María Teresa Andruetto: Two new books discuss the art of storytelling and literary practice.

The two new books that have just appeared by the teacher, narrator and poet from Córdoba, María Teresa Andruetto (1954), seem to dialogue with each other, creating an extremely attractive effect for any restless reader, one of those who never stops moving: that of the exposition of a theory that is then, in the following text, put into practice .

Namely: The Art of Storytelling (Fondo de Cultura Económica) exhibits a wealth of valuable ideas and complex conceptions about literature, reading and writing (we can consider it as theory), while the text entitled As if They Were Fables (Random House) brings to our retina a series of real stories – the factual in its maximum splendor – but which seem to reach in their development the summit, diffuse or apparently unreal due to the character/spirit of the events it relates, of the literary (that is to say: the decantation of what we speak in relation to practice).

Literature, as an activity that seeks everyday transcendence and always focuses on the future , is one of those disciplines that always thinks about/questions itself.

And in this sense, that of self-perception, self-analysis, and conscious attention to one's own task , Andruetto has long been demonstrating his amphibious nature: doing and thinking about what one does ; writing and questioning (first and foremost) how—and why and for whom—writing is carried out; reading and considering the ways in which these readings are carried out; intervening in one's time and questioning who is on the opposite side.

The political nature, in a broad sense of the word, not limited to the partisan but more so to the individual and his or her actions in the 21st-century polis (the streets, but also the internet), of this dual task that Andruetto has been developing is undeniable, sustained, and of remarkable persistence.

Narrative is a body that grows everywhere and is always adding new forms and layers of meaning to expand its scope. But narrative is also a body that mutates, transvestites, and develops with the passage of time ("it is always today," said Gustavo Cerati) and the rise of technology, which impacts the perception of new generations.

This is why thinking about the nature and diversity of narrative as an entity is a difficult task that must be carried out constantly. It is from this position (that is, that there is no definitive truth in this) that The art of storytelling reveals the different aspects that storytelling has to question and rethink.

Andruetto advances in blocks: narrative and the body, narrative and memory, narrative and language, narrative and women, narrative and school, narrative and translation, narrative and territory, narrative and childhood, among others.

In each of these chapters, which are texts written for very different occasions and now brought together achieve coherence, the author moves forward from the deviations .

What does this mean? That there is no straight line to lucidly contemplate the elusive nature of narrative ; that one must go backward (through history), sideways (look at contemporaries and classics), upward (stretch the canon), forward (glimpse the days to come). And all this happens on the page with prose that ranges from didactic to rigorous without ever losing its charm.

Andruetto writes on page 165, reflecting on the journey he takes in this book: “ Inventing is a potential act of resistance, a certain degree of freedom from the machinery of power. That's what great artists do, and sometimes even people do it in the most unexpected ways, so that the unthinkable can happen, to hear something more than what we already know. Good books don't respond to a global taste, and the writer is not a median term for the conscience of a country, but rather someone who tries to look at his creatures without shame and without preconceptions, and who, by looking at what is, sometimes makes us see what we wouldn't want to see.”

Film director Andrei Tarkovsky said: “I am most interested in man’s willingness to serve something higher, his refusal to conform.” And these are the words Anduretto takes and makes his own to conclude the first text of As if They Were Fables: “Soldiers.”

It is, perhaps, appropriate because it somehow sums up the impetus that lives in these stories that give off a burning question: can we humans aspire to something more than what is visible, what is palpable? Can we achieve some kind of infinity and extraordinary relevance when death is the norm?

Albert Camus, Vivian Maier, Rodolfo Walsh, Afro-Argentines, geographic dialects, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vinciane Despret, James Baldwin, the Mulita Festival of Chaco, among other names/themes that circulate throughout this book and show that the great history , those events that remain forever marked in the emotional almanacs of an era and a territory, is built on the foundations of microhistories that often go unnoticed and only writers are the ones who rescue them from that garbage can called oblivion (“Taste, aesthetics, even the basic ways of preparing a dish change over time”, p. 100).

This is the author's approach: working with brevity, combining form (texts that do not exceed 5 pages) and content (small events that give rise to great subsequent thoughts) with a style that can be that of a chronicle, but also adding the pulse of the narrator and the poet to make these moments of the past, recent and distant, a great moment of reading and reflection.

Hence, the notion of “fable” that appears in the title refers to that remainder, that residue, of thought (or perhaps “the message”) that emanates from these lives, these experiences that are told: the reader is led to think differently about this very complex present that is being lived .

Andruetto writes on page 151, in the text called “Guasca,” where he talks about the poet Franco Rivero: “There are things that can be said in one language and not in another, not because they shouldn't, but because, in the language of the first emotion, the senses unfold in a different way and reach the heart of the other in a different way.”

Andruetto has long since achieved and conquered, book by book, a personal language. Her readers (both young and old, as her career in children's literature is extraordinary) know this, and these two books confirm it. Persistence is one of the most powerful tools a writer has. And Andruetto knows how to use it.

The Art of Storytelling (Fondo de Cultura Económica) and As if They Were Fables (Random House), by María Teresa Andruetto.