Loveable

Enrique Vila-Matas. Writer. Barcelona, 1948

 

Oscar Tusquets must be so dissatisfied with encyclopaedias that he has made his own. Good for him. Schopenhauer, for example, was so unhappy with the existing histories of philosophy that he wrote one of his own, for his own personal use. / In Tusquets’s literary work - the aspect about which I feel most qualified to venture an opinion - I see a writer who is carried away by sudden or refined (it doesn’t matter which) intuitions which remind us that the primary purpose of art is to surprise, to break our habits of perception and make old things new. / Language ages quickly in us, and the writers we love are those who renew it. That is why we love them. Tusquets renews, therefore he is loveable. As a person he is brusque and not at all tactful, and for that reason his opinions are loveable and sometimes even refined. As a writer, he is quite simply loveable, because he renews. / Intuitively, free of the always excessive burden of what has been learned in useless lessons, he renews the fossilised language of so many run-of-the-mill intellectuals. Tusquets knows or intuitively senses that in today’s world you need to rinse your eyes each time you have looked at something. And he is endearing because he knows or intuitively senses that if the purpose of literature is to create new ways of looking out of old ones that are buried with the good writers who invented them, he clearly cannot confine himself simply to obedience. He knows, or endearingly senses, that it is necessary to go back, beyond the world’s first gaze and first utterance: to rewind past the original misunderstanding, that misunderstanding which the intuitive and endearing Kafka said could lead to our ruin. / Tusquets is endearing because he re-invents the world, detail by detail, even though he knows that in all of that there is nothing which is entirely his own. And yet, all of that is himself.