Someone criticizes the desert landscape of the peruvian coast. To me in change fascinates me. On one page a yellowish, under his letter thick and brown, Julio Ramón Ribeyro outlines dunes orange and blue skies. In December 1994, died in Lima the great storyteller peruvian. Now, a book recovers one of your hobbies less well-known: the paintings. A hundred paintings, sketches, drawings of people and landscapes that accompany many other notes unpublished —and they allow the reader to approach the work of Ribeyro from the other perspective— compose Drawings and notes (1978-1992), the peruvian Publishing Group Things presents when is the 25th anniversary of the death of the great author.
“I went to visit Him when he was in Paris, and I remember a battery of drawings that I had in the studio: watercolors, paintings, drawings..,” recalls Claudio de la Puente, peruvian ambassador in Spain, and nephew (and godson) of Ribeyro. “It shows that their sensitivity goes beyond the literature: complementing his vision with humor and irony. You only have to read some of the comments he makes to other writers, it seems that we are reading their Prose stateless persons”.
Reading on the terrace of the hotel La Brunella.
In effect, the drawings of Rybeiro are filled with dimensions, scabs and comments that seem taken from that work magna mix of journal, aphorism, and essay that are your Prose stateless persons. What old heavy!, is lee on a cover of war and Peace that draws pencil Ribeyro, on the regal effigy of a bearded Tolstoy frown.
Ribeyrólogo confessed, the ambassador put in context the importance of the writer: “At the beginning of the fifty Ribeyro writes in a article of Trade that Lima is a city without a novel, and a complaint that there is not a holistic view of the capital.” Everything would change from that decade with the emergence of the so-called Generation of the 50s: Luis Loayza, Enrique Congrains, Carlos Germán Belli… poets and storytellers who capture that moment of migration from the countryside to the capital and emergence of the middle class peruvian. “Ribeyro is dedicated to the rescue to the literature of the dispossessed”, he explains Of the Bridge. To the rescue, as he says in the prologue The word of the dumb (the anthology of short stories), “excluded from the banquet of life”. Ribeyro became, in the words of the which may pass for being the best storyteller of the next generation, the nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, “a short story writer only, that made the story a unique art and live in a unique place: at the top of the hill of excellence.”
expand photo The monte Solaro, in Capri.
The four old ladies are centuries old, arm in arm, with their fur coats, I meet again with them, he says under the picture of four women with their backs. What endearing passes to the drama: The Lady skeletal: you do not suffer from AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis or other serious disease of infectious nature (…) suffers from anorexia , that is to say, the rejection of every form of food, explains under the fine drawing of a woman that he passes in the hospital.
“it Is a book-object that has respect for the author, who keeps his spirit but at the same time allows us to get into his mind,” says Julio Ramón Ribeyro son, who was involved from the beginning in the publication of a book of drawings and notes. “A lot of times the notes that accompany the drawings are sketches not intended to be published, therefore, offer a unique view of your privacy and your way of thinking.”
Cover of the book, whose edition was sponsored by the University of Lima and the BBVA foundation.
Comments, as highlighted by Ribeyro son, in the protruding “his unique sense of humor”. Although there are also notes darker. A sample are their drawings dedicated to the island of Capri: the side of a print bright, vivid colors —I have drunk a little, only a bottle of whisky in all these days (mixed with water, or orangeade, or Coca-Cola), for the Italian wines I found to be unbearable, writes about the landscape—, the book places another later: Look good, look well all around. Well it’s not back to see more. Feeling that never I will return to Capri. Why, I wonder, in addition?, notes on a landscape, this time black, roofed with dark clouds.
“I can Only be satisfied,” he confesses his son. “I wonder if he would imagine that 25 years after his death we would be celebrating and remembering his work in this way”, he says, and recalls that the work of the author of The temptation of the failure (perhaps his masterpiece), each time translated more. There are translations into Arabic, English. The last year was translated into Polish. “I wonder if I have imagined this when I was in those cafes miserable, in those miserable hotel rooms”, apostille. “If you dream of then with the force of his work.”
Allegory of the frustration
Antonio Muñoz Molina says, speaking of Ribeyro, “the tone murmured of his style.” All around him, his countenance, his gestures, was marked by muteness or silence. In Spain, around 1994, the time of his death, were published his complete stories. Carlos Brarral not welcomed in the boom because his publisher was not publishing stories. In 1966, that Mario Vargas Llosa had said in that tone of Ribeyro: “All his stories and novels are fragments of a single allegory about the frustration fundamental of being peruvian: frustration, social, individual, cultural, psychological, and sexual”. Allegory of peruvian literature of the TWENTIETH century, based on the own Vargas Llosa to Blanca Varela, of Arguedas Bryce Echenique, which is celebrating “giving worth to the blues”. Of Bryce are some of the stories on Ribeyro. These are the featured in the FIL of Guadalajara, Mexico, after the death of his friend. Sick of cancer in a Paris hospital, Ribeyro was observed that patients who went out weight the moved to better rooms, and was filled with his clothes dinnerware full. The first book of Ribeyro appeared in France had on the cover the photograph of the brazilian João Ubaldo Ribeyro… “we Celebrate both the birth of your child that you just provide when the child had already been baptized”.
