Why Is Juan José Saer an Essential Open Letter Author?

Announcing the official release of "The Event," translated by Helen R. Lane.

I think I’m obsessed with grifters.

Supplement selling right-wing media hosts, self-styled gurus pandering in invented forms of Western yoga, Dr. Oz’s bullshit cures for Tylenol-induced autism [sic], our entire media environment . . . I mean, to be honest, what isn’t a grift in 2025?? Capitalism is basically just a grift in philosophical clothing. (M.B.A. degrees? Totally a grift.) Today’s world is a suspect place, and once you start noticing, all you can see are grifts all the way down.

That said, like all marks (aka, most people), I long for something else, for a sort of miracle of unexpectedness that causes me to rethink what I believe to be true. A peek behind the veil to something more real, something beyond explanation around which a nascent hope can grow.

Enter Bianco, the protagonist of Juan José Saer’s 1987 novel, La ocasión, translated into English by Helen R. Lane (1921–2004) as The Event. Originally published by Serpent’s Tail in 1995, and today by Open Letter, The Event, on one level, asks the question: Is Bianco a grifter? Are all of these reality-warping spiritualists just full of shit?

The novel starts in the Argentine pampas, where Bianco fled in the mid-1850s after a run of attention-grabbing performances throughout Europe—in which he showed off his supernatural mental gifts for large audiences totally mesmerized by his ability to bend spoons with a thought, read minds, etc.—was exposed by the “positivist conspiracy” as a complete fabrication. This is the time of the Fox Sisters (see: Rochester Knockings, another Open Letter book about grifters) and other spiritualists who were advancing the idea that the mind was far more powerful than science could imagine, that the world was filled with unseen forces that the illuminated could tap into, that the realm of the dead was separated from the living by a thin, pierceable barrier—if you had the gift.

But now, he lives in near-solitude in Argentina, with two close companions: Garay López, his good friend, who might be boinking his live-in girlfriend, Gina, who is trying to help Bianco regain his psychic powers. If he ever had psychic powers in the first place . . .

Which is one of the reasons this book first intrigued me—the true nature of Bianco is always held in suspense. And although the novel progresses mostly through domestic issues and more realistic, typical travails, Bianco’s foil comes in the form of Waldo, a mute child who begins to speak prophecies in verse and becomes incredibly popular, attracting people from afar, pilgrimaging with candy and gifts in hopes of receiving some extra-sensory wisdom.

It’s a bit of a strange book, even for Saer, but one that sings with his precise, evocative writing style, expertly captured by Helen R. Lane, who also translated Nobody Nothing Never and The Investigation, two other highly regarded Saer novels that Serpent’s Tail brought out in the 1990s.

Point being, this book (available today, almost exactly 17 years since the first Open Letter title, Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugresic & Ellen Elias-Bursać, was released) sent me down a Saer rabbit hole, which led to Saer becoming the second-most published author by Open Letter Books.¹

Juan José Saer, copyright by CCPE Rosario

Since reading Cortázar’s “The Continuity of Parks” in a Spanish class in college, I’ve read a ton of Argentine authors, and published a pretty fair amount of their works. (Seven via Open Letter—Chejfec, Macedonio Fernández, Fresán, Gelman, Neuman, Saccomanno, Saer—and a couple for Dalkey Archive.) There’s not a statistical basis behind this, but I find works by Argentine writers to have a perfect blend of European influence and structural experimentation. Same can be said for Chilean authors we’ve done, like Mónica-Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbé, and other authors south of the border, but for whatever reason, Argentina seems loaded with these sort of innovative, playful, intellectually stimulating authors.

And for Saer in particular, I was drawn to the way he straddles both the Argentine “tradition,” and the French Nouveau Roman, being frequently cited as an influence on Alain Robbe-Grillet. (In my memory, this is most evident in The Investigation, although it’s been 20 years since I read that particular novel. Maybe, if we can acquire the rights to this—along with those to Nobody Nothing Never and the four remaining novels that have never seen the light of English—I’ll reassess my youthful opinions.) This is, in brief, one pillar of Open Letter’s aesthetic vision, which can be traced through a number of titles we’ve done—not just the ones from the Southern Cone, but also writers like Volodine, Basara, Shishkin, etc.

At the time when I first started reading Saer, the availability of these Serpent’s Tail books were still a question, which is why, up until now, we’ve only published titles of his that hadn’t previously been translated. We started with The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, translated by Steve Dolph, about a birthday party neither of the two main characters attended and a discussion about whether a horse can simply trip. This, like many of his books, is infused with Latin American politics of the twentieth-century, which can be both dark and maybe prophetic. One funny story: This book was reviewed in The Nation, where the fact we changed the title—it was originally “Gloss”—earned us this little dig:

(The title does no favors to Steve Dolph’s translation, which is full of elegant, resourceful solutions to a most difficult text yet splotched by basic errors. Why not simply “Washington’s Sixty-Fifth,” as the phrase refers to a birthday?)

Zing!

Then we did Scars, also translated by Dolph, and one of my all-time favorite Open Letter titles. This is a telescopic book in reverse, in which a tragic event is told from the perspective of various characters, first covering a period of five months, then three, then two, then one. It’s delightful and haunting, and amazingly well-translated.

Steve Dolph returned for our third Saer, La Grande, which was Saer’s final book, left unfinished, sort of, maybe, but ends on the most perfect line with which to finish a career: “With the rain came the fall, and with the fall, the time for wine.”

After that we did The One Before translated by Roanne Kantor. This is the only story collection we’ve done: it’s three short pieces comprising a triptych of sorts. (If you don’t know already, “triptychs” are another pillar of the Open Letter aesthetosphere.) This book starts to pull on some of the threads that tie together the other Saer books . . . I don’t think his universe is as tightly wound as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, but characters recur, stories begin or are alluded to in one novel only to be completed later on . . . this too is catnip for my reading soul.

[Also, on an embarrassing note, the first edition of The One Before has an egregious typo that the cover designer accidentally inserted at the last minute. Maybe you should buy a copy now, since this is a rarity? an Open Letter collectable? And no, I’m not saying what it is. If you know, you know.]

From there we went to The Clouds translated by Hilary Vaughn Dobel (as you can see, there are a lot of top notch translators interested in working on Saer), which is set-up as a found manuscript about a Doctor Real leading five patients across Argentina to a recently built asylum. This one is relatively short, bleakly funny, and set in the early 1800s—not too many decades before Bianco arrives in Argentina in The Event.

Finally, the last new title we’ve done is The Regal Lemon Tree translated by Sergio Waisman, a hallucinatory, repetitive (think Nouveau Roman) novel over a single night and day six years after the death of a child, and featuring some scenes that evoke the work of David Lynch. (Lynch being a sort of patron saint of Open Letter as a whole.)

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These seven Saer books do, as mentioned above, lock together in various ways and, honestly, I would binge-read them all. Especially since they’re all 25% on our website through the end of the month. That includes both paperbacks and ebooks, and, well, stay tuned. I hope to both write more about Saer and have some more news about his other works in the not too distant future.

But for now, enjoy all these, and if that’s not enough, The Investigation (LOVE) and Nobody Nothing Never (a favorite of many fans and scholars) are available on the used book market.

1. The most published author is Dubrakva Ugresic with 10 titles compared to Saer’s 7. And there are a handful of others with 5 titles a piece: Rodrigo Fresán, Sara Mesa, Andrés Neuman, and Mercè Rodoreda.