Poste restante
Cynthia Rimsky
FICTION | 2001/2014 | 248 pages
WINNER OF THE 2001 SANTIAGO MUNICIPAL LITERARY PRIZE
In 1998, the author of this book found an old photo album in a street market in Santiago with photographs of an Eastern European family and her last name, Rimski, handwritten on the first page. Despite the difference in the last letter—an uncertain blur, much like her family’s history of immigration—she believes that the people in the photographs could be her relatives and decides to make the same trip her grandparents made in 1907 in reverse.
In each country, she observes the daily routines and the traces that these routines have left on the country she left behind, constructing a puzzle made up of maps, food lists, pages from her travel diary, accounts, stories, newspaper scraps, photographs, and a poetic description of the photographs in the album with her name.
Chaotic enumeration is the rhetorical figure of choice of all travelers: Claude Lévi-Strauss’s markets, Paul Bowles’s bazaars, named as markers of the conquest of body-to-body knowledge, of the knowledge of assimilation. Cynthia Rimski the traveler seems tounderstand by stripping things away—a language, a woolen cap from Chiloé, the path to a piggy bank on the sand. Her enumerations aren’t treasured but rather stripped away in the name of a hospitable disposition to newness, where curiosity overcomes all fear or regret. Poste restante is made up of calm epiphanies, delicate observations that are far from the manic exaltation of the beat trip or the denunciatory bias of the Guevarist trip, political without an emphasis or eagerness to read into the Other, seeking to domesticate its meaning. Written with hypnotic perfection, almost like a miniature, Poste restante seems to turn into an album much like the one tha tinspired it.
RIGHTS: spanish (chile) EDITORIAL OVEROL | spanish (argentina) ENTROPÍA | spanish (mexio) LIBROSAMPLEADOS | spanish (spain) LASTARRIA Y DE MORAS | portuguese (brazil) RELICÁRIO
“The narrator’s curious, determined gaze captures intonations, translating the time of each place. The voice is measured, so calm that it produces an enchanting effect. With an unusual book format, small and friendly, Poste restante is also a journey to the lands of poetic experience.”
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