Salvador Elizondo

Today is the birthday of Salvador Elizondo, born December 19, 1932. The Mexican novelist, poet, critic, playwright, and journalist was one of the most unabashedly experimental writers coming out of the vibrant Mexican literary world of the 19650's & 60's. Elizondo is perhaps the best known of the Mexican "meta-fictionalists," his style combining a wonderfully poetic sense of language with vernacular outbursts from news reports, comic books and the sounds of Mexico City street life. Elizondo was a Professor of literature at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México for two decades, and received dozens of international awards, including both Guggenheim and Rockefeller grants, and received the 1990 Mexican National Prize for Literature.

Elizondo's most widely read novel is Farabeuf, the fictionalized biography of an early-20th century renegade anatomist, but my personal favorite is the wonderfully strange and idiosyncratic El Grafógrafo ("The Graphographer"), a series of short texts using dozens of voices and unexpected twists of language to give a tour of a writer's mind as he puts pen to paper.

Elizondo died in Mexico City on March 29, 2006.

From El Grafógrafo

I write. I write I write. Mentally I am writing I write and I can also see that I write myself. I remember seeing and writing and writing. And I am remembering that I am writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I wrote and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen me write that I was writing I remembered having seen me writing and writing writing writing writing that. I can also imagine writing that he had written that I imagine writing that he had written that I thought writing that I am writing to write.