No, no pienses en un conejo blanco
Patricio Pron

ESSAY | 2022 | 90 pages

This is an essay about the role of literature in today's society. Sometime after the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll admitted that he had created the character of the White Rabbit to offer a “contrast” to the “youth, boldness, energy, and gentle resolve” with which Alice pursues her goals. That we have become like the White Rabbit means that, with his same haste, we too have internalized the aging, lack of boldness, disinterest, and fickleness that characterize him in opposition to the book's protagonist. But it also means that, in the imitation of Alice, in particular, and in literature, in general, there is a likely solution to the problem of the demand for “more, sooner, for more people, faster.”

In opposition to the demand that our practices and exchanges be faster and faster, literature constitutes a practice slow enough to offer a refuge—indeed, a form of resistance—to the imperative to go faster and faster. From every book—though perhaps not from one like this—derives a coherence that can serve as a model for the rehabilitation of a congruent self-portrait and of our bonds with others.

RIGHTS: spanish (colombia) ARTIFICIO LIBROS | spanish (costa rica) H&H

““A critical book that does not allow itself to be merciful to anyone and investigates the responsibilities of each sector in the deepening of this decadence. It is a flip-flop into which even the author himself would fall, in whom the three roles of writer, reader and critic converge. In that sense, this essay can be understood not only as an ode not to give in to the temptation of speed, but also as an apology for taking things slowly.””
— Juan Pablo Cinelli, Tiempo Argentino