A Cultural Capital : Despite the ‘Dirty War’ of the ‘70s, Buenos Aires Is Still a Literary Haven

Recalling the magic of this city in 1962, Argentine author Tomas Eloy Martinez wrote recently about an evening when he found himself on a balcony in illustrious company: novelists Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Augusto Roa Bastos of Paraguay and Ernesto Sabato of Argentina.

Eloy Martinez described the “golden light of dusk, the spring breeze that caressed the city,” as the young lions of literature, spellbound, watched a woman walk by in an elegant dress that revealed “the most beautiful back in the world.” The moment seems suspended in time, Eloy Martinez wrote in a column in the Pagina 12 newspaper--a moment “in which we become what we once were or, mysteriously, what we could never be.”

Three decades after Argentina’s booksellers and writers helped launch the literary giants of Latin America’s “Boom Generation,” Buenos Aires remains a refuge of books and readers, a cultural capital. Its hustle-bustle boulevards are lined with big bookstores, small bookstores, cafe-bookstores, round-the-clock used-book emporiums that smell like dusty, yellowed pages, and historic palatial cafes where artists and intellectuals have held court since the 1920s.

And every spring, the Argentine president inaugurates a book fair of ostentatious dimensions: One million visitors crowd a convention hall to attend readings and buy books as if they were going out of style. An impressed Brazilian colleague told veteran bookseller Natalia Poblet: “You Argentines read books the way we Brazilians drink coffee--constantly.”

Nonetheless, the rich literary tradition has suffered considerably in the past 30 years. Political repression and economic crisis have battered the once-mighty publishing industry and dampened the appetite for the printed word. Today, television, computers and other modern media are competing with books as they do the world over--despite appearances.

“You look at all those people at that book fair and you might think that in this country everyone reads,” mused Paco Poblet, Natalia’s brother and co-owner of Classic and Modern, a cafe-bookstore. “But the fact is that many of them never set foot in a bookstore the rest of the year.”

A brick-lined sanctuary with the cafe-performance space in front and shelves in back, Classic and Modern is an institution, established in 1938. Its history parallels the rise, decline and renewal of literary life here.

The Poblets, a genial and bespectacled brother-sister team, were raised in the business. They were born in an apartment behind the store on stately Avenue Callao. Their Catalan grandfather arrived from Spain in 1914. Like other immigrant entrepreneurs, he started out sleeping on the counter of his shop. His son became part of a generation of transplanted Spanish booksellers, many of them refugees from Spain’s devastating Civil War of 1936-1939. They built a publishing industry in Argentina that came to dominate the Spanish-speaking world.

“That was the golden age of the Argentine book,” Paco Poblet recalled. “The Argentine publishers supplied the entire Latin American market, as well as Spain.”

Argentina’s agriculture-based prosperity had created an enlightened educational system and a flourishing literary, arts and music scene. Although authoritarian ruler Juan Peron was no godsend to the cultural world, his populist reign from 1946 to 1955 contributed to the rise of an unusually comfortable and well-educated working class. In the 1950s and ‘60s, clients at Classic and Modern bought novels and books of poetry 10 at a time.

Eloy Martinez, today a best-selling author and a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, came as a student to the cosmopolitan ferment of the capital from the sleepy province of Tucuman. He wrote in his column that he experienced Buenos Aires “in a perpetual state of stupor.”

Besides producing titans such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Argentina’s publishers and literary community--along with their counterparts in Mexico City--propelled the careers of other Latin American writers. Editorial Sudamericana of Buenos Aires published Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in 1967--that classic introduced the world to the genre of “magical realism” and to Colombia’s future Nobel laureate.

Eloy Martinez became editor of Primera Plana, an influential weekly magazine that showcased authors of the incipient boom, legends in the making. Primera Plana’s correspondent in Lima was, for example, acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who, among other things, a quarter century later would run for president of Peru. And Eloy Martinez brought Garcia Marquez to Buenos Aires “before anyone had ever heard of him. It was a time of great cultural effervescence.”

It was also a time of turbulence and intermittent military uprisings. “There was police repression,” Eloy Martinez said in a telephone interview. “Argentina has always been authoritarian and with a tendency toward uniformity.”

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The advent of a brutal military junta and the “dirty war” against leftist guerrillas in the mid-1970s crushed cultural life. Writers were persecuted and went into exile. “There was direct censorship, self-censorship,” Paco Poblet said. “It shattered Argentina, in a thousand ways. It was a lost generation.”

The economy foundered. The Classic and Modern bookstore endured harsh years. In the early 1980s, when the military regime began to lose its grip, the store served as a haven for clandestine gatherings of artists and intellectuals. Democracy was restored in 1983, but the ravages of inflation continued through the end of the decade.

For a combination of business and creative motives, the Poblets removed most of the bookshelves from the spacious interior and set up the cafe. It hosts readings, workshops, musical performances and art exhibits. The books have been relegated to a small room in back.

Today, booksellers and writers see fundamental changes in Argentina. Some publishing houses have faded or have been absorbed, ironically, by companies based in Spain, where the industry experienced a renaissance after the end of the dictatorship in 1975. Now, “Barcelona is the capital of Spanish-language publishing,” said Jorge Naveiro, an executive of the Atlantida publishing firm and the president of the Argentine Book Foundation. “What never disappeared here, though, is publishing know-how.”

Argentines echo the universal, modern complaint that people read less. Although certain writers are popular, such as the eternal Borges and Mexican newcomer Angeles Mastretta, readers tend toward the genres of politics, investigative journalism and historical fiction. “There is interest in politics, in corruption,” Natalia Poblet said. “It is as if people have little time for fiction.”

Another change, according to Eloy Martinez: Intellectuals have lost stature here compared with societies such as Colombia or Mexico, where Garcia Marquez and Fuentes effectively wield the influence of ministers without portfolio. In Argentina, “the central effect has been the loss of the role of the intellectuals as spokespersons of the community,” Eloy Martinez said. “The prophets of television and radio have more importance.”

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The landscape looks far from bleak, however. Argentina’s cultural health compares favorably with other nations on the continent for a basic reason: The society here does not suffer the poverty, violence and illiteracy afflicting vast sections of Latin America. Argentines each year buy about one book per each of the 33 million citizens, a figure that leads the region, according to the national council of publishers. In the United States, the annual figure is 2.5 per inhabitant; in France, it is five per inhabitant, Naveiro said.

In real terms, books do better today than in the golden age. Eloy Martinez’s latest novel, “Santa Evita,” which tells of the strange odyssey of Eva Peron’s corpse into near-sainthood, has equaled or surpassed the initial sales of books here by famed colleagues such as the late Manuel Puig. And Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa hailed it as a modern masterpiece.

The continuing popularity of the 21-year-old book fair also heartens publishers. Naveiro, an organizer of the extravaganza, said the city will have to build a larger convention center to keep up with the interest. “It has been a permanent success, surviving all kinds of political torments,” he said. “It is like a great show featuring the book. Perhaps that explains its appeal.”

And although the prestige of intellectuals may have declined, it has not vanished. Writers appear often in the press, whether as authors or subjects. Last month, the magazine Noticias recounted an anecdote about Sabato, who is revered for his erudite fiction and his moral authority as president of a commission that investigated the dirty war. After dinner in the city on a recent night, the gentlemanly Sabato, 85, returned to his suburban home by train, according to the magazine. When he boarded, the passengers recognized him--and realized that one of the nation’s most celebrated authors was riding alongside them in a humble commuter train. They burst into applause.