The Magician of Vienna

July 10, 2017
The third installment of Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory (following The Art of Flight and The Journey) threads together stories, recollections, and visceral experiences of literature. Time is by turns both an urgent reality and a nonentity in this hybrid of fiction, literary analysis, and journal, a testament to language and his favorite authors. Marrying the dual roles of reader and writer, Pitol is more detective than aesthetic admirer, tracing his love of words from an adolescent fascination with Jorge Luis Borges through a host of other authors such as César Aira, Augusto Monterroso, and Nikolai Gogol. He also explains how the book itself has benefited from all of these literary inspirations. The narrative describes Pitol’s travels through the world, through literature, and through the words and lives of writers, sometimes of his own acquaintance and sometimes those long gone. This tour of a brilliant mind culminates with a series of diary entries from May 2004 that mingle Pitol’s literary journey with his medical struggles. This triad of books is a rarity: each can stand on its own, but they also form a fulfilling tale together, the capstone of a long and celebrated career of writing and translating. Pitol has memorialized the fullness of his life and passion for literature in lasting fashion.