Minimal Bildung

With Minimal Bildung, the Cuban-born, Barcelona-based novelist and essayist Jorge Ferrer has brought to literary life what could be the most insidious, tenacious, scornful exercise, for at least the last 50 years of Cuban letters, in writing fiction not only in exile but from it, and, a much rarer event, toward it. Moreover, Jorge Ferrer accomplishes so by means that are at the same time minimal[ist] and overloaded, as if the only way to overcome the unbearable scission between existence tout court and culture at large lied in stripping the first of its last redoubt of sentimentality, and the latter of its unsustainable claim to transcendence. Buenaventura Vichy's coming-of-age tale does not leave us with any moral more reassuring than the apparent evidence that the only possible, or lasting rite of passage is the one that takes us from one native exile through another, from its first and most lethal incarnation in the form of a fatal identity (our sin of nativeness, any nativeness) through the imposture of any form of knowledge whose authority is derived from its own inner history, not from its ability to take us beyond our splitting duality. From life to culture and back to nowhere (or just to an immanent irony whose lost referent condemns us to a wait without object), that is the fate Jorge Ferrer, and his alter egos, tell us we are invariably submitted to. In a literary landscape, that of contemporary, post-revolutionary Cuban letters, dominated either by the petty, anecdotic, often vulgar narcissism of former spoiled children fallen on hard times, or by the ventriloquism that trades spirit for letter, Jorge Ferrer’s Minimal Bildung is no small feat. This is no doubt a cruel, bitter book (perhaps the cruelest ever written in Cuban literature), but it may prove to be the most suitable remedy for certain terminal illnesses. Glenn Wertheimer