Author: Ricardo Cano Gaviria
- Fiction
- Igitur
- ISBN: 9789588319711
- Release Date: 01-01-2009
-Reviewed by: Félix Lizárraga
Walter Benjamin (1892-1949) is a German writer who (not unlike Nietzsche) amalgamated the philosophic with the literary in a supercharged, aphoristic style, and whose influential works are well known in academic and literary circles. Being Jewish and a (somewhat unorthodox) Marxist, he was forced to flee Hitler’s Germany; faced with the threat of imminent repatriation by the Spanish police, he opted for suicide. A posthumous manuscript of his reached Theodor Adorno and was published in New York two years later; it is said that he carried in his luggage another completed manuscript that has never been found.
El pasajero Walter Benjamin (Walter Benjamin, A Passenger) is a novel by Colombian author Ricardo Cano Gaviria (Medellín, 1946) who resides in Spain. In El pasajero…, Cano avowedly attempts a poetic reconstruction of Benjamin’s last days at the frontier town of Portbou. One is inevitably reminded of Hermann Broch’s gargantuan The Death of Virgil, albeit Cano’s book is fortunately much thinner at about 200 pages.
Also unlike Broch –who soon leaves behind all narrative pretenses and plunges into Virgil’s delirious visions, never to resurface—Cano alternates between a minute, somewhat sordid account of what Benjamin’s day-to-day life could have been upon his arrival at Portbou and Benjamin’s reflections and memories, with an abundance of quotations from, and allusions to, Benjamin’s own books.
Much like Broch’s monumental prose poem, though, Cano’s is the sort of book that garnishes lavish praise from critics and connoisseurs, wins literary awards (its first edition, in 1988, received the Navarra Award for Best Novel), but goes pretty much unread by most people.
