The Speed of Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

any case, what I am sure of is that I soon realized Rodney was the best-read friend I'd ever had. Although for some reason I took a while to confess that I wanted to be a writer and that there in Urbana I'd begun to write a novel, from the start I talked to him about the North American writers I was then reading: about Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Flannery O'Connor. To my surprise (and delight), Rodney had read them all; I should make clear that it wasn't that he said he'dread them, rather that from the comments he made to damp down or stoke my reckless enthusiasm (more often the former than the latter), I could tell he'd read them. Without a doubt it was Rodney who I first heard mention, during those evenings in Treno's, some of the writers I've since then always associated with Urbana: Stanley Elkin, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, Richard Brautigan, Harry Mathews. We also talked once in a while about Rodoreda, who before Rota's impossible classes was the only Catalan author my friend knew, as well as certain Latin American writers he liked, and I think Rodney showed on more than one occasion, or pretended to show, some interest in Spanish literature, although I soon realized that, in contrast to Borgheson's followers, he knew little of it and liked it less. What Rodney really liked, what fascinated him, was classic American literature. My ignorance of the subject was absolute, so it took me a little while to understand that, like any good reader, Rodney's tastes and opinions on the matter were saturated in prejudices; the fact is they were unequivocal: he adored Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and Twain, considered Fenimore Cooper a fraud, Poe a minor author, Melville a moralist of unbearable solemnity and James an affected, snobbish and overvalued narrator; he respected Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and thought there was no better writer in the whole century than Scott Fitzgerald, but only Hemingway, Hemingway of all people, was the object of his unconditional devotion. Unconditional, but not uncritical: many a time I heard him scoff at the errors, banality, schmaltz and shortcomings that afflicted Hemingway's novels, but, thanks to an unexpected dodge in the line of argument that was like a sleight of hand, those blunders always ended up turning into essential seasonings of his greatness in Rodney's eyes. 'Lots of people have written better novels than Hemingway,' he told me the first time we talked about him, as if he'd forgotten the illiterate opinion I'd blurted out the day we met. 'But no one has written better short stories than Hemingway and no one can outdo a page of Hemingway. Besides,' he concluded without a smile, before I could finish blushing, 'if you pay close attention he's a very useful idiot detector: idiots never like Hemingway.' Even though it may well have been, I didn't take this last phrase as a personal allusion; I didn't get angry, although I could have. But, whether he was right or not, with time I've come to think that, more than an admired writer, Hemingway was for Rodney a dark or perhaps radiant symbol the extent of which not even he could entirely perceive.
    I said earlier that only well into autumn did I understand that Rodney's interest in politics was not merely conversational, but very serious, although also a bit excessive or at least — to put it a more conventional way — unconventional. Actually I didn't begin to sense this until one Sunday at the beginning of October when a colleague from the depart ment called Rodrigo Gines invited me to lunch at his house, to talk about the issue of Linea Plural that was supposed to come out the following semester. Gines, who'd arrived in Urbana at the same time as me and would end up becoming one of my best friends there, was Chilean, a writer and a cellist; he was also an assistant professor of Spanish. Many years before he'd been a professor at the Austral University of Chile, but after the fall