“Salvador Elizondo: (1932-2006) Mexican writer. Linked to the post-Boom writers like Sarduy and Rodriguez Julia, Elizondo is a writer’s writer, with a strong affinity to Borges. In junior high school he lived in in California, which would form the setting for his novella Elsinore (1988). His first collection of stories, Narda o el Verano (1964), contained ‘Historia de Pao Cheng,’ in which the title character leans over a writer’s shoulder to find out that he is a character in the story, and that, should the story end, he will die. The tale synthesizes many of Elizondo’s concerns about the nature of the creative process, the role of the writer and reader, and forms the basis of his novel El hipogeo secreto (1968). Farabeuf (1965; tr Farabeuf, The Chronicle of an Instant, 1992), his first novel, won the Villaurrutia Prize and established him internationally. It chronicles the obsession of a couple with a Chinese form of torture known as ‘Leng t’che,’ but through the use of images and ideograms becomes a hallucinatory, exquisitely written meditation on the insufficiencies and dangers of words. Elizondo has published a play, Miscast (1981), and books of critical prose, including Estanquillo (1993). His Cuaderno de Escritura (1969), ‘a writer’s notebook,’ contains a phrase that admirably sums up his aesthetic: ‘Scribo ergo sum.’”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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