Editor’s Note: Victoria de Stefano (Rimini, Italy, 1940 – Caracas, Venezuela, 2023) was a founding member of the Advisory Board of Latin American Literature Today and a frequent contributor to and advocate of the magazine.
“Andrés, some friends are coming around this afternoon. Would you like to have tea with us?” “No, Grandma, you and your friends are always talking about things that don’t exist. I’ll stay in my bedroom.” Victoria de Stefano, my friend Victoria, liked to use that anecdote to characterize the kind of small reunions she occasionally hosted in her house. Earlier this year, Victoria unexpectedly left us. Her son Martin found her, as though asleep in her bed, one morning in January.
The title of her novel El lugar del escritor—the place of the writer—perhaps best expresses the center of gravity of an extraordinary literary oeuvre, composed of nine novels, three collections of essays, and a diary. From that place, her permanent place of writing, the Venezuelan novelist, born in 1940 in Rimini, Italy, constantly perfected her passionate exploration of the expressive possibilities of the language her parents bestowed on her when they set her down among us, here in Venezuela (where she arrived in 1946), and so created an exceptional body of work, unique in Hispanic literature.
In his well-known collection of aphorisms, “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way,”1 Franz Kafka, an author frequently quoted by characters in the novels of Victoria de Stefano and one she clearly admired, writes: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” That imperative affirmation could well serve as an epigraph to Victoria de Stefano’s collected works. There are many passages in her novels where a character stresses the preeminent necessity for that space in the psyche and spirit of the writer; that space, that small room in which one’s own and others’ lives and experiences are lived, recalled, and recreated, from which the world is convened to pluralize the most deep-seated intimacy. Thus Claudia—the writer and in some sense alter ego of Victoria in the novel mentioned above—states: “A room is the world, the world can fit in a room, the world holds the room, holds us. Can you hear the creaking of the doors as they are closed? The shadows grow, swell, with the best of leavening, apparently. It’s the world about to enter. The room is almost overflowing its borders, borders it in fact does not possess. It’s full to the brim; full to the brim with me, with the world, as crammed-full as a beehive. I live, swarming.” It is the place where the chosen profession is carried out, where consciousness of the impossibility of perfection makes its nest and reinforces the certainty that such work carries with it a penalty: the exhausting task of editing. As another of her characters tells us: “Editing isn’t, as some think, a tidying-up, deleting here, adding there, a period here, a comma there; editing is a constant, manic rectification, it is turning everything head over heels when you thought you had it standing firmly on its feet. Once again, from the beginning, and again and again, from the beginning to the end… And then one more time, from the beginning to the end.”
As with Marcel Proust, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, or her friend Sergio Chejfec, to name just a few of the authors whose work bears a “family resemblance” to hers, exhaustive description and an infinite web of relationships, quotations, objects, situations, reflections, and digressions take shape in this narrative space, providing a consummate sense of suspension and density far from the traditional inertia of novels of intrigue, surprise, effect, and adventure. One could perhaps speak of a novelistic style of stillness that seeks out the shadows, the points of rupture or inflection from which the creative memory is triggered to weave stories that gallop over one another, running the whole gamut of the list of memories. Like a condor, the narrator in this novelistic style pauses in its flight and glides in circles over and again, unhurriedly observing the mountain ranges, the veining of memory. And all that done without a form of language that attempts to mask or decenter verbal communication; nothing could be further from Victoria de Stefano’s aesthetic aims than the baroque or the juggling of metaphors. The primary task of the mechanism this narrative oeuvre puts into play is, rather, one of unraveling. Here, each exhaustive retelling, each multiplication of stories, revolves around the same questions radiating from a shared center of exploration: human existence and the indecipherable weave on which it takes place.
On the computer in her bedroom, her place of writing, where she died alone and fully lived a life devoted to reading and authorship, she left a completed posthumous novel, Un grano de polvo se levanta. I’m certain that when her friends read these pages, we will be able to continue conversing with her, over and again, about those things that—according to her grandson Andrés—don’t exist, but make existence less uncertain for us. Hispanic literature owes an immense debt to the work of this outstanding artist. It is my hope that the speck of dust she left us will indeed rise to become the beginning of the recovery and just appreciation of her masterful prose, beyond the frontiers of her bedroom and the country that took her in and that she made her own; a country where, lamentably, she also suffered and endured the poverty of our present times, marked by shortages, ignominy, and disillusion.
Thank you, dear Victoria. Thank you for so much, my beloved friend. We miss you.
Translated by Christina MacSweeney
