to numbers. It happens that, in one of its corners, Nancy’s supersonic program is telling me exactly how many copies I have in my library. And it happens that, instead of seeming to me a mere superfluous piece of information, it activated my cumulative side. And the oracle. After a few sessions on Saturdays, I liked the number of books entered, it brought me the best omens. At the end of other sessions, on the other hand, she was left upset by the unpleasantness or restless by the omens.
One day, not so long ago, I decided that I was going to stop accumulating books when there were 5,555 copies in my library. It is more or less the amount that enters the walls of my desk, and it is also the height of the house where I was born, there in the South.
According to the supersonic file, as of today I’m not that far from that number. When I found out, I had a moment of stinging that began to dissipate as soon as I understood that this does not have to mean any limit, no end and that it does not take away any mobility from things either: it is not that I will stop adding new books to my shelves , but each new one that appears will bring out one that is already there. This time it will be an intramural conversation, let’s say. At first, at least at first, the conversation will be easy: there are several books in my library that I know shouldn’t be there. And after that beginning, in the stage that follows, there will be a season in which my library will only have books that I like or are very interested in. And then what do I know, then it doesn’t exist. (…)
-Fragment of “Certain Type of Disorder” by María Sonia Cristoff. Writer and translator, her novels are “Include me outside”, “Mal de epoch” and “Derroche” and her non-fiction books “False calm” and “Dislocated”.
-“Libraries” is the 200th book of Ediciones Godot, one of the most prestigious independent publishers. And with him he celebrates his 15 years. In “Libraries” a group of writers tell how they assembled and organized their collection of books. With texts by Selva Almada, Martín Kohan, Luis Chitarroni, Jorge Carrión and several others.
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by Maria Sonia Cristoff
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