Living in literature: talent and gift of/from Cristina Peri Rossi

Abstract

In this article, written as a tribute, the self-definition of Cristina Peri Rossi as a “writer of the imagination” is revealed in order to thus, through the concept of the postulated author, assume the complicit responsibility of imagining her –the author–, living in the literature. This takes place through the reading of three texts: “Tsunami” (2007), a story that supports an autobiographical reading; the explicitly autobiographical novel entitled La insumisa (2020); and, finally, the story “Estate violenta” (1980), apparently alien to the Uruguayan-Spanish writer's self but which, like the two previous cases, overlaps and combines fictions, among them those of an author who plays at being imagined.