Fontanarrosa began his career in magazines rosary beads, transcended nationally due to the originality of his drawings and the speed with which he executed them, which is why his graphic production was so prolific or abundant. In the 70’s he began to draw in the magazines Hortensia, Satiricón and in the newspaper Clarín, where he transcended with his characters. “Boogie the Oily One” -which reached publications in Colombia and Mexico-, and the gaucho Toilet Pereyraalways attached to his dog mendieta.
fan of Central Rosary and football fanatic, he also wrote several plays with this sport as a theme, such as the story “December 19, 1971”, in which he recounts Central’s victory over Newell’s in the semifinal of a national tournament, “The eight was Moacyr”, or the stories about Sister Rosa, an eccentric mentalist who is the protagonist of stories related to the events in which the National Team played, which she takes up again in this new collection of texts.
In this case, the author chooses as the protagonist of the stories a sports journalist who follows in the footsteps of the Argentine National Team in the qualifying rounds for the World Cups in France and Korea/Japan, and in the sporting events of those soccer contests, where he returns to appear the Rosa Sister, who is anticipating with little success the sporting results of the Albiceleste Selection; and includes the analyst and dermatologist John Joseph Serenelliwho tries to shoot down with sharp logic simplistic thoughts that every fan can have.
In these scenarios, Fontanarrosa makes use of comparisons, sometimes hyperbolic, when setting up situations in which some matches are reminiscent of a war, or by alluding to choreographers to account for the sporting ability that certain players from opposing teams carry and that will be necessary knock down on the field of play. In these stories, the author’s prose stands out for the cultural vastness that it reveals to have and that the popular creator of “The world has lived wrong”, “I do not know if I have been clear”, “Nothing from the other world”, “The greatest of my defects” and “One never knows”born on November 26, 1944.
“El Negro was the possessor of an entire library inside his head. He knew football as well as history, geography, painting, literature, lifting and rudeness techniques (male and female), music, cafeteria, sociology, psychology, charlatanism, philosophy, esotericism, pragmatism, trade unionism, politics, botany, insectology. That is, he knew everything. And, about everything, a lot, “says Russo in dialogue with Télam.
“I want to see you again is one more proof of that wisdom. A hilarious mixture of each and every one of the human sciences (and not so much) homogenized by an impeccable narrative technique that he has, like all the other books his, the remarkable characteristic of making easy for the reader what seems impossible to discern. A characteristic that is very difficult to find in universal literature”, adds Russo, who as a journalist interviewed Fontanarrosa on many occasions and fondly remembers the first time he did so.
“Before starting my first report on Fontanarrosa, he asked me why I was interviewing him. When I told him that I was doing it because of the book of stories that had just been published (at that time by De la Flor), that I wanted to interview the narrator Fontanarrosa, he started He burst out laughing and said, sincerely and visibly embarrassed, “Hey, but I’m not a writer! We ran into each other ten or fifteen more times, and he always remembered what he kept calling ‘the afternoon of the amazing misunderstanding.'”
“I enjoyed each and every one of his books with a voracity that, I admit, only a very few writers provided me with. Each one of them, read on the continuous train trips from my house to work, made me the repository of the look of astonishment from all the passage that surrounded me without being able to believe that a book could be the cause of the laughter that I could not and did not want to repress”, recalls the journalist and editor.
Fontanarrosa was the protagonist of these trips to where the Argentine National Team arrived and in qualifying matches, which is recovered in “I want to see you again”. Russo says that the author had traveled “to the World Cup in France and to various points where the qualifiers for the two World Cups covered in this new book took place. However, he describes the places where he did not travel at the precise moment of the matches with a impeccable certainty, as if wanting to demonstrate that all the places in the universe are always the same place as his native Rosario. ‘More houses, less houses, just like my Santiago…’, he seems to say paraphrasing the theme that Los Chalchaleros popularized, “he adds journalist.
As for the new works that the publishing house intends to publish for the first time, Russo points out that “among the many unpublished papers rescued by the Fontanarrosa family, there is an enormous quantity of stories, notes, projects, poems, story outlines, possible variants of narrations, histories, autobiographical accounts and memory aids that we are classifying to put together new books”.
Given this vastness of found materials, the editor assesses that “after seeing them all, there will be no less than three or four new books. The topics addressed are as broad as those of the other books by Negro, always with a very attentive eye on the comings and goings of the national being, except for the stories in which he recounts parts of his life (his relationships, his professional and non-professional friendships, his tastes, his pleasures, his dreams, his nightmares), a theme not addressed in any of the books edited so far.
Fontanarrosa published three novels and fifteen storybooks, many of which were dramatized, turned into plays and made into films or television. The admiration, recognition and value for the friendship he cultivated throughout his life made him the repository, after his death on July 19, 2007, of a large number of tributes that ranged from a documentary about his own life, sculptures from his figure and his most emblematic characters such as Boogie el aceitoso, Mendieta and Inodoro Pereyra, to the creation of a cultural center that bears his name in the city of Rosario.
For Russo, editor of the unknown work left by Fontanarrosa, the possibility of publishing his unpublished material “is one of those fantastic caresses that life offers you in the midst of so much beating. Seeing his old papers, some manuscripts, others typed with corrections made by hand, gave me the wonderful feeling of seeing him again (hence the endearing, football and not so much, ‘I want to see you again’), of listening to him count sitting on the other side of the table and of being in front of the presence of the stories of one of the pillars of Argentine literature, despite what he thought of himself”, he concludes.
By Claudia Lorenzo
Source: Ambito
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