I was searching Google for some more information on a book I just read (Cortázar's 62/modelo para armar), and I came upon an exerpt of an interview with Ricardo Piglia. The interviewer is asking Piglia a question about Roberto Bolaño, and he begins by saying: "Because he always mentioned Borges, Di Benedetto, Puig and Cortázar, now some people say that he (Bolaño) was an excellent Argentine author." Familiar with three of the four cited authors, I decided to investigate the fourth. Antonio Di Benedetto was born in Mendoza, and was a journalist as well as an author. His most famous novel, Zama, is considered a classic of 20th century Argentine literature, and he also wrote many collections of short stories. Wikipedia says that he was once involved in a diplomatic dust-up when he ended a ceremonial toast at a NATO meeting with the customary Spanish words "cin cin" (clink clink), which offended the Japanese delegation (chin chin is slang for penis in Japanese, apparently). Wikipedia says that he was later prosecuted for this offense. Wikipedia also says "citation needed" after this statement, leading me to wonder if Antonio Di Benedetto was ever truly prosecuted for this offense, or if any of this ever happened at all. The Wikipedia article in Spanish contains more (and more believable) anecdotes. Di Benedetto was persecuted and tortured by the Videla regime in the 70s, and lived in exile in Spain from 1976 and 1984. While in Spain, he maintained an extensive correspondence with a young Roberto Bolaño, who later wrote a story about his epistolary relationship with Di Benedetto entitled "Santini." After his death, his fiction has been championed by Juan José Saer and many of his books have been re-published. I was intrigued (especially because I've always liked that Bolaño short story), and I went to the library and checked out his first collection of short stories, Mundo Animal.

The first story is about a man who is accused of spitting up blood, but who proceeds to explain how the blood is not blood but instead butterflies. He describes how he saw his donkey eating daisies and decided to try one himself. As he lifts the daisy to his mouth, a butterfly poses on it and he thinks, "why not this also?" as he swallows the butterfly. A second and third butterfly then voluntarily enter his mouth, perhaps in pursuit of the initial visitor. Even though they could fly back out (his mouth is open, nothing is keeping them there), they choose to descend into his heart, where they make their home and have offspring. These offspring, with the curiosity of youth, fly back up through his throat and exit through his mouth; unfortunately, raised in the darkness of his chest cavity, they are blind and flutter helplessly to the ground, where they are mistakenly interpreted as the bloody phlegm of a tubercular man. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

All of the stories contain animals, and most are as bizarre and surreal as the first. A mime has a large rat for whom he collects discarded crusts from white bread (I had forgotten about the Argentine crustless sandwiches de miga, as well as my old ponderings concerning what Buenos Aires bakeries did with all those crusts); a man travels to a land where the people don't know how to read and sells them books, teaching them to read so that they will need them. They prosecute him and condemn him to death, and a ball of millions of ants eats away his flesh, leaving him in bare bones. Unsatisfied, the town obtains another mass of flying ants, who take pity on him and carry him off to another land where there are rivers of milk and wine. He chooses milk and his flesh is replentished. He moves on to wine and eventually decides to attempt to destroy theis new land's idols, and crafts bombs to drop on their monument to the deity of music. He is once again prosecuted in this new land. In another story, a man discusses with another man the capacity of all men to commit beastly acts (perradas), like those that a dog would commit. The story then shifts to the man committing his own perrada, and then he's a dog, and getting into a fight with another dog.

A few months ago I read some books by an Ecuadorean author named Pablo Palacio, and I was impressed by how bizarre and twisted they were, and how effectively he was able to channel such strange perspectives. Reading his books reminded me of listening to Kool Keith albums when I was in high school, progressing from the slightly-deranged Keith of Ultramagnetic MCs through a series of increasingly insane alter egos (Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, Black Elvis, Clifton), using extremely rich and varied vocabulary to create raps that were different from almost all other rappers out there. I'm pleased to find the same sort of intensity and penetration into different, hallucinatory perspectives in the work of writers like Palacio and now Di Benedetto. In the case of the stories in Mundo Animal, I thought that the interplay between human and animal worlds, with characters transforming from human to animal and animals thinking as humans think, allowed for some narratives that would make Kool Keith proud. My favorite story, for instance, was about a cat who lives in a movie theater, which he patrols for rats. The cat starts expounding about how he's been learning things, and how he sees these mothers telling their children not to pet him because it might be dangerous, and he thinks about if there were cats bigger than children, and the cats had to be warned not to play with the children; then he starts talking about how he's done things, about how one of the greatest movies, one that will be discussed in arthouses of the future, was actually written and produced by him; it's his work and future generations will know nothing of this, if only he could remember the pseudonyms he used and what the movie was called...it's bizarre, but it's also exactly what I'd like to imagine my cat thinking as it sits in the corner and broods over whatever it is that cats brood over.

The other comparison I would like to make is with Salvador Dalí. I remember going to the Dalí museum in St. Petersburg when I lived in Florida, and I always thought about how I'd like to find a book that, as I read it, would provide a similar experience to browsing that collection of Dalí paintings. This may be the closest I've come. ( )