Juan Filloy, Op Oloop (Latin American Literature)
, Trans. by Lisa Dillman, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009."Mr. Optimus Oloop is a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires. His life runs according to a methodical and rigid schedule, with everything—from his meals down to his regular visits to the city brothels—timed to the minute. But when an insignificant traffic delay upsets this sacred schedule, and on the day of Oloop's engagement party, the clock begins ticking down towards a catastrophe that no amount of planning will avert. A playful and unpredictable masterpiece of Argentinean literature, raising comparisons to Ulysses and serving as a primary inspiration to authors such as Julio Cortázar and Alfonso Reyes, Op Oloopis the first novel by lawyer, Hellenist, boxing referee, and decagenarian Juan Filloy (1894-2000) to be translated into English."
"The first English translation of the 1934 novel by prolific Argentinean author Filloy (who died in 2000 at age 106) is a meandering day-in-the-life chronicle of Optimus Oloop, a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires, who is described as method personified—an accomplished executioner of spontaneity. His wanderings begin one morning when, on a routine trip to a Turkish-Roman bath, a minor traffic accident unglues him from his punctual reality. Filloy zips frantically between lengthy ruminations steeped in flowery, occasionally madeup language as Op unravels recklessly through his day. Like its main character in the throes of his breakdown, the narrative is at turns fascinating and impossible: Filloy shines in small moments when he displays his expert wordplay—Op's hilarious journal of the prostitutes he's known, or the occasional colorful aphorism—but more often the dense landscape of his language swallows the narrative and ditches the reader." - Publishers Weekly
"A prolific polymath, Argentinean writer Juan Filloy mastered seven languages, worked as a boxing referee, lawyer and judge, and authored 55 novels during his 106 years. The first of these to arrive in English translation is his most famous work, (originally published in 1934), which follows a Finnish statistician on a daylong romp around Buenos Aires.
The meticulous, titular Oloop metes out the deeds of daily life according to strict routine. Once that routine is thrown asunder on the day of his engagement party, Oloop’s battle to regain composure becomes his mental—and marital—undoing. At a bathhouse, the Finnish consulate, botanical gardens, a hotel banquet, and finally the portside brothels, Oloop loses his marbles amid rollicking descriptive flourishes from Filloy, an expert palindromist who delighted in multilingual flights of fancy.
Occasionally ranting against the depravity of life unhinged from his beloved “method,” Oloop’s struggle is at turns pathetic and hilarious, though he persists to the very last." - Paste Magazine
"The first time I heard of Juan Filloy was during an editorial trip to Germany, organized by the German Book Office and including a day of “speed dating” with other publishers. It was at one of my first “dates” that I met the very hip editors from Tropen Verlag who, after finding out that I worked at Dalkey Archive, the publisher of David Markson’s best works, suggested that instead of doing any of the German authors they might recommend, the one author that Dalkey absolutely had to publish was the Argentine writer Juan Filloy, especially his Op Oloop.
Before even getting to his actual novels, there’s a lot Filloy had going for him:
■He lived in three centuries—born in the nineteenth, and passing away in 2000 at the age of 106;
■Julio Cortazar loved him, and references his Caterva in chapter 108 of Hopscotch;
■Freud was a fan of Op Oloop, which led to a personal correspondence between the two;
■Filloy was a lover of palindromes and wrote over 6,000;
■and, not to be overlooked, almost all fifty-plus of his novels and collections of poems have seven-letter titles. (Op Oloop, Caterva, Vil y Vil, so on and so forth.)
Who wouldn’t want to publish someone like this? And thankfully, six years later, Op Oloop is finally available to English readers. (Hopefully it won’t take another six years for Caterva to come out.)
The plot of Op Oloop is pretty simple: it chronicles the final day and night in the life of its titular character, Op Oloop, a Finnish transplant in Buenos Aires who is recently engaged to Franziska, the Finnish consul’s niece. As he likes to state, Op Oloop is a “man of method,” a statistician who lives his life in a very orderly, pre-arranged way.
Thus, Op Oloop was convinced yet again that it was simply impossible for him to act contrary to his nature. “SUNDAY: WRITING, BETWEEN 7:00 AND 10:00 A.M.” That was the rule. When life is as ordered as a mathematical equation, you can’t just skip a digit whenever you feel like it. Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine; even such a trivial, graphical set such as addressing an envelope he’d already begun while still within the allotted time.
It’s clear from the start that Op Oloop isn’t all there—his speech to the employees at his local spa about the need to unite on tipping and form a “Gratuity International” is proof enough—but on this particular day, things go from bad to worse, as Op’s “method” is thwarted and he can’t regain his sense of order.
