Argentina

Renowned Argentine Author Delivers Opening Speech at International Literary Festival

Author Vicente Battista delivered the opening speech at the 39th Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires.

Publication Date

Renowned Argentine Author Delivers Opening Speech at International Literary Festival

Renowned Argentine author Vicente Battista listens to jazz and classical music while he pens his award-winning stories.

Publication Date

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Renowned author Vicente Battista takes a book from his library, adjusts his glasses and eyes the green cover for several seconds. He sighs in a low tone as if preparing to deliver a profound truth.

“Reading is a pleasure,” he says.

The 72-year-old writer gave the opening speech on April 25 at the 39th Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires. The festival is the most-attended literary event in the Spanish-speaking world, according to Fundacíon El Libro, the nonprofit civil foundation that organizes the annual event. It will run until May 13 in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital.

Battista, who has two daughters and two grandchildren, settles into his desk in his Buenos Aires home. He sits in front of the computer to prepare his speech.

His collection of pipes watches over him from a corner of the room. In another corner, his library overflows with books that stack to the ceiling. Columns of jazz and classical music CDs wait to accompany him while he writes.

Battista has published six books of short stories and five novels. He has received several awards, including the Gran Premio Fondo Nacional de las Artes, an annual prize from the federal government’s fund for the arts, in 1967 for “Los Muertos,” a book of short stories. He also won a Premio Planeta de Argentina, a literary prize from publisher Grupo Planeta, in 1995 for his novel “Sucesos Argentinos.” Some of his works were translated into French and German.

The Feria Internacional del Libro has taken place in Buenos Aires for 39 years. The three-week event draws more than 1 million readers and more than 10,000 literary professionals each year, according to Fundacíon El Libro.

The foundation designated Battista as the speaker at this year’s opening event. He follows Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, who gave the opening speech last year.

In his opening speech at the festival, Battista expresses to the public the pleasure literature provides him.

“From the very moment in which we learned to read, we stopped being mere spectators,” he says to those gathered at the festival. “Reading is an act of constant creation. The words assembled in a book add music to the silence.”

At his house in the days before the event, Battista says his desire to write began when he was young.

“As a little kid, I liked to fantasize,” he says. “Since I was very small, I always liked to read, the idea of forming ​​possible worlds and writing based on that.”

One of his favorite genres to write is crime. Local media offers one source of inspiration for these stories.

“I use police news as a trigger,” he says. “A police incident is always an extreme situation. It carries an implicit crime, from a rape to a robbery. Those incidents have made me an author of some interesting stories.”

Battista writes at night and can spend hours writing and editing his work while classical or jazz music plays in the background. He says he enjoys Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach. He calls himself a technology enthusiast, but he prefers to correct his work on paper.

Graciela Pérez de Lois, the editorial director of Santillana publishing house in Buenos Aires and part of the coordinating team of the Comisión de Actividades Educativas for Fundación El Libro, explains why the foundation selected Battista to make the opening speech.

“He is a renowned writer and representative of Argentina,” she says. “He has very clear ideas.”

Elsa Osorio, author of works such as “La Capitana,” “Cielo de Tango” and “Callejón Con Salida,” says she has known Battista for years and values him as an interesting writer of his generation.

“He is representative of our society and is a person with social sensitivity,” she says.

Meanwhile, the young audience appreciates the innovation and unpredictability of his literature. Laura Fornic, 28, says she began reading Battista’s work through a recommendation, and the author immediately captivated her.

“I read it, and his literature caught my attention,” she says. “My generation looks for some innovation, and he is innovative. He is not predictable. He is passionate. He is a great characterizer of his characters. He is a great observer and transmits it in his literature.”

Battista says he looks to craft a fantasy world in his literature that prevails over the world of digested images on television. He differentiates between literature and television regarding how the words of a book make the audience think and imagine.

“The screen thinks for us,” he says. “Reading is different. What is happening to us is that we become spectators in front of the television screen. The series we are seeing is already digested and shows us what the gangster looks like. We hear the music. We hear the shots. Everything is already digested. We do not have to think at all.”

Rather, Battista invites the reader to collaborate with him on the construction of the characters and worlds in his literature.

“When the reader reads, they are working with the writer,” he says. “Together, they are composing the story, which does not happen with the spectator.”

Battista gets up from his seat and prints a few pages to edit his speech for the festival. While he moves his body, his voice continues to expand on his ideas.

“For me, it is magical that a conglomeration of words makes you laugh or cry or get angry,” he says. “For me, that is magical. Reading can be magical.”

Interviews were translated from Spanish.