Almost certainly the best-loved writer in his native Peru, Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1929-1994) was a superb storyteller whose work has not yet been widely published in English translation. Some of his books are exceedingly hard to find even in Peru. Dichos de Luder ("Luder's Sayings"), for example, a collection of aphorisms, appeared in the late nineteen-eighties in a single printing of five hundred copies, 250 of which, in lieu of an advance on royalties, went to Ribeyro himself. A form of censorship, the censorship of the market, prevents the book from being reissued. And yet, Dichos de Luder circulates widely: as with samizdat in the old days of the Soviet Union, dirty copies pass from hand to hand. The entire book is posted on the web. There are even excerpts from English translations of the book on blogs kept by Ribeyro's admirers from around the world:
Luder's Sayings
Julio Ramón Ribeyro
"I've found out that in German your name, added to certain suffixes, means stupid, lazy, braggart—"
"Doesn't surprise me," says Luder. "I've always believed in the prophetic character of names."
*
"I've never been insulted, persecuted, injured, or exiled," says Luder. "I must therefore be a wretch."
*
"When Balzac goes into description mode," observes a friend, "he can spend forty pages describing in detail every sofa, every painting, every curtain, every lamp of a drawing room."
"I know," says Luder. "That's why I don't go into the drawing room. I go down the hall."
*
"An excellent book," says Luder, "can be an aggregate of banal sentences, just as a succession of brilliant sentences doesn't necessarily make an excellent book. In literature, oddly, the whole is not the sum of the parts."
*
"Those who know me," says Luder, "know that when I denigrate myself, it's so that they will praise me. But what they don't know is that when I praise myself, it's so that they will immediately tell me how right I am."
*
"I'm like a third-division player," complains Luder. "I scored my best goals on a dusty field in the slums in front of four drunk fans who don't remember anything."
*
He is shown an article mentioning all the writers of his generation but him.
"I escaped the round-up," says Luder.
*
"All my work is an indictment of life," says Luder. "I've done nothing to better the human condition. If my books survive it will be because of the perversity of my readers."
*
"Doesn't it bother you to have written for thirty years and achieved such little renown?" Luder is asked.
"Of course. I'd like to write thirty more years and become completely unknown."
*
"Today I have awoken feeling particularly optimistic," says Luder. "I think I'm finally going to be able to write my epitaph."
*
"Whenever someone starts by telling me, 'I'm going to be frank with you,' the hair on the back of my neck stands on end," says Luder. "I imagine I'm going to have to face some brutal truth. Pleasant as it is to live in fragile self-deceit."
*
People ask him why he sometimes gets drunk in low-class bars.
"As a precaution," says Luder. "It happens that I occasionally wake up with the vague satisfaction that I'm becoming a respectable person."
*
Luder walks quickly by a beggar who is holding his right hand out plaintively.
"Pig!" shouts the beggar.
Luder stops and goes back with a coin, smiling.
"I was just waiting for you to call me by my name."
*
"Nothing moves me more than men who cry," says Luder. "Our cowardice has made us think of weeping as something for insignificant women. When only the brave cry: Homer's heroes, for example."
*
"Literature is imposture," says Luder. "Not for nothing does it have all those rhymes."
