Pandemics have always accompanied man in his journey through history. The Iliad, the foundational epic poem of our literature, begins with the narrative of the evil plague with which the god Apollo punishes the Achaean hosts because the Attride committed a slight to priest Crises.
It was the year 1348 when the terrible Black Death broke out in Europe, which served as inspiration for Giovanni Bocaccio to write The Decameron, that, in the style of The One thousand and One Nights, is made up of a series of stories that a group of 10 young people who, isolated in a country mansion, begin to spend time narrating short stories.
Since the beginning of the 20th century the plague had not been present. We even came to think that it was a thing of the past or of remote places, such as Ebola, that the Spanish flu was just a memory and AIDS an exclusive disease of some minorities.
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We believed in our arrogance that the plague would not reach us and if it did, scientific advances would allow us to control it. It was only enough that a new type of coronavirus appeared, SARS-CoV-2, to remind us of our fragility, our mortality, the importance of the simple and the usefulness of the useless.
Once again, literature was green and a book about books became the lifeline against the tedium of dead hours due to isolation, reminding us that we share a common past, teaching us that readers are a very young family, because our species conquered the word about 100,000 years ago, and the writing was tamed by the Sumerians between 3500 and 3000 BC. C.
There are things, artifacts, objects and even acts that are so everyday, so normal and repetitive that they seem normal to us and we forget that culture and art, because it is a human phenomenon, are fragile and can be transformed, destroyed or lost.
Writing and books are a miracle, an effective remedy against forgetting. This is how Irene Vallejo proposes it in ‘El Infinito en un junco’, a 400-page essay that with mastery, subtlety and grace makes us travel through time to show us how our ancestors were able to develop this artifact that, in Borges’s words, it is an extension of the imagination.
With more than 150,000 copies sold and translated into 30 languages, ‘El Infinito’ has become an editorial phenomenon as a result of the most effective marketing strategy: word of mouth.
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Due to its subject matter and its length, as well as being an academic writing, ‘Infinity in a junk’ was born as an unlikely book, when its author was going through difficult times and had lost hope of achieving the dream of being a writer with a certain reputation. The publisher you trust recommends that you take the text to Siruela, the publisher that you bet and won.
On different occasions Jorge Luis Borges said that he imagined Paradise as a great library. With his genius he came to say that the phrase “Required reading” it is a contradiction. Should we talk about obligatory pleasure? So, reading because it is a form of happiness should not be mandatory.
Due to its importance, ‘El Infinito en un junco’ is an exception to the general rule proposed by the Argentine genius, the essay has entered the list of compulsory readings of our time just for the pleasure of reading it.
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