By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jan 26 1999 (IPS)

Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato has broken a 25-year literary silence with a new book which, while thumbed-down by some critics, has been selling faster than even the famous novels he wrote in the ’40s and ’50s.

In barely three weeks, 90,000 copies of ‘Antes del Fin’ have been sold in Argentina and, according to the publisher, there is still enough demand to warrant reprinting another 10,000 a week, alongside those published in Mexico (10,000), Spain (20,000), Colombia and Chile.

The work has been a bestseller ever since it first came out on Dec. 10. The publisher estimates that 2,000 copies a day are bought in Buenos Aires, and in some bookstores ‘Antes del Fin’ is sold out just two hours after it hits the shelves.

‘El Tunel’ (The Tunnel) and ‘Sobre Héroes y Tumbas’ (On Heroes and Tombs) – two of his previous works – had sold 27,000 and 45,000 copies, respectively, in a little over a month after they first hit the bookshelves. Since then these classics of Argentine literature have been re-issued permanently.

For the past six years, the 87-year-old author said he was writing his memoirs. More than a biography, however, his new book is an essay meant for the youth who, he says, keep him alive with their admiration.

Sabato devotes very little of its some 200 pages to his vicissitudes as a scientist – he has a doctorate in physics, but gave up science to devote himself to literature – as a writer or essayist, nor does he reveal much about his personal life.

Instead, he writes extensively on his critical view of the world, individualism, the secularization of technology, materialism, poverty, environmental degradation and other issues, and urges young people to keep up their vision of utopia.

Therein lies the key to the book’s commercial success. The youth see in Sabato a cultural reference, a lucid and coherent elder who, with his skepticism and nihilistic ideas, has become an idol, literary critic Alicia Martinez explained in an interview.

A broad spectrum of people had also been anxiously awaiting the publication of the book, even without having read ‘The Tunnel’ (1948) or ‘On Heroes and Tombs’ (1961), two of the three novels which made him world famous, she added.

Sabato is also the author of many essays, such as ‘El escritor y sus fantasmas’ (The Writer and His Ghosts) and ‘Uno y el Universo’ (One and the Universe), in which he develops his apocalyptic view of the modern world.

Sabato left the literary world to descend into the inferno – as he put it – in 1984, when he was appointed president of a commission that investigated forced disappearances during the last military dictatorship (1976-1983).

The ‘Comisión Nacional sobre Desaparición de Personas’ (National Commission on Disappearances) collected thousands of testimonies of kidnapped persons, people who were tortured, detainees, children born in captivity and concentration camps.

These testimonies were later published in a book titled ‘Nunca Mas’ (Never Again).

The information the Commission collected was used to try and convict former dictators of gross violations of human rights, but they were pardoned later, something which, Sabato reveals in his new book, pained him deeply.

Sabato is idolised by millions of Argentines. “He is a symbol, more than a writer,” says fellow author Eduardo Gudino Kieffer.

His editors say TV audiences increase dramatically when he appears on programmes as a special guest, which he does rarely though he does respond when, for example, teachers or residents of poor neighbourhoods ask him to participate in protests.

One of the critics of his new book is Ana Maria Shua. “It a very mediated phenomenon,” says Shua, who feels Sabato was “opportunistic” to publish a book touted as probably his last.

Sabato, who was of the same generation as renowned Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, has always been a loner and has had few friends in the literary world, with the exception of late Franco- Algerian writer Albert Camus and Argentina’s Leopoldo Marechal.

For Sabato’s more benevolent critics, the problem for writers of Borges’ generation was that none came close to his genius and he thus overshadowed them. According to Alicia Martinez, Borges was prolific but the quality of his work was even, whereas Sabato yielded to the temptation of continuing to write even when he had run out of things to say.

She explained that even though critics rejected ‘Antes del Fin’, “Sabato’s hold on the middle class and the youth is incredible”, especially because of his commitment to human rights issues.

Martinez also indicated that people had been waiting anxiously for a new work by Sabato since, after publishing his last novel ‘Abbadon, el exterminador’ in 1974, he devoted himself to painting, but nevertheless remained one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers.

He himself believes he does not deserve so much recognition, although his declarations to that effect could be interpreted as false modesty.

Sabato won the Cervantes Prize, the most important award in Spanish literature, in 1974. He is also a holder of the Menendez y Pelayo award, and was often a candidate for the Nobel Prize – he recalls one occasion on which the president of the Swedish Academy praised his work, but said later that he had not written enough to be given the prize.

He has been much more affected by his critics in Argentina, as he hints in his new book, and it was they who discouraged him from continuing to write, in addition his own bitter fights with other writers, which he partly regrets.

Sabato seems to have waited until after the death of his wife Matilde to publish ‘Antes del Fin’. She died last year after a six- year illness, and the text was at the publisher’s immediately afterwards, completed with the help of assistants and proofreaders.

“I don’t want to die without saying these words: ‘I have faith in you’,” he says at the end of his book to the youth, whom he urges to have hope and solidarity and go back to believing in the utopia of a humanistic, sensitive world.

