Review of the book "A way to reach the future": last sunsets in the century

An old mattress, a dog named Tapial, a candy that shines on the sidewalk, a neighbor who dreams and bangs on a wall, the memory of lovers, the light cables that seem to divide the image between the sky of everyday life. and the horizon of a minor apocalypse: it is in that neighborhood and on that map where it takes place A way to get to the futurethe last (and perhaps the best) book by Santiago Venturini.

A first detail: each of the poems in the book has no title and begins in lowercase. That is to say: there is no clear indicator that separates one poem from another. It is as if this time the beginning or the end did not matter, as if each poem calmly followed the course of the previous one, without grand gestures, without labels, capital letters or fireworks.

Second detail: in this, as in several of Venturini’s books, the construction of the character is a fundamental procedure. Each of the poems will revolve around that character, like satellites and blogs. “I have a wooden table / and four chairs in case guests arrive / my idea of the future was different / but not so different”, he tells us. “For a long time I’ve been trying to become/ a new man/ but I’m barely able/ to brush my teeth/ and turn off the lights/ before going to sleep.”

The overall effect is that of an intimate diary in verse and even that of a kind of Instagram anti-profile where each poem keeps the residue of the passage of time. This tension between the past and the future is traversed by the tension between the instantaneous and what lasts, between the particular and the general, as if that life were not just a life, as if that man who throws poems from solitude did not stop being , too, any of us.

“Today is the first day of the rest of my life”, begins by saying, overwhelmed, the character of The orchid thief, probably the best film from the Kaufman-Jonze duo. The latest book by Santiago Venturini could well portray that same character: a sorrowful man, with a grim face, head down, closer to 40 than to 20. Although, as in that film, suddenly, almost without realizing it , something else begins to happen: an adventure, the fleeting possibility of change, that intense and incomparable experience of the present body, the precarious allure of the 21st century.