The No Variations: Diary of an Unfinished Novel

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“The writer doesn’t really want to write, he wants to be; and in order to truly be, he must face up to the difficult challenge of not writing at all …”

Nicasio Urlihrt, the first name we encounter in The No Variations, and the writer to whom the quotation above is attributed, can never truly be, at least in the legal or corporeal sense, unless, that is, he rearranges the letters of his name and starts calling himself Luis Chitarroni. But Urlihrt is only one among a multitude of fictive entities the author of this so-called diary has created to do his scribbling for him, so that he can face up to the truly difficult challenge of being Luis Chitarroni.

Although largely unknown in the English-speaking world, in South America he’s long been recognized as a prominent editor, literary critic, and author of exceptionally weird books. The first of these, Siluetas (Silhouettes), published in 1992, is a collection of satirical biographies of writers, both real and fictitious, that had previously appeared in the aptly named Argentine literary journal Babel. More ambitious in scope, his 1997 follow-up, El Carapálida (The Paleface), is perhaps the only book he’s yet written that can properly be described as a “novel.” Set in an elementary school in Argentina in the early seventies, it is in fact a pasquinade on the bourgeois pretentions and puerile rivalries among Buenos Aires writers and intellectuals at that time. For his next work, Chitarroni planned to write a hybrid of the preceding two.

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