Urban Voodoo, by Edgardo Cozarinsky, is a slightly intimidating book to review, as Susan Sontag has written an excellent introduction, but I’ll do so nonetheless, as it is unjustifiably out of print despite being (I am convinced) one of the great works of late 20th century literature. Sontag compares Cozarinsky, who was also a film maker, to Godard in his blurring of essay and (autobiographical) story (“like Godard, who said he wanted to make fiction films that are like documentaries and documentaries that are like fiction films”) and in his use of quotation. For me, however—and there really is no higher praise—Cozarinsky brought to mind Chris Marker, with his errant, irony-tinged lyricism, blending of essay and fiction/poetry, invocation of epistolarity/postcards, and vision of postmodernity as melancholic drift (rather than, say, playful iconoclasm). Not to say that Cozarinsky doesn’t have preoccupations of his own, which include, inter alia, bitter reflections on class in Argentina and a poetics of commerce and decaying port cities…

Sontag also situates Cozarinsky as a writer of exile and transnationality. This is a biographical fact: the Argentinian Cozarinsky was living in Paris while writing these “postcards”, many of which are dated to the time of the dictatorship. It’s also a feature of the composition of the book, which emerged in translation, written partly in English before being translated back into Cozarinsky’s native Spanish. But I’d like to take a moment to dwell on a different (though, here, thematically related) type of liminality permeating Urban Voodoo: the liminal time between day and night, which Cozarinsky portrays with cinematographic sensitivity. The book opens with a neon-lit odyssey (katabasis) that dissolves the boundaries between Paris and Buenos Aires, living and dead. (For those interested, Cozarinsky explores a similar concept in the 2005 film Night Watch, about a gay street walker in Buenos Aires, which is very much worth seeking out). Elsewhere, he pairs twilit scenes of Buenos Aires and Paris, where the “elusive moment” before nightfall intoxicates with memory and desire (memory of desire), heightens fleeting perceptions and leads reality off into fiction. Of Buenos Aires on late spring evenings, Cozarinsky writes: “How engrossing to feel those barely tangible changes taking place around you, while the city staged undistinguished crowd scenes. How easy to stay there. To watch. To feel. To stay.” These sentences, with their poignant repetition of “to stay”, express the melancholy of displacement as well as the intoxication of the magic hour. But isn’t this desire to prolong an elusive sensation/state of sensitivity also what makes reading so pleasurable?