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By IPS Correspondents
PORT OF SPAIN, Jan 12 1999 (IPS)

It is an old debate: what really is calypso? It is difficult to say these days.

In the land heralded as its birthplace, Trinidad and Tobago, the purists have argued that it is certainly not all the blends that have been emerging over the years.

They say that only those compositions which hearken back to the vintage melodies produced by the likes of calypso titans Cipher, Sparrow, Spoiler, Kitchener, Melody, Growling Tiger, Shadow among others qualify for the title of ‘kaiso’ as the musical genre is also called.

The massive body of works coming from these indisputable masters of the art form have all excelled in their witty and engaging lyrics which rest delicately on charming melodic frameworks.

That has been their hallmark. The calypso has been a medium by which the trials and comedic mishaps and triumphs of the masses have been recorded and communicated to and for themselves.

It has been a society’s way of keeping in touch with itself, and it has been an instrument for maintaining archival memory.

This has been particularly significant to the Caribbean, a region largely populated by people who were uprooted from several other homelands. Just as they have had to learn to live among one another, discovering and assimilating new cultures as the centuries passed, so too has the islands’ music begun to weave itself into multi-coloured tapestries, brilliantly expressive of the many cultures dancing the dance of survival together.

It has led to the emergence of several hybrid musical forms, starting nearly two decades ago with the rise of soca, a soulful calypso with a heavier emphasis on an upbeat melodic line.

Soca was seen as the music of the younger generation of musicians, yet one of the greatest pieces of soca music ever recorded was the classic “Sugar Boom Boom” by Lord Kitchener, a septuagenarian, and one of the revered grandfathers of calypso.

Kitchener proved that just because it was not the old, recognised form of calypso, that did not mean soca was bad.

In the past few years, the trend has been to blend Jamaican reggae and dancehall into soca, resulting in wider acceptance by teenagers and young adults.

Chutney music, itself a hybrid of Indian music fused with beats reminiscent of, but not quite soca, has found itself gaining wider appeal by embracing more of the soca beat, and incorporating more English rather than Hindi lyrics.

Barbadian musicians have brought their own style into the fray, almost threatening to silence the Trinidad and Tobago posses with the sheer exuberance and captivating quality of their blends.

For the past few years, top Barbados bands like Square One and Krosfyah, with singers like Allison Hinds and Edwin Yearwood, have been among the hottest acts at the Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, leading to warning cries of a Bajan (Barbadian) invasion.

Most of the public, however, seemed not care, finding it much more entertaining and satisfying to party with their Caribbean neighbours – like Burning Flames from Antigua and Byron Lee and the Dragonnaires from Jamaica – than the appalling surfeit of inane soca ditties.

Even the biggest party animals had to concede that the music at the numerous Carnival fetes was becoming indistinguishable. The songs all featured instructions for what might just as easily be an aerobics class: bend down, wave, touch your toes, wave, move to the right, the left, back, forward, wave; wine (gyrate), wine, wine!

The Bajan invasion seems to have arrested that trend, and all indications are that there will be more variety to the jam and wine themes for the 1999 Carnival season.

Perhaps because of the political climate in Trinidad and Tobago, and maybe because of globalisation, there is so much worthy of social commentary and humour, the signs point to a return to that aspect of the calypso: story-telling.

The calypso tents will undoubtedly benefit from this as Carnival 1999 begins to roll out its red carpets.

Already one of the hot songs for the season has come from Square One: ‘Ding, Ding, Ding,’ which begins with a resonant Mother Africa call sung by the talented Allison Hinds and is itself an example of Caribbean cross-fertilisation.

‘Ding, Ding, Ding’ was created by ‘Aisasi’ band, one of the foremost exponents of ‘kawina’, an African-based music in Suriname, where the original, intoxicating version by roosty Surinamese singer Sister Agie became a hit in late 1997.

Most of the song is in Sranantongo (Surinamese creole) and its popularity is not only a tribute to the powerful vocalisation by Hinds – who learnt it when she visited Suriname in 1998 – but also to the eagerness of the Caribbean people to take into their music all the life forces that have made them.

It suggests that perhaps in the attempt to come to terms with all the drabness and pettiness spurting out from all around them, Caribbean people might be feeling a little introspective, and retrospective these days. Their leaders are failing them, their cricketers have disappointed them, they are turning to their musicians for more than just entertainment.

In this regard, one musician – David Rudder – stands head and shoulders above all the others in the Caribbean. When Rudder first appeared on the scene in the early 80s the purists said he was not singing calypso, and they wanted to turn away from him.

But then he celebrated their music with his ‘Calypso Music’ and he wrote the West Indies cricket Anthem ‘Rally Round The West Indies’. In between and since then, he has produced dozens more celebrating and analysing the Caribbean way of life.

His music has remained steadfast in its philosophy and the Caribbean-wide acceptance that has guaranteed its success shows that, though there will always be awful practitioners in any art form, it is important to let the music evolve.

The cream will always rise to the top.

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