The history of the location between the short story and the novel is one of the discrete and recurring enigmas of literature. Although both forms are nurtured by the art of storytelling, although the novel is nevertheless a strict constellation of stories arranged in a functional hierarchy, and above all, although the stories are enough to open up a world that could be continued after the initial conflict is exhausted, it seems that despite this convergence everyone go your own way and live your life. In times of novel futility due to overselling, stories and storytellers retire to their winter quarters with the confidence and pride of never succumbing to the bad taste of success. Twinned with poets, they contemplate with horror that on the scale of literary values, media coverage for circulations, translations, participation in festivals, but above all, a flat and uniform way of agreeing on an apparently indisputable quality that is never clearly explained enough. When one reaches this point, one makes the mistake of assuming that all novelists write in the same way, without any difference, and resorts to the canonical filling that Borges, the great prose writer of the 20th century, never wrote a single novel. , and neither did Shakespeare. Set in a temporary calm, the narrator brings to light a tradition that could focus on tremendous miracles One thousand and one nightsintense days Decameron or the canterbury talesNot to mention the armies of storytellers who—from Flannery O’Connor to Augusto Monterros—worked against the wind and the market.

But in times of uncertain imagination, when every anecdote wants to pass as a story, and the language becomes operative like the language of an ordinary chronicle, believing that the story, like paper, can bear everything, it turns out that the novel also retreats to its barracks and licks the wounds of the great misunderstood novel on the verge of disappearing, a real challenging monster into which all languages, all stories, all voices enter, as if life is running out and only that last chance to channel the rivers remains. visible and underground of a time and space. That great patience of the novel that postpones immediate satisfaction with the appearance, with what pops out of nowhere, to bet on the long-term writing that always puts itself to the test, instead of quickly solving a surprising and impressive story, tries to reveal authenticity and a background that could be counted.

Haruki Murakami, who wanders both narrative shores, said that he returns to the story with the feeling that he is in the garden, and that the forests are the prerogative of the novel. The picture is submitted, true. But I’m interested in the anomaly. Like the one in the story attributed to Hans Christian Andersen about a magical seed that, after being sown – say in a garden – goes wild and rises into the sky until it is lost among the clouds. So they allow the character from the story to go to the castle where there is a treasure guarded by a giant. The story of another magical seed that should have been a story and became one Quixote. Cervantes never suspected that the planned story was an unexpected novel.

When I started writing fiction, a little before the age of twenty, I was busy jotting down the stories from the novels I was going to work on in my notebook. I wouldn’t give my whole life to finish them. Until one afternoon I discovered that what I thought were novels were stories. Over time, paradoxically, the advantages of brevity became a problem. Why should I abandon a character I liked? Why did he forbid me to continue visiting the places that the story allowed me to outline and which were mysterious? Those brief partings led me to further research, to the point where I said to the conflicting protagonists in the original story, “Go on without me. I will stay.”

This comes at a price. The stories left me. It was almost as if they were afraid that if they fell into my hands, I would dive into them and not come out until I turned the opportunity of their appearance into a condensed life. This experience enabled me to understand what would at first appear to be a sarcastic definition of the novel, that of Ambrose Bierce in his the devil’s dictionary, when he says it’s “a far-fetched story”. Yes, he is, but he has to inflate himself out of necessity and see how long the story can last. After being inflated like a hot air balloon, it is possible to soar high and take in an unheard of panorama at a glance that you would not have had the slightest chance to discover. And yet, even great novels can be summed up at the end as if they were short stories. I would say more: almost songs. It is true that what remains of a novel after a long time of reading is an image or a verse. There, the underlying story continues to act as the basis of Bierce’s bloated text. It is enough to recall that picture or go over again the concluding lines that seem to seal the narrated world and set the gong for eternity, when some of my favorite novels say: “Between sadness and nothingness, I choose sadness.” (wild palm treesFaulkner) or “we must go on, I will go on” (Nameless, Samuel Beckett) or also “The end is not a process. Deforestation” (Correction, Thomas Bernhard) or even “She dances, dances. He says he will never die” (blood meridianCormac McCarthy) and above all when, as if exhaling life, he says: “Well, that’s it, I had my vision” (to the lighthouseVirginia Woolf). (OR)