Barry Schwabsky Reviews Sergio Chejfec's Notes Toward a Pamphlet

Out of 20 pamphlets that Ugly Duckling Presse has devoted the year to publishing, the one that struck critic and poet Barry Schwabsky the most "bore a name unfamiliar to [him]: Sergio Chejfec." "He turns out to be an Argentine novelist living in New York," explains Schwabsky in his review of Notes Toward a Pamphlet for Tourniquet Review. More:

…Consisting of an eleven-page Introduction, thirty-three pages of Notes, and a one-page Coda, it is a commentary on the life and work of an eccentric Argentine poet of the twentieth century, a certain Samich, who, if you google him, turns out to have been the protagonist of Chejfec’s untranslated 1990 novel Moral—or rather, as it’s been described, an “antinovel” that “defies being read as one is accustomed to reading a narrative”; “the basis of Chefjec’s novel” being (according to a reference work on Jewish Writers of Latin America) “the sensation of recursive digressions that provide a cumulative mosaic of pointlessness.” That sounds less like the description of a real novel than of the kind of novel a Latin American novelist would imagine one of his characters writing….

Finish the review here.