Vizconde de Lascano Tegui (1887–1966)
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Élégance des temps endormis (LE DILETTANTE) 1 Exemplar
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Wissenswertes
- Geburtstag
- 1887-05-19
- Todestag
- 1966-04-23
- Geschlecht
- male
- Nationalität
- Argentina
- Geburtsort
- Concepción del Uruguay, Entre Rios, Argentina
- Sterbeort
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Berufe
- writer
painter
diplomat
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The book is written in journal form, with the narrator beginning by introducing himself and his Bougival home. As a child he gained some notoriety for spotting more dead corpses floating down the Seine than anyone else, and he reveled in this morbid fame. His journal entries show his great powers of observation, and also a disquieting tendency toward the dark nooks and crannies of life. The closest thing to a recurring character is the carriage driver Raimundo, who lets the narrator join him in the front seat of his carriage and tells him stories as he makes his rounds. He tells him about a man of the church surprised by death in the bed of a mistress, and how he helped a woman condition the scene to make it appear otherwise; he also suggests that the narrator write a book in the style of a journal documenting the syphilitic life and death of Don Juan. In between occasional carriage rides, the narrator recalls and reflects on a series of female neighbors and their peculiarities, and conveys his negative and twisted view of the world that surrounds him. You get the feeling that you're reading the thoughts of a psychopath in gestation. The only time the entries stray from Bougival is a brief recollection of the narrator's service in the French armed forces in Africa. When he comes back, he's brought an illness with him.
It was one of Raimundo's stories, about sixty pages in, that fully won me over and made me realize that this book was indeed what I hoped it to be: he tells of how Marie Roger, one of the narrator's neighbors in Bougival, washed her hands of her husband when he lost his mind. He was truly crazy, and could not even remember his name, so his wife and daughter brought him out and convinced him to get into Raimundo's carriage and take a ride to the city. When they reached the city, they got off the carriage and put the man on a bench; they then alerted a policeman on patrol that there was a man who needed to be taken to the asylum, and when asked if they were of any relation to him, they said no. In this way, they were able to undo themselves of their husband and father without incurring any of the responsibilities associated with his illness. These are the sort of observations the narrator makes wherever he looks, and his descriptions of such dark scenes are quite poetic. His expressive language does remind me of some of his illustrious contemporaries, and when I turn back to his dedicatory passage, I imagine him taking these pages to people like Güiraldes and Girondo, imagining them to be kindred spirits and hoping for inclusion into their creative circle.
Again, it's hard to believe that this book was rediscovered and brought to English nearly ninety years after its publication. It belongs to a time, a place and a creative culture that fascinate me, and reading Tegui's journal is something like discovering a lost work written by Roberto Arlt during a trip to the countryside, a book that I wanted to exist but never thought did. I'd like to own a Spanish edition of this book, but I fear that I'll have to add it to my list of books that are easier to find at an affordable price in translation than in the original Spanish. Maybe I'll just have to serially check it out from the library and keep it in a special place on my bookshelf to read a few entries whenever the fancy strikes me. I am quite partial to this old, yellowed first edition, which has its fair share of peculiarities. On occasion, perhaps forgetting himself, the author slips a slight bit of French into the text, an "et" in place of "y" or something similarly minor; I wonder if future editions corrected these along with the other few dozen blatant typos that litter the text.… (mehr)