Chejfec on Chejfec

Sergio Chejfec is interviewed at Guernica magazine. I’d like to draw attention to this one quote because I think My Two Worlds is a fairly difficult book to find one’s way into. I mean, if you get it you’ll have no problem enjoying it, but (if you’re like me) you’ll have no idea what to make of it after a first reading, other than feeling that you must try to understand it. But this quote—in no way a replacement for experiencing the book itself—gives some idea of what Chejfec is after:

Sergio Chejfec: What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing. Not to say that the process assumes anything of “greater” or “lesser” importance, though: it’s just more graphic information. Take the surrealists, for example, or a work by Cage. For me, there’s a great value in doing this with literature. There’s a certain form of dependence; process and product inform each other, depend on each other. I consider myself a writer who doesn’t write with a style, almost. I begin with tension, with a vibe, a character. In My Two Worlds, the narrator’s walk is a form of mobility that one can compare to a trip, which is, for literature, is a commonly used form of character mobility and development. It creates displacement. The walk is a way to focus on this. Because to walk through the city also, I think that it’s a way to walk, to be a flâneur, and a way for the character—and the reader—to lose himself or herself. All walkers are consumed by their own literature, their own cultural history, the capitalist or urban economy. Thus I find as a way to write, it is a way to access the same urge as the contemporary, urban walker—the urge to know, to see that type of frustration, of weariness, of unease, of deception. Because the city promises you many, many things, but in reality is doing no more than showing you their possibility. Because the time has already passed in which the city was machine, a factory of revelations, of self-awareness. One is often betrayed by the city, right? There is a strong desire to come into contact with the environment, even though it may never truly happen.

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