Filloy’s protagonist is a step beyond eccentric, and Lisa Dillman’s ability to capture his peculiar speech, wordplay, and insanity is quite impressive. This is especially true in the lengthy section detailing Op Oloop’s special dinner with his friends (in preparation for him to sleep with his 1,000th prostitute—a situation that doesn’t go according to plan and is the final nail that breaks Op’s mind). This dinner is the section of the book that seems most Cortazar-like (Hopscotch is filthy with groups of characters bantering and making statements about Argentina and its people), although Filloy’s not quite as tight and witty and fluid as Cortazar (who is?).
“In Hollywood, everyone knows the caloric value of everything. Just as they all aspire unanimously to stardom, they’re all equally fanatical about being tres mince rather than overweight. Truly, there’s a veritable obsession with fat. Dieting forces them all to undertake endless calculations and combinations. All portions are measured on a basis of one-hundred-calorie units. For example, one hundred calories equals: a tablespoon of honey, or two mandarin oranges, or four dates, or twenty asparagus tips, or a quarter-inch thick steak measuring five inches long and two and a half inches wide . . .” “So you must’ve gone round with tape measures, eyedroppers, and scales . . .” “It’s not a joke. You know, I’ve noticed that Argentines in general tend to be quite sarcastic, yet they’re entirely lacking in humor deep down. They make fun of everything in particular, and yet as a nation are all unanimously dull. It’s truly incongruous!”
As the novel lurches from scene to scene, Filloy creates an interesting account of one man’s mental breakdown. With the exception of what happens at the whorehouse, most of the underlying motivations for his breakdown are mysterious, summed up by the idea that he’s “method personified.” A more conventional book would delve into this issue, maybe explain how the hell he ended up with Franziska in the first place, etc., etc., but this isn’t a conventional book. It’s a more daring, playful novel, that, while not perfect, is one of the most fun novels I’ve read this year. I only wish the graph of Op Oloop’s day that’s in the Spanish edition was also included in this galley."- Three Percent
"Op Oloop, the protagonist of this novel, is a Finnish statistician -- and ratio incarnate, "method personified". He is governed by numbers, and hence:
Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine; even such a trivial, graphical act such as addressing an envelope he'd already begun while still within the allotted time.
Yes:
When life is as ordered as a mathematical equation, you can't just skip a digit whenever you like it.
Needless to say, life doesn't always play along (indeed, it's a wonder he's gotten this far), and early during the less than twenty-four hour span of the novel Oloop gets bumped slightly off course (which is enough for him to find: "All my methodology has gone straight to hell") and never manages to get quite back on again.
Love is a further complication, as he has fallen in love with the niece of the local Finnish Consul, Franziska Hoerée. It was on his way to an engagement party for the two of them that he got thrown off track -- thrown for an (unending) loop, in fact ("I can't seem to bring the experience to a close", he notes with considerable dismay). And he finds:
My personality is built on reflection, but I can no longer see myself.
Still, he remains somewhat attuned to what is happening to him, even as he senses it is destroying him:
The miracle of love has plotted the definitive sabotage of my spirit. I note intolerable obstacles, steel traps that make my psychological gears slip and destroy the harmonious mechanics of my system. It's deplorable.
Both he and Franziska are quite undone by the turn of events -- yet also find themselves connected on a higher spiritual plane: a meeting of minds and souls that continues through the book, even as they are separated. Oloop stumbles through the rest of the day and night, spending most of it at a grand dinner with some friends, still unable to gather himself. A further crisis comes in the form of the discovery of an unexpected link to his past. It's all a bit much for him to bear.
A friend diagnoses:
His tragedy lies in numbers: in being all method and no style. His esprit de geometrie forces a square peg into a round hole, as it were. He wants to chart and graph it all ! But the sentimental beings who inhabit our souls can't be organized into numerical series, coordinates, formulas. We've heard his heart explode. Perfection, shot to pieces ! Filloy focusses largely on the already broken man, his precision and pedantry a memory that Oloop desperately tries to cling to but that slips like sand through his fingers. The novel veers between slapstick humor, philosophising, and ethereal romance; just as he doesn't allow his protagonist to get his bearings, Filloy toys with the reader, too.
