Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) by Roberto Bolaño Read Free Book Online

with the body of a
rich, illiterate heiress, found in her bedroom,
under
the large
canopied bed, with multiple stab wounds. The novel remained unpublished until
well into the sixties, for family reasons.
    A long silence ensued. In 1943, Fontaine published an article in a Rio
newspaper, protesting Brazil’s entry into the Second World War. In 1948 he
contributed an article to a magazine called
Brazilian Woman
on the
flowers and legends of Pará, especially the region between the rivers Tapajoz
and Xingu.
    And that was all until 1955 and the publication of his
Critique of
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Volume I
(350 pages), which deals only
with sections two and three of Sartre’s introduction, “In Pursuit of Being”:
“The Phenomenon of Being and the Being of the Phenomenon” and “The Prereflective
Cogito and the Being of the
Percipere
.” In his denigration, Fontaine
ranges from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the movies of Chaplin and Buster
Keaton. Volume II (320 pages) appeared in 1957, dealing with the fifth and sixth
sections of the introduction to Sartre’s work, “The Ontological Proof” and
“Being-in-Itself.” It would be an exaggeration to say that either book sent so
much as a ripple through philosophical and academic circles in Brazil.
    In 1960, the third volume appeared. In exactly 600 pages it broaches
the third, fourth and fifth sections (“The Dialectical Concept of Nothingness,”
“The Phenomenological Concept of Nothingness” and “The Origin of Nothingness”)
of the first chapter (“The Origin of Negation”) in Part I (“The Problem of
Nothingness”) and the first, second and third sections (“Bad Faith and
Falsehood,” “Patterns of Bad Faith,” “The ‘Faith’ of Bad Faith”) of the second
chapter (“Bad Faith”).
    In 1961, a sepulchral silence, which Fontaine’s publisher made no
effort to break, greeted the publication of the fourth volume (555 pages), which
tackles the five sections (“Presence to Self,” “The Facticity of the
For-Itself,” “The For-Itself and the Being of Value,” “The For-Itself and the
Being of Possibilities,” “The Self and the Circuit of Selfness”) of the first
chapter (“Immediate Structures of the For-Itself”) of Part II
(“Being-for-Itself”) and the second and third sections (“The Ontology of
Temporality” and “Original Temporality and Psychic Temporality: Reflection”) of
the second chapter (“Temporality”).
    In 1962, the fifth volume (720 pages) appeared, in which, passing over
the third chapter (“Transcendence”) of Part II, almost all the sections of the
first chapter (“The Existence of Others”) of Part III (“Being-for-Others”), and
the whole of the second chapter (“The Body”), Fontaine makes a wild and reckless
leap to the third section (“Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger”) of the first chapter and
the three sections (“First Attitude Toward Others: Love, Language, Masochism,”
“Second Attitude Toward Others: Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism” and
“‘Being-With’ (
Mitsein
) and the ‘We’”) of the third chapter (“Concrete
Relations with Others”) of Part III.
    In 1963, while he was working on the sixth volume, his siblings and
nephews were obliged to have him interned once again in the clinic, where he
remained until 1970. He never resumed his writing. Death took him by surprise
seven years later in his comfortable apartment in the Leblon neighborhood of
Rio, as he listened to a record by the Argentinean composer Tito Vásquez, and
looked out of the window at night falling over the city, passing cars, people
chatting on the sidewalks, lights coming on and going out, and windows being
closed.

E RNESTO P ÉREZ M ASÓN
    Matanzas, 1908–New York, 1980
    T he reputation of Ernesto
Pérez Masón, realist, naturalist and expressionist novelist, exponent of the
decadent style and social realism, rests on a series of twenty works, beginning
with the splendid story “Heartless”