Baroni, a Journey
By Sergio Chejfec
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Carson
Published by Almost Island Books (2017)
Hardback, 166 pages | ISBN-13: 978-81-921295-4-9
Baroni is a real person. Baroni is a fictional character. This novel demonstrates that the two statements are not contradictory. The real person is Rafaela Baroni, a renowned popular artist who lives in a small town in the Andean foothills of Venezuela. There she devotes herself to carving wooden figures, almost always religious, to curing the sick, to predicting misfortunes, to dying. Baroni dies and returns to life: twice a year she performs her own death. The fictional character is a vague and multifaceted being who is transfigured into memory, landscape, and communal experiences.
Baroni, a Journey is the evolution of an ever-changing gaze, which goes from the main character to the country she inhabits, from the unknowns of popular religion to the no less mysterious conditions for artistic creation. As in all of Sergio Chejfec’s books, in Baroni, a Journey the representation of thought occupies a central place in the writing. And once more, his doubts and digressions, together with the marginal beings he chooses to display, are the hallmark of a very personal style.
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PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who, marrying true intellect with simple description of a space, simultaneously covers so little and so much ground.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“On first reading Chejfec, we recall many admired authors, but at a later moment—a more solid and lasting one—we realize that he resembles no one, and that he has chosen an unusual and quite distinctive path, one that reveals itself slowly because of the demanding and very personal searches the author himself carries out in his narrative.”
— Enrique Vila-Matas
“Chejfec bravely reveals to us a world seen all askew, wherein we will gaze at everyday objects, and perhaps glimpse their invisible, indestructible core.”
— Scott Esposito
“Chejfec has a unique and compelling way of exploring the inner and outer worlds of an artist who, thanks to his own peculiar (multiple) gaze, emerges as far more sophisticated and intriguing than the categories of “folk,” “popular,” or “religious art” may suggest. His allusive, engagingly manneristic style hints parodically at the fact that he could have written an essay on Baroni’s art; or a novel inspired by her life; or even a travelogue focused on Venezuelan folk art. Instead, he has given us a book that is much richer, deeper, and more fascinating than any of these three genres would have allowed, given their scope and limitations.”
— Graziano Krätli in World Literature Today
“Unqualifiedly experimental in his affinities, Chejfec is a manipulator of forms. Like the great German stylist of the modern novel W.G. Sebald, he dwells in fragments, essays, and ambiguities, in deep, philosophical reflections. Reading him is no walk in the park. His elliptical prose — Baroni is a classic example of it — demands an island of attention from readers, a mental discipline that is difficult to haul up, surrounded as we all are by the ceaseless distractions of the internet. Its labyrinthine plot, if it can be called that, is hard to piece together into a quick summary — it doesn’t tick any boxes of race, gender or other, overtly ideological agenda. From start to finish, Chejfec’s investment is in craft and aesthetics, in exhuming truths from thick descriptions of the landscape his narrator travels through.”
— Somak Ghoshal in Live Mint
“Chejfec has written a number of erudite, highly idiosyncratic, and densely philosophical works, either in the form of novels or novel-based visual art, that follow peripatetic narrators in their meditations on artistic creation, memory, and landscape. Baroni: A Journey, his most recent book translated into English, is a modern interpretation of the flâneur novel. The result is a stylistic tour de force, a rigorous exploration of the border between art and life, and an intimate chronicle of a man’s intellectual and spiritual engagement with an artist and her work.”
— Darren Huang in Music & Literature
