Lima: Casa de la Literatura Peruana, 2024. 198 pages.
Rossella Di Paolo (Lima, 1960), the renowned Peruvian author of the Generation of the 1980s, has published several poetry collections, including Prueba de galera (1985), Continuidad de los cuadros (1988), Piel alzada (1993), Tablillas de San Lázaro (2001), La silla en el mar (2016), and Cielo a tierra (2013). In 2022, the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Peru republished her first five books as Poesía reunida 1985-2016, and now, the Casa de Literatura Peruana has published Villapapeles, a book of Di Paolo’s chronicles, essays, and short stories.
Di Paolo’s interest in different literary genres is clear in her creative writing, which includes criticism, short fiction, biographical sketches, and book reviews. Villapapeles reflects this diversity and delights readers with its mastery and unique ingenuity. The texts in this edition exhibit grace and imagination. They engage in a constant and fruitful dialogue with the author’s own lyrical works, as well as other literary texts aligned with her tastes. Di Paolo crafts her criticism by merging testimony, analysis, and storytelling, offering seasoned readers that certain flavor they seek in hybrid writing. In this book, we find hints of Azorín’s transparency, Wáshington Delgado’s amiability, and Blanca Varela’s casual conversations.
From the first lines of the book, Di Paolo questions herself and, in doing so, she questions language, stating: “If I put one word next to another, under another, above another, I have only three or ten words, because poetry is (or isn’t) found in the juncture of words, those spaces in which even the thinnest blade of a knife can’t fit.” Indeed, at the end of the day, handpicked and measured language is poetry’s raw material. And Di Paolo is fulfilled in poetry; she resides and exists in it. Nevertheless, she knows that, occasionally, words can be shy. They might run or slip away. They might even escape altogether. But, despite it all, we get the feeling that poetry’s word is the fire that feeds her existence. We get the feeling that Di Paolo lives and breathes wrapped in words and verses. This is how she exists in the universe.
At the same time, these texts illustrate her poetics. Di Paolo understands that words, like people, have their place in the world. They occupy a space and have a function. While they fulfill their basic purpose of communicating, words also fulfill something else, something distinct, which aims for transcendence: an aesthetic space and function. The world of human beings appears, then, as a textual universe populated by all variety of words. In a kind of dynamic and artistic revelation, Di Paolo seems to tell us that this is how literature is. Some creative texts happen to be this way because the words breathing life into them (and not others) perfectly occupy their assigned spaces in all the glory of their resonances and connotations.
The little girl who took blank pieces of paper from her father’s desk to write peculiar stories (most about dwarfs, written shakily, with spelling errors), and who then adorned them with drawings, bound them, and placed them near her bed, is the same girl who later, when she was about fourteen years old, was surprised to discover a poem by Martín Adán on a flyer (“El sol brincó en el árbol / después, todo fue pájaros”) [the light skipped around in the tree / afterward, everything was birds]. She is the same girl who was spellbound reading a poem by Javier Sologuren that a teacher handed out in class. From that point on, Di Paolo confirmed that words name the world in unique, exceptional ways. She understands that the universe of fiction requires the entire treasure chest of words (transparent, tainted, clean, or dirty words) to create, recreate, transform, and correct the things humans cannot or do not want to change in life.
As both a reader and writer of literary essays, Di Paolo looks for expository clarity, pertinent anecdotes, and thoroughness of language when analyzing literary works. In this practice, she allows herself to be guided by the images and sounds of the texts’ words, spirit, and sense, while always explaining to the reader why this poem or narrative paragraph, and not another, is interesting to her, and why it has touched her innermost being and even seduced her.
“Rossella Di Paolo’s literary analyses of works by authors she admires and values are imbued with an affective force.”
For Di Paolo, reading is a largely stimulating, vivid, creative, and dynamic endeavor, similar to creating a poem. Reading and creating move the machinery of her imagination. Senses are protagonists; they are essential instruments that take us to the root of the text in question. Ultimately, in her work as a reader, Di Paolo dialogues intensely with the texts that interest her. She approaches them with interpretative liberty, reviewing aspects and details in the works of Herman Melville, Paul Auster, Silvina Ocampo, and Gabriel García Márquez. Moreover, her sustained interest in works by Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl is evident in her writing.
Many pages in Villapapeles show a special preference for works by important Peruvian women writers, from Blanca Varela and Patricia de Souza to Carmen Ollé, Pilar Dughi, and Mariela Dreyfus. Di Paolo states, for example, her initial difficulty when approaching Noches de adrenalina by Carmen Ollé: “It wasn’t easy for me to take in the novelty of her language, given those present indicatives asserting the force of an exact science: this is that, that is like this, you have to (or don’t have to) do this.” At the same time, she doesn’t shy away from celebrating her colleagues’ triumphs: “Mariela Dreyfus’s work pulls everything together in a rarely seen poetic maturity and harmony.” Along these lines, she also points to the solitary road to perfection in Blanca Varela’s austere and elusive poems, which “always suggest the lumpy texture of earthly things, from their damp, hidden corners and unclear mumblings.”
She remains objective when discussing Patricia de Souza’s narrative, noting: “A characteristic that emerges very early in her writing is her capacity for hybridizing fiction, autofiction, and essay with a disconcerting naturalness.” She doesn’t hold back her warm feelings when evoking Pilar Dughi, an important Peruvian writer: “How could we not miss Pilar as a human being? How could we not lament that she left us too soon? How could we not want to read her works?”
We mustn’t neglect to mention Di Paolo’s concern for texts by writers from the Generation of the 1950s (Javier Sologuren, Raúl Deustua, Wáshington Delgado, and Edgardo Rivera Martínez), the 1960s (Arturo Corcuera, Jorge Díaz Herrera, and Antonio Cisneros), the 1970s (Oscar Colchado and José Watanabe) and the 1980s (Eduardo Chirinos). For each of these writers, she crafts an autobiographical sketch, an objective analysis, and pointed statements interrogating their texts. And, in this way, she invites readers to consult, enjoy, and appreciate their works.
Rossella Di Paolo’s literary analyses of works by authors she admires and values are imbued with an affective force. The texts in this edition parallel her exquisite poems. Each of her intriguing works is born of a buzzing, restless imagination that continues to surprise and captivate us.
