El mago de Viena

Sergio Pitol recounts, right from the start of the book, that for Robert Louis Stevenson, an aspiring writer must transform into an ape with a high capacity for imitation, whose responsibility is to read his favorite authors with an attitude more akin to that of a detective than an aesthete. The Magician of Vienna dissolves the boundaries between genres. In a work without indexes, arranged in dreamlike, improbable, real, or unreal fragments, the author reveals his intense relationship with writing, the discovery of his ars poetica. Within these pages, Pitol shares his thoughts on great works, on certain genres, on renowned authors, and on his own creations, or recounts, with colorful anecdotes, his travels from Warsaw to Xalapa, passing through Beijing, Havana, and Barcelona, ​​which appear as both literary and vital material. For Pitol, writer, translator, and diplomat, literature has never been imaginary, but rather the most tangible, most beautiful substance of reality. The Magician of Vienna is a constant friction of themes and literary genres to enhance memory, writing, favorite authors, travel and discovering, as the alchemists believed, that "everything is in everything".