Filloy - one of whose favorite literary forms was the palindrome -- can well be considered a pre-Oulipoian writer with the games he plays in his text and the mix of maths and wordgames, and he uses all these to good effect in this novel. Not all of this comes across in translation: Filloy likes his puns, and only some of these can be conveyed in the English. His fondness for the grand pronouncements and philosophical flights of fancy comes across better: the novel is full of wonderfully put thoughts, from the pithy -- "Love is a plane crash of the soul" -- to the discursive:
Life itself - which for Goethe was multiple in character, and for Kant, rational - is not necessarily extinguished by the demise of one or even thousands of its integral elements. So, for people who are chronologically infirm, the voyage of life is nothing more than a funeral cortège mathematically culminating in the necropolis, when matter finally becomes entirely overwhelmed, and perishes.
And, of course, there's Oloop's wonderful cri de cœur to Franziska:
Oh no, cherie ! They'll never be able to abelardize us ! Our union is incoercible. It can't be touched by vulgarity. If any difficulties arise, our mutual trust will overcome them. I'm nothing like Abelard. No one can abelardize me ! And they'll certainly never manage to abelardize us ! (No one has any idea what he means by that, but someone does note: "It's a neologism. That's a bad sign")
Op Oloop is a strange, playful novel, as Filloy twists the story around the flights of fancy and philosophy that seem to be the main excuse for it. It is decidedly odd, but sparkles in its oddity.
Well worthwhile." - M. A. Orthofer
"Juan Filloy was an Argentine writer with a dramatic bio that includes boxing referee and palindromist. His writing exhibits the love of words and philosophy of the latter; the no-nonsense, unflinching eye of the former. He lived to be 106, having died in 2000, and in some circles is placed alongside some of Latin America’s best writers of the 20th century, such as his friends Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges.
As if all that weren’t enough, he’s also funny. Would that Op Oloop, the main character from Mr. Filloy’s first translated novel Op Oloop, could have shared a bit of the whimsy that Filloy sprinkled through the text around him. Oloop’s worldview and the “life” he lived—for lack of a better word—might have been far different.
Optimus “Op” Oloop is a man bound by his wristwatch. His life is a carefully timed, systematized, and ultimately hollow mechanism. Locked into patterns that dictate every action, he finally winds the spring too tight when he prepares for his engagement party. His self-imposed binds are evident in his preparations. As invitations are prepared the clock strikes ten. Oloop stops, mid-invitation, that of his closest friend, because in his schedule he doesn’t write letters after ten.
His servant mails the others, but his best friend isn’t invited. On the eve of his biggest achievement, the marriage into politically connected and successful family, Oloop won’t break free of his own arbitrary rules.
This is because success, for Oloop and his friends, is the result of ignoring better impulses. Rewards fall upon those who close their eyes to suffering.
The irony of this is heightened by the novel’s location and setting: Argentina in the ‘30s, a world not yet past the scars of the First World War and the Great Depression, not yet willing to see the horrors of World War II on the horizon. Ironic, too, is that Oloop is a communist who is successful in capitalism. He treats workers poorly, offers unwanted advice about unionizing immediately after snarky criticism. He talks to the proletariat as if waiters and pedicurists can’t hear him simply because he isn’t speaking to them.
His regimented lifestyle has made him an expert on the world. His statistician’s eye keeps his nose in ledgers, deciphering the world through its use of lumber, condoms, and the reclaimed remains of soldiers lost on the Great War’s battlefields. Emotionally scarred by horrors he saw in an unsuccessful communist uprising in Finland and work for the US ARMY identifying soldiers’ remains, Oloop lives so rigidly it’s a wonder his ties don’t snap when knotted.
When an emotional outburst makes him late for an appointment with his fiancé and others, his descent begins. Nothing has been lost, his future father-in-law urges him to realize, but for Oloop it’s too late. His gears have slipped. Undone, he ricochets between manic, moralizing speeches and catatonic episodes. By the time Oloop reaches his engagement party, which takes up most of the book, he has already suffered a head wound (from the Finnish Ambassador) and undergone a sexually themed vision shared with his fiancé (which may or may not be a psychic link).
It is at his party that a variety of life-philosophies collide, in the form of Oloop’s “friends”. His friends include a submarine captain who worked for the Germans in the First World War, a French pimp and white-slaver, a medical student who intentionally fails school to avoid graduation, the head of city sanitation, and the chief air traffic controller. Each is subjected to Oloop’s strange behavior and each judges it, consoles it, or encourages it through the evening meal. The meal itself, a gastronomic tidal wave of overly rich, rare foods, served in numerous portions, awash with alcohol, and like the guests it overwhelms.
