Nora Catelli's 'Other People's Bookshelves' Explores Exile and Literature as Homeland

Nora Catelli's "Estanterías ajenas" (Other People's Bookshelves) delves into the profound connection between reading, memory, and the experience of exile. The book's cataloging terms, "Reading. Autobiographical memory. Exile", aptly introduce the seven chapters that follow.

In the initial chapter, "A Justification: Books, Encounters, Scenes, Searches," Catelli recounts an early realization at age eight: "War was the center of books, what explains their existence, which is to draw the trace of what is lost." This theme of loss and survival, particularly for those marked by migration, illuminates Catelli's own journey.

Catelli details her flight from Argentina in 1975, escaping the Triple A with her partner, Jorge Belinsky. She recounts taking only "The Wings of the Dove" by Henry James and a volume by Mikhail Bakhtin, leaving behind her home and country. Her exile led her to Spain, where she found new "bookshelves", a personal cartography of readings, exiles, and discoveries.

Literature, for Catelli, transcends mere reading; it becomes a foundational element of identity. She describes her "dazzlement by the proximity of human models and understandable aspirations" in authors like Zola, Stendhal, the Brontës, and Flaubert. These characters, mirroring historical events, offered a different kind of rebellion than those found in Gide or Faulkner.

Drawing on Fernando Pessoa's idea that "the homeland is language," Catelli redefines this concept, stating, "My mother tongue was books." Her "Estanterías ajenas" charts a unique homeland-language, one of "logos and its cosmogony," an acquired, universal patria forged through "ambulatory formation." Like Cheever's swimmer returning home through others' pools, Catelli navigates the landscapes and faces presented by the written word.