For more than 90 years, the great Cynthia Ozick (New York, 1928) continued to be active, of course with centagotas, donating cents once in a while The New Yorkerbut with the plume still clean, as was usually decided, and of that shape.
Antiguedades
Cynthia Ozick
Translated by Eugenio Vázquez Nacarino. Alpha decay, 2026. 112 pages. €17.90
But on the last novel (so call it) until the end it is excellent and wonderful Antiguedades (2021), created a long story or story novelas best you like, a format created by a neo-Yorquin with mastery, as demonstrated in the most iconic title quiz: El chal (1989).
It is always fascinating to read how texts from this distance can host such fascinating reading.
Antiguedades there is no exception: in less than these pages, Ozick immerses us in a whole world that will pass away, stripped of dust and in decay, this irreversible decadence without an embargo, we will move in most of the world thanks to the universality of the story and also hecho vision, or rather suspect-elucubrary than in reality the author talks about her own world, including literature, also on the way to extinction.
Looking at a classic postmodern game of found manuscript (in this case, a post-WWII trompicon diary written by the last living graduate, an old man, of a particular elite college), Ozick follows to explain it all. a family and personal story that shifts between past and presentwhich interweaves vivid memories with eloquent reflections and gives us a character as enigmatic and fascinating as young Ben-Zion Elefantin, the sentimental catalyst for every little thing (or a lot, if you look at it) that occurs in this brilliantly imaginative narrative.
The antiquities referred to in the novel’s title are at the beginning some ancient Egyptian pieces that the narrator’s father obtained in situ, valid or invalid, which is unfortunately a question, although they are in terms of a family legacy, due to the memories that are focused on his father.
These “Antigüedades” by Cynthia Ozick could be as much literary as existential in testament
The records above are remnants from ancient times that tell us of a reality so changed by war that no one knew during his tenure at the school that brought him to life. I am de facto these fragile ones who reclaimed what little was left of the entire era. And you will find a storyteller in your life.
En este a song about decaythe decomposition that affects the way memory works, the distinct capacities of reality that are superimposed with elegance in the diary, a real parallel here with the Pauline disappearance of all generations of writers, I mean the surge in the United States in the 1960s Pynchon (88), Don DeLillo (89), Ishmael Reed (87), Annie Proulx (90) or el de la propia Ozick.
That some of them are waging war and that quite a few of them even did a great job shortly before they died (I think in Bloody Miami by Tom Wolf or The passenger de Cormac McCarthy), from which there is much to think about. I admire.
There are tasks that can be written only from the beginning of the day, they have nothing to lose for a long time and a full experience.
And so, in perspective, it is Antiguedades de Cynthia Ozick could be on her great imprint as a writer, a masterpiece of stylistic design, a testament as literary as it is existentiala work with which to send to the great, to weigh its short extension, if not because, who knows, the quizzes of the year, which comes to us a new collection of stories, and we who love it.
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