The Journey

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“Once again Pitol takes the reader on a transcendent adventure through geography and history. His voice — learned and warm — is the perfect companion on these flights, giving dramatic glimpses into the intellectual life of Soviet Prague one moment and inimitable insights into literature the next. The reader leaves the pages wiser, more enriched and able to fully appreciate Pitol’s status in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.” —MARK HABER, Brazos Bookstore

“Reading him, one has the impression…of being before the greatest Spanish-language writer of our time.” —ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS, author of Dublinesque

“Masterful.” —Dallas Observer on The Art of Flight

There is a story that Sergio Pitol used to often tell when he still led a public life, and which he recorded in The Art of Flight. At the beginning of the eighties he spent a two-month vacation in Mexico City, after having lived for years in Barcelona, Warsaw, Budapest, and Moscow. At the time, he was 45 and had six or seven published books; he had translated Conrad and James and had been the editor of the legendary collection Los Heterodoxos, published by Tusquets in Spain and with a wide circulation throughout the Americas. Shortly after arriving in Mexico, he received a call from the PEN Club, inviting him to participate in a series of dialogues between writers of different generations — a reading, followed by a public talk, between a veteran author and a novice. He accepted, and they announced that he would read with Juan Villoro. The event almost ended in disaster for Pitol: he thought, as he ascended the stage — twenty-three years and a pile of books older than Villoro — that he was to be the novice at the table.

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