By Looking at Everything, She Couldn’t See Anything
(Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía)
2018
In an era of perturbingly too much information –of tweets, of posts, of selfies, and of fake, real, irrelevant, and horrific news– it’s easy to get lost in it all. What is important and what is not? How can you tell, when the same news outlet on the same day let’s you know that Gorge Clooney got married, that hundreds of Palestinian children died last year, that drinking coffee might actually be good for you, that Kafka has been dead for too long, and that there was, once, life on the moon? Showing an extraordinary erudition, in this book Margo Glantz, through an endless stream of phrases, builds an image of the current state of the world, making fun, and at the same time reflecting on, the way we receive information and how we categorize and rank it, or how we don’t. This is both an experiment and a statement, a book that through words becomes something else: a picture of what currently is on our minds, a photography of what we, as a society, have become –in a word: a self-portrait of us all.
Critics
“This is a book that is as contemporary as it stands beyond what’s modern and postmodern.”
—Mónica Maristain
“Current literature tends to get stuck and when it moves forward it goes towards the best selling genres. Then, it gets tiresome… Glantz stood away from complacency and published a cerebral plastic exercise –an intimate journal, in a way– that becomes a panoptic of information. The Mexican writer proves with this book that experimentation is an integral part of the literary experience instead of a weakness of the youngsters. This is evidence that you can be a top-notch academic while at the same time a provocative writer that shows herself without timidity.”
—Luis Bugarini
“[Margo Glantz] is one of the master minds of the current Mexican literature.”
—Aleks Phoenix
Rights sold
• Spanish (Mexico and Spain): Sexto Piso
• Portuguese (Brasil): Relicário Edições