I had some time to kill this afternoon on Florida street so I wandered into a few bookstores. One of the most bizarre guidebooks to Argentina that caught my eye was titled Bariloche Nazi. Perhaps the highlight of the book is that it reveals the purported location of the Bariloche home of Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun after they escaped from post-World War II Germany….. Uh, yeah.

That’s not really the kind of thing I want to spend my money on…but on the topic of Nazis in Argentina, I do recommend The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Peron’s Argentina

Okay, I’m trying to keep my posts to a fairly low word count…saving you, dear reader, precious reading time. So, my next odd encounter will be posted tomorrow.

This afternoon at the café I read a book review which proceeded to tell me way more than I wanted to know about the book prior to reading it. I immediately remembered why I seldom read reviews of books that I want to read. And long ago I’ve learned never to read movie reviews. I rather approach things like this without much prior knowledge, just arming myself with only a vague notion of the story.

The amount you know about something beforehand certainly impacts your experience. But does it enhance or hinder your experience?

Likewise, what about the ways we experience a place, a city such as Buenos Aires?

Obviously the parallels are not the same. But I’m curious as to what type of reading, what type of learning experience, enhances our travels? And what type of reading actually hinders our experience?

I’ve spent the last few weeks working with fellow Buenos Aires resident Peter Robertson to produce the latest issue of The International Literary Quarterly. I think the highlight of this issue is an interview with Gao Xingjian, whose novel Soul Mountain I’ve also been slowly reading this year.

As I’m walking around Buenos Aires, thinking about the city’s history and my own writing, these words by Gao Xingjian stay with me:

… when artists die what is left behind, literature, is the history of human beings, is the interaction between the individual and the condition of history, that trace of history left behind, that is literature. It is the witness, it is the evidence of the individual’s interaction, connection, with history, and that is the trace, that is much more important and significant than the official discourse, the official history.

That is the meaning of literature, the meaning of the writer. That is, the writer, in spite of his or her insignificance, has left that trace that reflects the relationship between the individual and the condition of being alive. That trace itself is timeless, that is the meaning of literature. And that is far more important than the official history of political discourse. That is the real meaning of literature.