Scars
Описание книги
"The most important Argentinian writer since Borges."—The Independent[/i] Juan José Saer's Scars explores a crime committed by Luis Fiore, a thirty-nine year old laborer who shot his wife twice in the face with a shotgun; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime: a young reporter, Ángel, who lives with his mother and works the courthouse beat; a dissolute attorney who clings to life only for his nightly baccarat game; a misanthropic and dwindling judge who's creating a superfluous translation of The Picture Dorian Gray ; and, finally, Luis Fiore himself, who, on May Day, went duck hunting with his wife, daughter, and a bottle of gin. Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in time—be it a day or several months—when the lives of these characters are altered, more or less, by a singular event. Originally published in 1969, Scars marked a watershed moment in Argentinian literature and has since become a modern classic of Latin American literature. Juan José Saer[/b] was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event. Steve Dolph[/b] is the founder of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan José Saer's Scars was a finalist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award.
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PRAISE FOR
JUAN JOSÉ SAER
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Then I went back to the paper, and Tomatis said he was going somewhere or other. The print shop asked me for a headline for the weather report, which I had forgotten when I sent it in, and after turning it over a hundred times I decided on: No Change in Sight. I sent it to the shop and smoked a cigarette without anyone coming around to bother me. Then I went down to the machine room, and when the first copies came out I took one with me to the bar at the arcade. It was full of people, and when I got to the last page—with the comics and the classifieds—it was after seven-thirty. It was dark by then, and it was still raining. The neon signs reflected off the pavement, and since it was too early to go to Tomatis’s, and I had no interest in running into my mother at home, I decided to follow the first suspicious-looking guy I saw. I picked one who was dressed fashionably, with a white raincoat and an extremely fancy black umbrella that he had closed and was using as a cane. He was around thirty.
I was set up in one of the entrances to the arcade, protected from the rain falling on the sidewalk, and saw the guy coming south to north on San Martín. He stopped a second in front of the window to a shoe store and then went in the tobacconist that divides the arcade walkway in half. He bought pipe tobacco and left. I followed. He walked four blocks up San Martín and turned right toward the Plaza de Mayo, and after walking around the block he turned back onto San Martín, this time north to south, on the opposite sidewalk. I was following some forty meters back, not losing a step. In the entrance to a shop he took shelter from the rain and lit his pipe, taking three or four deep drags to make sure it was lit well. I stopped no more than two meters away, pretending to look in the window of the shop where he had stopped. When I realized that it was a lingerie shop, I turned away quickly and went ahead a few meters, but I stopped again because the guy was walking so slow that I was already ten meters ahead. I waited on the corner, and he passed next to me, stopping a second to open his black umbrella because the rain was getting heavier every second. The guy went six more blocks north to south on San Martín and then turned back, south to north again, on the opposite sidewalk. I didn’t lose a step the whole trip. He was walking so slow it was crazy. He passed by the illuminated walkway of the arcade again and at the first corner turned toward the bus station. At the entrance to the platforms he stopped, grabbed the pipe he had been chewing on the whole time, and with his mouth open gazed at the post office on the opposite sidewalk, where the windows were completely illuminated. The guy looked the building up and down, his mouth open the whole time, raising his head so high that at one point I thought he was going to fall backward. Then he went to the ticket window to Rosario and bought a fare. I went up to the window and got close enough to hear that the ticket was for the next day, at eight-ten in the morning. Then he went out onto the platforms, opened his umbrella again, crossed to the opposite sidewalk, and started walking back the way he had come. On the corner of 25 de Mayo he stopped in front of the windows of the Monte Carlo bar and looked in curiously. Apparently he didn’t see anything interesting because he turned around and kept walking north up 25 de Mayo. At the corner he closed his umbrella and went in the Palace Hotel. I went in after. The hotel lobby was incredibly bright and clean. There wasn’t a doormat, and yet there wasn’t a single muddy puddle on the floor. The guy went to the concierge desk and I followed him.
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