Farewell to Jorge Edwards, a writer who loved life to the point of feeling himself a slave to beauty

“I love life and everything in it captures me. I like beautiful women and black label whiskey. The good life enslaved me, but I tried never to be a slave to the slogan. I succeeded, to a certain extent, out of a deep love for freedom.” This is how the Chilean writer, journalist and diplomat Jorge Edwards (Santiago de Chile, 1931) expressed himself recently in an interview with journalist Miguel Lorenci. The narrator died this Friday in Madrid at the age of 92. ., confirmed by the publishing house Acantilado and the Penguin Group. Nationalized Spanish in 2010, lawyer by profession, was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1999.

The author is considered an essential voice of Latin America, especially because of the sensitivity and sharpness with which he critically portrayed the society and class system of Chile at that time. “When we want to know what Chile was in that generation, we will have to turn to Edwards,” the president of the Chilean Academy of Languages, Adriana Valdés, told Efe on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the author of works such as the weight of the night (1965). Valdés recalled that his work was banned by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and that he gave the first signals of alarm regarding Cuba and the conflict that existed there between intellectual freedom and revolutionary ideas.

Edwards, extols Acantilado, was one of the most important figures in today’s literature in the Spanish language. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Chile and at Princeton University, and between 1957 and 1973 he held various diplomatic posts in Latin America and Europe. Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1994, as a writer – he started as an excellent storyteller and over the years became a recognized novelist – he cultivated both novels and short stories as well as essays, and was translated into various languages. Among his major themes was family order as repression against disorder and dissent (the last sister, Cliff, 2016). Besides that the last sisterpublished by the publishing house Barcelona oh bad (2019), his special dedication to Neruda and, above all, to literature.

a victim of sexual abuse

Edwards, recalls Efe, studied at the San Ignacio school – where, according to what he denounced, he was sexually abused by a priest from Cádiz in 2012 – and graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Chile, although he knew that law was not for him true passion.

This was soon demonstrated by the appearance of his first book in 1952. Yard, a bouquet of stories with which he received the first applause and that catapulted him towards a long story. The first to appear was the weight of the nighta story about a middle-class family that delves into the intricacies of decadence – one of the pervasive themes of his work – and in which politics – another of his obsessions – is present in a subtle but very decisive way.

It would later be followed by highly acclaimed works such as stone guests (1978), Museum of wax figures (1981), A dream of a story (2000) and Dostoevsky’s house (2008), with which he crossed borders and which, along with José Donos, Enrique Lafourcade and Claudio Giaconi, made him one of the leading voices of the so-called “generation of the 50s”. A group of writers who are sometimes compared to classics of American literature such as Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. In a way, they inaugurated in their country a taste for what happens inside, from the houses inwards, compared to the previous trend, the Creole style, which focused on costumes, landscapes and traditions.

Diplomat at the time of Allende

Less mentioned is his role as a diplomat, a career he joined in 1954 and which had its first big moment in 1970, during the start of the socialist government of Salvador Allende, who relied on his skills to restore relations with Cuba.

However, Edwards’ closeness to Castro’s opposition intellectuals led Cuban leader Fidel Castro to regard him as a non grata, the title he used to open a memoir about those days. The volume gained the merit of being banned by both the Cuban and Chilean regimes, in addition to earning the enmity of left-wing political forces and causing great controversy among Latin American writers.

A friend of Pablo Neruda, he wrote a book about the author Twenty love songs and a song of despair titled Farewell poet: Pablo Neruda and his era (1990) and a novel inspired by his character: oh bad (2019).

In 1973, shortly after the coup against President Allende that led to military repression and the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, he traveled to Madrid, where he lived and worked for five years.

Returning to Chile in 1978, he joined the Chilean Language Academy and contributed to the founding of the Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Expression.

In 1988, he was one of the founders of the political movement Independent for Democratic Consensus and? After the end of the dictatorship, President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle appointed him ambassador to UNESCO (1994-1996).

In 2010, he was appointed ambassador to Paris by the new government of Sebastián Piñera, a politician Edwards publicly supported during the election campaign, and Spain granted him citizenship with a letter of naturalization.