Fireflies

by Luis Sagasti, Fionn Petch (Translator)

Overview

How do we even begin to narrate the history of the world? Where do we start, and where do we end? Fireflies is Sagasti’s bold and original attempt to answer these questions. Roaming across time and geography, he lights on an eclectic array of characters and events that at first glance seem unrelated, and teases out their stories to reveal unexpected points of contact between them. Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Neil Armstrong, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Beatles, Japanese poets, Brazilian priests, Russian cosmonauts and many more cross these pages, and Sagasti finds common threads that weave them together into a single narrative.The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always simply disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky indefinitely. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti transforms the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it is an extraordinary sight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781999722746
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	12/04/2019
Pages:	89
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Luis Sagasti, a writer, lecturer and art critic, was born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina in 1963. The author of five novels, including Fireflies (known in Spanish as Bellas Artes, 2011) and A Musical Offering (Una Ofrenda Musical, 2017), he’s just about to publish his most recent book, comprised entirely of footnotes.

Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM, and now lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish.

Read an Excerpt

The world is a ball of wool.A skein of yarn you can’t find the end of.When you can’t, you pluck at the surface to bring up a strand and then break it with a sharp tug. Once you find the other end, you can tie the two threads of yarn together again. One of grandma’s little tricks.Some people think the world is a ball of wool from a lamb that sacrificed itself long ago so everyone could stay warm.And they find this idea comforting.And there are others who think that, in fact, the world is held up by threads. As if the ball of yarn were elsewhere. So headlines appear that try to explain things like who pulls the strings of the world . Magazine covers: two threatening eyes against a black background. And there are writers who write whole books about this. Conspiracy theories. An explanation that arises from intellectual laziness: the idea that a shadowy group has chosen to weave the plots of all of our lives. Just like that. Because: a) they are pure and good; b) they want to keep hold of their wealth; c) they are evil, really evil; or d) they hold a secret that would be the end of all of us if we were to find it out – and of them too, of course. For those who see the world this way, any conspiracy – because there have always been conspiracies – is just the visible result of a greater conspiracy. And the smaller conspiracies are all interconnected. Man never reached the moon. Paul McCartney died in 1967 and was replaced by a lookalike. Christ descended from the cross and had twins with Mary Magdalene. Shakespeare’s works were actually written by Francis Bacon. The Lautaro Lodge was a branch of the Freemasons, who are a branch of the Rosicrucians, who are a branch of the Gnostics, and the tree proliferates so wildly that not only does it leave us unable to see the wood but it also fills everything with shadows, making way for those two threatening eyes that want us to understand that there’s something out there it’s better we don’t know about. Because – and this we do know – conspirators always leave clues, as if everything were one big game of hide and seek. For people who think like this, any secret is part of the plot because when people conspire they breathe low and in unison, as if whispering a secret.We shouldn’t believe them, though it’s right to believe in secrets. After all, childhood is nothing but the progressive revelation of well-kept secrets. To reveal them all at the same time would be to reveal nothing. The darkest dark and the whitest light are equally blinding. Like discovering that your dad has already bought all your Santa presents for the next five years.How do we know when there are no more secrets? When do we find that out? Or is there nothing to learn? There are secrets that make the world work in a particular way. But they shouldn’t be called secrets. Omissions would be more prudent. For the machine to keep running, it’s better not to mention certain things. Every family holds a terrible secret that, as soon as we sense what it might be, is no longer mentioned.And there are still others who believe that these threads in fact sustain the world from the inside, as if the world were the great ball of wool and we were insects, like ants or flies, crawling or flying around it. A ball of wool someone is using to knit something. Or perhaps no one is knitting anything at all. There’s just a great shroud with no Penelope, growing without purpose in the eternal silence of infinite space.One thing we can be sure of is that, for hundreds of thousands of years, the ball of yarn has been revolving without pause.

