l’hoteltomas

By Rodrigo Orihuela

For The Buenos Aires Herald

La Argentina crónica, collected by Maximilano Tomas (Planeta).

Sunday 16/09/07

The American journalist Peter Hamill once said that contemporary journalism attempts to write down history at great speed. Quoting Hamill, the Mexican writer and journalist Jorge Hernández added recently that “American journalism, in particular, has concentrated on narrating the high-paced vertigo of all passing stories, and has not only done so swiftly but also with prose, and some of the best (prose) one can read”.

Hernández’s comment was made in the introductory article to the August edition of the Mexican cultural magazine Letras Libres, dedicated entirely to US journalism. The special edition included translations of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Hamill, Gay Talese, and many other famous American hacks, all great writers of prose and all part of a tradition of journalism as a literary form.

This US tradition of well-written journalism is unparalleled in the world and good storytelling in journalism is one literary field in which Americans can claim absolute worldwide supremacy and only a dimwit would attempt to argue against the claim. This is not to say that there are no masters of prose among the journalists of other countries and one need look no further than the late Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of narrative journalism. Yet, nowhere is the outstanding decades’ long consistency of the American journalistic production equaled. Such enviable consistency is greatly the result of the existence of magazines like The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire and Rolling Stone, where feature articles written in narrative tone are the center-piece of every edition. It was in many of these magazines that great writers, ranging from Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Hunter Thompson to John Updike cut their teeth.

In Spanish, the word used to define the archetypal features of such magazines is “crónica”. But “crónica” has no direct translation in English, at least not one that is used in every-day talk (chronicle hardly fits). The feature article, according to the English-language usage of the term, comprises articles ranging from narrative profiles to hard-analysis while the “crónica” is a hundred per cent narrative. There is no possibility to develop a “crónica” if the author is not attempting to write well. Neither is there any sense in writing “crónicas” without a serious attempt to be a story-teller.

As in most countries, many Argentine writers have worked as journalists or written in the press, Roberto Arlt and Rodolfo Walsh being the top examples. However, the crónica as a genre has not been widely developed, mainly due to the absence of publications willing to offer the space, the working-time and the pay required to undertake the weeks and months-long research necessary to develop high-standard articles of the kind.

The absence of adequate publications has not, however, deterred production. Over the years, committed journalists have managed to write short narrative features for some of the existing magazines and newspapers (mainly Noticias and Página/12) and others have published books. The journalist Martín Caparrós out-stands among those who have vented their eagerness to publish crónicas through books, with a prolific production on a vast range of subjects, and Leila Guerriero, another reporter, published a highly successful book in the same vein in 2005, Los suicidas del fin del mundo. Guerriero’s book, in fact, convinced the Argentine division of the Spanish-publisher Tusquets to publish crónica-only books, the first of which is being released in September.

The excellent collection of Argentine crónicas put together by Maximiliano Tomas, La Argentina crónica, also serves to categorically prove that Argentina has many top class writers of crónicas among its rank-and-file journalists – journalists with the talent to spin wonderful literary pieces of work. The book, which includes a prologue by Caparrós, is good all-around and should be listed as a compulsory read at every journalism school in the country. Several types of crónicas are included, from the ones written heart-on-sleeve, to the cold, informative ones (as informative as a clearly and purposefully subjective story can be, considering that subjectivity is an unavoidable and openly accepted condition in every crónica).

All the articles do what stories –be they fiction or journalism– should always do: they tell more than one story; they tell the story that gives the article its name and which builds the theme of it all but they also have other strands, other stories that offer background music just as interesting as the central theme.

All 14 articles picked by Tomas are written from the view of the unashamed outsider who attempts to understand, or portray, a person or circumstance to which the writer cannot naturally relate to. They also prove that outsiders are not always the same when it comes to writing-and-describing –some can laugh at their own position (Hernán Brienza does it wonderfully in A caballo de la fe) while others can be informative and distant and still actively takes sides (Josefina Licitra in Y parirás con dolor).

It is, however, Alejandro Seseolvsky who stands far above everybody else with his Skinheads anti-fascistas: el lado rojo de la fuerza, an article which makes the entire book worthwhile. From a narrative journalism stand-point, Seseolvsky’s feature is perfect. First, because it takes a little known subject (anti-fascist skinheads) and offers a colourful portrait while also thoroughly informing in few words and without boring or losing his tempo. Second, the article is very well written, with excellent prose that combines colloquial and formal talk in precise measures. Third, Seselovsky makes it clear at all times that he is taking part of everything he describes and narrates. He tells his readers, for example, that he drank beer on a sidewalk with several skinheads and took them in his car to a football match, but he never takes over the story as a character. Readers know he is there but he is not even a thumping voice in the background. Finally, he rounds up his experience without any loose ends while he leaves readers itching for more.

Two articles could have been better left out, for different reasons. Gonzalo Sánchez’s Los dueños del fin del mundo tells the story of billionaire foreign businessmen who have bought vast extensions of land in the most beautiful areas of the Patagonia. Last year, Sánchez published La Patagonia vendida, a book with longer, more detailed articles on the same businessmen and lands he focuses on in this article. Thanks to La Patagonia vendida, Sánchez’s work on this specific topic is well-known and therefore it may have been more interesting for Tomas to present another article or another author to readers.

The second article that could have just as easily been left out of La Argentina crónica is Esteban Schmidt’s La política en los boxes, because it simply does not fit in the collection. All the other features selected by Tomas share one aspect: the authors powerfully relate –favorably or not, ironically, seriously or jokingly– to the topic they write about. They show that they feel strongly for whatever they are writing about and Schmidt’s article does not fulfill these precepts. It is not that the piece is bad. It simply belongs elsewhere, in a different kind of collection.

The topics of the collection range from political campaigns to high-profile criminal cases and to the little known world of professional TV show “laughers”. The features are anything but rosy and, in fact, there is a persistent feeling of melancholy –gloominess, even– which is at its highest with the opener, Carolina Reymúndez’s Operación Ja Ja. The bitter-sweetness of this story, whose characters’ sadness is comparable to that of circus clowns, sets the tone for a book that is, otherwise, a wonderful pleasure of a read.