• Mario Muchnik The editor who hunts literary 'instants of life'

The 20th century also had its charms, its disproportionate characters who were everywhere, knew everyone and left a mark unimaginable today in their time.

Mario Muchnik

, for example, was a visionary, an artist, a reveler, a beatnik, a fierce competitor and a vagabond... The Argentine publisher has died at the age of 91 in

Madrid

, in the country whose culture opened up the world in the 70's.

Muchnik's life began in the 20th century, in another country called

Argentina

, which at that time was one of the richest in the world.

His grandparents had come from

Russia

escaping from the pogroms and his father,

Jacobo

, beat lines and went from delivery man to successful advertising agent and from there to literary editor.

Together with the Seix brothers, part of the cultural elites of the Spanish republican exile, Jaccobo Muchnik published books by

Alberti, Gombrowicz, Jorge Guillén, Franz Kafka, Arthur Miller and Ernesto Sábato

in a label that was already called Muchnik Editores.

In this context, half mercantile, half intellectual, Mario Muchnik was born in 1931, in

Ramos Mejía

, a place that was a town and a suburb of Buenos Aires at the same time, famous for being the headquarters of the Ward school.

Manuel Puig

(1932) and Muchnik (one year older) coincided in his classrooms

, although the writer of Boquitas pintadas and the editor are characters who explain themselves more by opposition than by harmony: the obsessive and theatrical Puig is the opposite of the overwhelming and mercuric Muchnik.

His life was not the only coincidence: his private math teacher was Ernesto Sábato and

Ernesto Guevara

stole a girlfriend from him when he was a teenager. The 20th century was like a small town.

That must have happened before 1946, the year of Juan Domingo Perón

's rise to power

.

Muchnik, on several occasions, narrated that the military government expropriated the family business and kicked his father out of the country and never stopped talking about Peronism as "rottenness" that poisoned the economy and even the personal relationships of Argentines.

The memory of European anti-Semitism in the family and his connection with the intellectual elites of Buenos Aires led him to mistrust Peronism, which in the 1940s still resembled fascism more than social democracy.

The Muchniks went to the

United States

and Mario entered Columbia and graduated in Physics, Sábato's career.

He looked for a job in

Buenos Aires

but did not find it, he went to

Rome

on sabbatical before starting his doctorate and wrote a more or less informative book about

Einstein

.

Along the way he saw a performance of The Salem Witches, by

Arthur Miller

, and he liked it so much that he did not rest until he translated and edited the text with his father, who taught him the editor's trade.

Later, he lived in

Paris

, returned to Buenos Aires, became disenchanted with his country and settled in Barcelona in the 1970s, with the first wave of Argentine immigration that traveled back to Europe.

If the old Muchnik Editores was born from the Spanish Republicans' one-way trip to America, the new label was born from their return to Spain.

In the

Barcelona

of the 70s, Muchnik arrived with the Latin American writers of the Boom, as bearers of a much more attractive and cosmopolitan culture than that of a Spain that, however, was beginning to get richer.

Muchnik brought his knowledge of the Jewish-European tradition of the 20th century and of Latin American literature and a different way of being, a mixture of joyful life and professional hyper-competitiveness, to this country of nouveaux riches and new cults... Although he always looked himself as an anachronistic character in the publishing business. The 1970s were the years when writers and star agents took off, and Muchnik felt himself to be the last craftsman of the book.

For this reason, the books signed by Muchnik as an author almost always speak of irony and loss.

They are texts, almost all of them, of Woodyallenian memoirs, sometimes caustic about Judaism, about the years in Paris, about the lost Buenos Aires, about the editor's job... And they are all a continuum, a great book.

It only remains to remember Muchnik's third life, that of a photographer.

His leicas portrayed the years of the Boom, from his arrival in Barcelona to

Julio Cortázar

's last trip before he died. But his most moving report may be the one he did on a trip to Buenos Aires, determined to track down the remains of the already lost twentieth century.

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