Editorial Reviews

Society of Authors TA First Translation Prize (Shortlist)

"A subtle marvel...a nimble writer who merits wider readership in English." —Kirkus

"A genre-defying collection of associative musings on art, music, philosophy, and literature." —Publishers Weekly

"Innovative, playful, and beautifully executed." —Carlos Fonseca, author of COLONEL LAGRIMAS

"Simply genius." —Enrique Vila-Matas, author of DUBLINESQUE

"A work of wonderful analogies and disparate historical footnotes." —Morning Star

"Like Borges before him, Sagasti has produced a rare thing: a work of fiction as learned as it is fun." —Gary M. Perry, Foyles Charing Cross

"Sagasti produces here a magnificent constellation of stories, and in doing so pays tribute to art." —Fnac

"One hundred pages of pure intelligence, to be enjoyed listening to Sun Ra." —L’Arbre Vengeur

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Praise for Luis Sagasti

"A beautiful, fragmentary rendition which never strikes a false note." —Irish Times

"A bewitching suite of stories about music, heard and unheard." —The Arts Desk

"A work of immense complexity, great balance and extraordinary beauty." —The Monthly Booking

"Sagasti’s careful contrapuntal construction weaves together an eclectic range of vignettes which transcend their parts, leaving an indelible emotional impact that defies rationalisation." —Gutter Magazine

"I have gained knowledge I didn’t know I needed." —Joyzine

"Fate could be likened to a pointillist painting by Seurat, with each dab of colour and each descriptive passage contributing to what is finally a beautifully structured and brilliantly shimmering whole." —BookBlast

"The literary equivalent of a symphony." —Books and Bao

"Sagasti manages to create a world rich in illuminations and philosophical reflections." —Morning Star

Republic of Consciousness Prize (Shortlist)

"Una fascinante suite de historias sobre música, tanto escuchada como desconocida." —The Arts Desk

"Una interpretación hermosa y fragmentaria que siempre da con la nota precisa." —Irish Times

"Una ofrenda musical no es tanto un intento de escribir sobre música sino una verdadera partitura que usa palabras como un nuevo tipo de notación." —Will Ashon, autor de CHAMBER MUSIC y STRANGE LABYRINTH

"I have gained knowledge I didn’t know I needed." —Joyzine

"Sagasti logra crear un mundo rico en iluminaciones y reflexiones filosóficas." —Morning Star

"El equivalente literario a una sinfonía." —Books and Bao

"Un trabajo de inmensa complejidad, con un gran balance y una belleza extraordinaria." —The Monthly Booking

"Fate could be likened to a pointillist painting by Seurat, with each dab of colour and each descriptive passage contributing to what is finally a beautifully structured and brilliantly shimmering whole." —BookBlast

"La cuidadosa construcción a contrapunto de Sagasti entreteje una variedad de viñetas eclécticas que trascienden sus partes, dejando un impacto emocional indeleble que desafía la racionalización." —Gutter Magazine

From the Publisher

2019-11-11
A postmodern work of fiction made up of neatly assembled and interpreted facts, the first of Argentine writer Sagasti's books to be translated into English.

It makes good sense that by day, Sagasti works as a museum curator, for this is a diligently collected series of oddments that help make sense of how the world works—and, as Sagasti writes, that it works at all is a marvel, since "for the machine to keep running, it's better not to mention certain things." Those certain things might include matters of family dysfunction or historical inconveniences; whatever the case, Sagasti enjoys turning them up and looking them over, counseling that in a world full of people as cold as the distant heavens, "we should seek out only the fireflies," never mind that they die just like everything else. Sagasti keeps the theme of his title alive and at work throughout this brief book, which turns into a lively meditation on how things connect and cohere of the sort that Guy Davenport would have approved. One firefly is the German artist Joseph Beuys, shot down as a Luftwaffe pilot over Russia and briefly held by a Tatar shaman who allays his fears by pointing to the flickering stars—and then, it seems, implants those stars in Beuys' head, for "shamans travel into the skies in search of the sick person's soul in order to return it to their body." If shamans can do it, so can the time-traveling Billy Pilgrim, another prisoner of war, of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five; and the Tatars may have taken an idea or two from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another flyer whose novel The Little Prince was translated into their language. In the manner of a well-functioning ecosystem, everything in Sagasti's book connects to everything else, and it's a subtle marvel—especially the surprise ending.

A nimble writer who merits wider readership in English—and several more novels await translation.

Kirkus Reviews