Slipping further and further away from reality, Oloop reveals the purpose of the evening. It is, he tells them after many catatonic slippages, a celebration of love and sexual record-keeping. He intends to visit his 1,000th prostitute that evening and add her to his well kept files. Oloop is sexually obsessed, as both his diary and the sexual fantasy involving his fiancé (or psychic-linkage with his fiancé, depending on whether you’re a romantic or not) reveal. His friendships with a syphilitic med-student and French white slaver/pimp remind us further of this proclivity.
The book is surprising in its use of sex. The humor is often dirty, language rude, but ultimately very real. The party conversation is frat-boy authentic. The sexual fantasy with his fiancé is beautifully absurd. For him it is time to revel in his achievement: 1,000 whores and a pending marriage.
The dinner and alcohol draw out his friends’ judgments and prejudices against him and one another, and Oloop leaves, in a fit, ready to find the prostitute, his 1,000th, that his white-slaver friend promises is a “new Swede”. Oloop ultimately cannot handle the encounter, the prostitute is not whom the madam or pimp claim, and she brings with her too much of Oloop’s past, his hurt, his claims to living too forcefully in love. It drives him to action as unavoidable as it is expected.
At this point it is worth remembering that an old maxim states it’s not the destination but the journey. So, although much of the novel is predictable, it still forces consideration; both for its bluntly stated philosophies, and its jokes, parodies and satires of those philosophies. The novel is both humorous and absurd. Like the best satire it is an understated undermining of a lifestyle it illustrates in perfect, chiseled detail.
At times, however, the novel almost doesn’t hold together. It is so in Oloop that it is nearly as rigid as he, and perhaps denser. Little plot, much character. Despite this, it maintains a sense of itself, in much the same way that Oloop, despite fantasy and self-satisfied-delusion still maintains some sense of himself. And while the end is easily seen coming, it is not disappointing.
Finally, the best and worst compliment for the novel is that it skewers those social mechanisms and the gears within it that still labor today, making Op Oloop sadly, obviously, relevant to contemporary readers.Op Oloop is set in an economically collapsed society with an out of touch bourgeoisies, just after a bloody war based on sloganeering, and its rife with individuals soaked in patriotism and sexual identity who wear their success as a burden." - Sean Ferrell
"In the spirit of our PerecFest, I recommend Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop, published last summer by Dalkey Archive in Lisa Dillman’s ingenious translation. The title chimes with upending as well as with Oulipo, both appropriate cognates for Filloy’s ludic acrobatics.
Filloy spoke seven languages, created over six thousand palindromes, used only seven letters in the titles of his books, and lived in three centuries, dying in 2000 at the age of 106—a description worthy of his creation Optimus Oloop, a Finnish statistician living in Buenos Aires. Oloop, the ultimate method man, lives on a rigid schedule—“Op Oloop was entirely incapable of any impromptu act that might violate the pre-established norms of his routine” —and a timetable straight fromMussolini’s trains; a minor delay throws him off the grid and into chaos.
Op Oloop has, to his surprise and dismay, fallen in love: “The miracle of love has plotted the definitive sabotage of my spirit. I note intolerable obstacles, steel traps that make my psychological gears slip and destroy the harmonious mechanics of my system. It's deplorable”; he struggles to reconcile his precise nature with the vagaries of emotion (“I like you just the way you are: Height: 162 centimeters; neck: 32.4 centimeters; bust: 82 centimeters . . .”). Late for his own engagement party, he falls into a reverie when he realizes he has arrived at 10:04 on April 22—22:04 on 04/22; but this is the last gasp of the rational man. “We’ve heard his heart explode,” observes a friend. “Perfection shot to pieces.”
Chockablock with neologisms (“They’ll never abelardize us!”) and word play (he refers to France’s “three great clods”: Bernard, Monet, and Debussy), this pre-Oulipoian (Oloopian?) romp is a must read for lovers of Perec, and a fine introduction to this dazzling writer." - Susan Harris
"Filloy lived to be 106, finally expiring in his sleep in 2000. Unlike Rosales, Filloy lived a charmed, somewhat leisurely life. He spoke seven languages, and was a talented caricaturist, boxing referee, palindromist (he composed over six thousand), and judge in his hometown of Río Cuarto, Argentina, where he lived, some say, to escape the pernicious literary society of Buenos Aires. According to Op Oloop’s translator, Lisa Dillman, much of what Filloy wrote “he simply passed around to friends” instead of submitting it for publication. Nonetheless, Julio Cortázar cited Filloy as a formative influence, and he’s said to be experiencing a “cult following” in Latin America today.
