Sergio Chejfec, Mis dos mundos (2008)

A novella of the promise and disappointment of walking an unknown city

“Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form?” once asked economist Tyler Cowen in a post on his long-running blog Marginal Revolution. He went on to give his own answer: “I am.” The context was one of his occasional “What I’ve been reading” roundups, and the book in question was Mis dos mundos by Sergio Chejfec — or rather My Two Worlds, as it had just then, in 2011, been published in an English translation by Margaret Carson. Though I’d already been reading Marginal Revolution for years at that point, I can’t recall whether that description piqued my interest when Cowen first posted it, when I had scant experience with cities or travel in any case. But when I found my way back to it last year, my desire to read such a book, ideally in the Spanish original, could hardly have been stronger. Looking up Chejfec and his body of work, I wondered — as I do ever more frequently about Latin American writers — where he’d been all my life.