Cristina Peri Rossi, Cervantes Prize 2021

It is rare to remember that the Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi is 80 years old. "La

" was nicknamed by the poet Ángel Rama in his first years of career and the joke today sounds like an invitation to the island of lost children.

... the themes that mark Peri Rossi's almost 60 years of literature are those of a young writer. Today, the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious of letters in Spanish, has chosen the author of 'The abandoned museums' as a way to rejuvenate her record.

The choice of Peri Rossi also comes at a time when his figure seemed an almost forgotten obsession for many readers. Peri Rossi, away from the media in which she wrote since the 1960s, has published her latest books on two Palencia stamps, Less Quarter and Cálamo.

, its most recent title (it appeared in 2020) is

and that serve as a guide to understand her life and work.

A summary: Cristina Peri Rossi was born into a working-class family in which Genoese and Spanish emigrants mixed. His father was an elusive and angry man; his mother, a cultured and frustrated woman. In Peri Rossi's childhood, sickly and lonely, the first great vital issue was his obsessive relationship with his mother, whom he wanted to marry at the age of three and

. She spent time in the country, had a sister who sabotaged her filial exclusive rights, wanted to be a writer before she could write, and developed a defiant and transgressive attitude from an early age.

In 1963, she was already a university professor and edited her first stories. In 1964 he was already publishing literary reviews in

, the newspaper of the Uruguayan Communist Party and, shortly after, in the weekly

. In 1969 came

, his first book of poetry. And, in 1972, the trench that divided his life in two was opened. That year, in April,

the first step that justified the military seizure of power. Peri Rossi then hid in his house Ana Luisa Valdés, a student of his who felt threatened by the new order. The first day that Valdés went out into the street, he disappeared. The terrified writer resigned her position at the university and hastily devised a plan to escape from Montevideo. The first ship that could take her out of the country, the Italian ship

, was heading to Genoa with a previous stop in Barcelona. Peri Rossi embarked on it on October 4, 1972 and portrayed it years later in the novel

. Catalonia would be his destination.

In

, the youthful memories of the writer, there is a story that suggests that in that flight there was something else, a love, a woman who, shortly after,

. It is tempting to think that that lack of love, narrated by her writer as a vital turning point, led the Uruguayan writer to abandon explicitly political literature for other equally rebellious but more complex terrain. That can only be confirmed by her.

Life was yet to hit her again: in 1973, the Uruguayan military staged a coup d'état and formed a government and

.

Turned into an uncomfortable figure for Franco's Spain, the writer went to Paris, where

.

Cristina Peri Rossi.ANTONIO HEREDIA

The year in which Cortázar and Peri Rossi lived together in Paris should be one of the great myths of Spanish literature. For his readers, their relationship was something similar to the mixture between

and the little girl ended up protecting the gigantic Julio. Cortázar wrote 15 poems "for Cris", which Peri Rossi considers among the best of his work, although he tries to avoid. And the Uruguayan, after the years, made a story of that friendship that is a moving portrait of the author of

. In the pages of that

Among other things, it was discovered that the disease that killed Cortázar was not cancer, as was believed, but AIDS, transmitted in a blood transmission.

The disease, at that time, had no name.

Julio Cortázar y Cris

, despite seeming to be a more or less anecdotal book (the subversion of the genre of the poet and the muse), partly explains the work of Peri Rossi: the desire to push individuality to the limit, the vision of literature as a form of radicalism, the idealization of love as an inexplicable and transcendent reality ... And also rebellion to any category.

Peri Rossi

(Spain gave him nationality in 1975). He has written poetry that tended to narrative and novels that seem like vignettes. It has employed male and female storytellers. He anticipated such current issues as the deconstruction of masculinity or rebellion against biological genders. And he has treated love as if it were a drug.

In the late 1970s, when Peri Rossi was able to return to Spain, he entered the orbit of

magazine

and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

With them, the writer built the best-known section of her work as a narrator and poet:

(Loewe Prize, 2014)

were some of the titles that made Peri Rossi's voice recognizable: ironic, obscene, sometimes refined and sometimes voluntarily vulgar ... Elena Poniatowska, one of the five women who preceded her in the Cervantes list, said of her that all

.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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