Op Oloop was first published in 1934. The protagonist, Optimus (“Op”) Oloop, is a 39-year-old Finnish statistician whose legendary gift for self-discipline goes to pieces when he falls in love—for the first time—with a beautiful virgin named Franciszka. The story takes place in one day: the eve of his betrothal, which is also the night of his 1,000th “fuck” with a prostitute. And, though it begins cinematically, with Op gallivanting about town, it quickly fades into an extended lyrical discourse on love, with echoes of Montaigne (“Love, at times, follows the path of truth. But friendship, almost unfailingly, follows a more tortuous path”) and Freud (“The human condition imposes ineludible obligations which it is necessary to fulfill so as not to fall into psycho-moral trauma”). The plot is all but replaced by armchair psychoanalysis and a fragrant cloud of aphorisms: “Love, like blood, contains biological permanent characteristics;” “Love requires freedom, or else it asphyxiates;” “Love is a plane crash of the soul.”
One is left with the impression of a virtuosic, wildly passionate, and often hilarious writer writing primarily for his own aesthetic amusement. Filloy’s storyline exits at so many metaphorical cloverleafs—with lengthy explorations, for example, of the similarities between crime and pregnancy, or between the psyche and the Mediterranean Sea—that the novel runs out of gas before reaching its destination. The language is impressively ornate, with lovers’ souls merging “telestically in the grace of a Pythagorean rapture.” And the author provides a splendid portrait of the pre-modern metrosexual, personified by Op Oloop, whose symptoms include “inexcusable levels of urbanity” and “respecting himself altogether too much.” Yet Filloy’s verbal facility couldn’t hold this reader’s attention. Which is another way of saying Op Oloop lacks urgency of purpose—something which might be too much to ask from a 75-year-old work that may not have been written for publication." - Jed Lipinski
"Quirky Argentine writer who was born in the 19th century and composed more than 6,000 palindromes JUAN FILLOY, who has died a few days before his 106th birthday [2000.], was a prolific and adventurous writer, admired by Sigmund Freud, among others.
In his native Argentina he remained largely unknown until his last few years. He spent the whole of it in provincial obscurity, far from Buenos Aires literary society. Lately he has been rediscovered by younger writers and critics, who have compared him with Jorge Luis Borges and even with Balzac.
Filloy enjoyed his latter-day acclaim, but had never bothered to cultivate a readership or follow fashions. He wrote as he pleased, and did not mind if his work was unappreciated by public, critics or publishers. It did not worry him that he never made enough to live on from his writings. Indeed, he made a virtue of working purely for his own satisfaction - he said he felt a physical compulsion to write.
Most of his books had tiny print runs, which he paid for himself. He would point out that he was rarely noticed by the Buenos Aires papers because his publishers did not send out review copies. Filloy wrote 40 works of fiction and poetry that grew quirkier with every volume, crammed with allusions and conceits. Several had seven-letter titles: Estafen, Aquende, Finesse and Balumba, all written in the 1930s, his most creative period.
The best known, Op Oloop (1934), was about an obsessively tidy and methodical mathematician who eventually went mad. Some considered it pornographic, but Freud liked it so much that he sent Filloy a hand-written letter of congratulations - and kept up a correspondence for several years.
A later novel, Vil y Vil (1975), was banned by the military dictatorship then ruling Argentina, which was suspicious of intellectuals of every stripe, and Filloy was pulled in for questioning. They soon let him go, as he refused to talk about anything but literary theory.
Filloy cultivated almost every genre, including short stories, essays, plays, journalism and - most remarkable of all - palindromes, of which he wrote more than 6,000. One example gives something of the flavour: dábale arroz a la zorra el abad (the abbot used to give rice to the vixen - though the Spanish syntax is convoluted).
Filloy was president of the Argentine society of authors in 1939, but wider recognition came much later. The government gave him an award for a lifetime's achievements when he was 102. He never lost his lucidity and mental energy; he was at work on eight different manuscripts at the time of his death.
Juan Filloy was born in Córdoba, Argentina, on August 1 1894, the son of a Spanish grocer and his French Basque wife, who took in washing to make ends meet. They were illiterate, but scrimped and saved to send Juan to school. He spoke French at home before Spanish, and his writing had a strong French influence.
Filloy practised for more than 40 years as a lawyer in his native province of Córdoba. He later moved to R¿¤o Cuarto, and accepted tiny fees to defend the poor. He also founded a local gallery for Argentine art.
Filloy married, in 1930, Paulina Warshawsky, who was born in London of Jewish immigrant parents; she died in 1983. They had a son and a daughter.“ - The Telegraph
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