Journalist, writer and essayist Beatriz Sarlo, an iconic figure of Argentine culture as an outstanding literary and cultural critic, has died at the age of 82.
Three weeks ago, Sarlo had suffered a stroke which complicated her health. Even though she managed to emerge from the intensive therapy ward at the Sanatorio Otamendi hospital, she underwent a relapse in her final hours and died on Tuesday, December 17.
After the death of her partner, filmmaker Rafael Filippelli, last March, she fell into depression and her health began to suffer, local media reported. Her ex-husband Alberto Sato is expected to return from Chile to oversee the final farewell.
Sarlo’s loss represents an irreparable loss for the cultural world. Her work explored the tensions between tradition and modern life, as well as the place of Argentina in a globalised world. In one of her last statements to the La Nación newspaper, the writer revealed that she was working on her memoirs.
Sarlo won recognition for her vast academic track record numerous books, including Escenas de la vida posmoderna (“Scenes of Post-Modern Life”), her 1994 bestseller. Other essential titles such as Una modernidad periférica (1988), Borges, un escritor en las orillas in 1993, La pasión y la excepción (2003), Siete ensayos sobre Walter Benjamin y la cultura (2000) and La audacia y el cálculo: (Néstor) Kirchner 2003-2010 in 2011, often combining literary, political and cultural analysis.
The writer’s body of work in culture and literature won her important prizes such as a Guggenheim scholarship, the Premio Konex de Platino, the Premio Pluma de Honor de la Academia Nacional de Periodismo de la Argentina, the Premio a la Trayectoria del Fondo Nacional de las Artes, the Ordem do Mérito Cultural da República do Brasil and the Premio Internacional ‘Pedro Henríquez Ureña,’ awarded by the Dominican Republic in 2015.
Sarlo’s impact was often felt beyond the literary world and academic sphere too. Not only was she a welcome guest as a panellist or commentator on television shows discussing current issues as one of the most lucid and articulate talking heads but during the coronavirus pandemic she played a key role in exposing the ‘VIP vaccination’ scandal when in March, 2021 she became the only celebrity to reveal having received an offer to jump the queue (made by Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof’s wife), while also refusing.
Literary career
Sarlo was born in this city on March 29, 1942, the daughter of Saúl Sarlo Sabajanes and Leocadia Beatriz del Río. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) at the age of 26, then beginning a career linked to cultural analysis and literary criticism.
In 1978 she co-founded the magazine Punto de Vista, a key publication in the intellectual resistance to the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. She edited the magazine, which she created together with Carlos Altamirano, Ricardo Piglia and Elías Semán, for three decades. The publication was an important disseminator of studies in the fields of social sciences, culture and literature, consecrating her as an outstanding intellectual of her times.
As from the return of democracy in 1983, Punto de Vista became a famous reference-point for cultural and political expression in Argentina, advancing concepts for intellectual debate.
Sarlo taught Argentine literature at UBA’s Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, giving courses as a visiting professor at such universities in the United States as Columbia, Berkeley, Maryland and Minnesota. She was also a member of the Wilson Center in Washington DC and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlín while being named Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge in England.
In 1982, she co-authored her first book Literatura y sociedad with her then partner, the sociologist and essayist Carlos Altamirano. In that work, together with Ensayos argentinos: de Sarmiento a la vanguardia (1983), the couple discussed the importance of literature in history.
It was a love she would share with readers of her work for decades to come.
Final writings
Last February, the author’s last book, Las dos torres, reached bookshelves nationwide. Across a collection of essays, Sarlo analyses different contemporary expressions in cinema, music and theatre to observe what place surprise, scandal and new ideas might have in current culture.
“What will become of art under the mandate of democratic diversity and political correctness?” the author asks.
In her last column published in Perfil, Sarlo shared ‘El ensayo y su búsqueda' (The essay and its quest), a fragment from Las dos torres examining the essay genre, its process and elements and the importance of speaking out first in order to think and then write.
“All good essayists are writers in the sense that [Roland] Barthes gave that word. The essay writes up [and describes] a quest. Its model could be the Proustian novel: writing to find, to show the scheming and the difficulties into which you are forced when following a trail while going astray; not to write to tell what has already been found: ‘I see things clearly in my thoughts up to the horizon but I endeavour to describe only those things which are on the other side of the horizon.’”
– TIMES
