Mephisto’s Waltz: Selected Short Stories by Sergio Pitol
Reviews
By Robert Rea
Sergio Pitol has been slow to catch on with English readers, despite being one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world. The Mexican author won the Cervantes Prize in 2005 and counts Roberto Bolaño and Valeria Luiselli among his fans. Mr. Pitol, who passed away last April at 85, lived to see his English debut with the massive Trilogy of Memory. Thankfully, the same publisher—Dallas-based Deep Vellum—has gone back to the Pitol well for a sampling of shorter works.
Pitol spent much of his life abroad, traveling as a diplomat for the Mexican Foreign Service. So it’s no surprise that these stories play out on an international stage. The narrator in “Westward Bound” is part of a Mexican delegation to China, where his eager-to-please hosts—or “veritable torturers,” as he calls them—shuttle him from one tourist attraction to the next, “despite his contestations that he found none of it of interest.” “Truth be told,” he notes with regret, “none of it has been real life. Where was the legendary and mysterious China? The unforgettable nights of Shanghai that young people everywhere have dreamt of?” Needless to say, his search is misguided, and though he never sees past his projections, we see how authenticity itself becomes a tourist trap.
If the book has a flaw, it’s that the career-spanning compilation throws in the kitchen sink. After a handful of fair-to-middling entries, the back end finds Pitol more adventurous than ever. “Cemetery of Thrushes,” “Mephisto’s Waltz,” “Bukhara Nocturne,” and “The Dark Twin” have super-complicated plots that are hard to pin down. A dizzying and, at times, disorienting read, yet surely this is what caused Pitol to light up an already-lit Latin scene.
Pitol’s biggest leaps forward—nesting stories inside one another, analyzing his writing like a critic, blurring the line between life and art—test the limits of what bookfolk today like to call autofiction. In “Cemetery of Thrushes,” a writer can’t seem to finish a story about growing up in Mexico. It opens with a dream in which he confronts figures from his past, then lurches through his many false starts on the page. At first we’re as lost as he is—is it a story about boyhood? a saga of family ties? a drama of haves and have-nots?—but the fits and starts aren’t quite as random as they appear. Together, the fragments add up to a broad snapshot of a time and place and, in hindsight, make the narrative gymnastics of Bolaño seem inevitable.
“The Dark Twin” begins as an essay about the relationship between a work of fiction and the author who writes it. But Pitol quickly jumps from talk of Paul Auster and Thomas Mann to a comic set piece at a lavish dinner party. “I imagine a diplomat who was also a novelist,” writes the essayist Pitol. “I would place him in Prague, a wonderful city, as is well-known. He has just spent an extended holiday in Madeira and attends a dinner at the Portuguese embassy.” What follows is a satire about the gilded circles of high-level diplomacy, before cutting back to the outer frame. Unlike a lot of writers of autofiction, Pitol avoids a straight retelling of his life by insisting on the made-upness of it all. And with that strange soup of fact and fiction, he may be on to something few have imagined yet.
Robert Rea is the deputy editor and web editor for SwR.
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