Tribute to the Imagined Whores of Gustavo Baudelio

by Eric Lind

“The Imagined Whores of Gustavo Baudelio” was, without doubt, my greatest success – the novel that finally brought interest to the previous two. Its triumph was due in no small part to the notable critic and essayist, Stanley Fischer, who celebrated my book in his enthusiastic review. Excessively, I thought, or at least that’s what I said in public. My book, Stanley wrote, explored the fringes of sexual behavior, violently, through a series of polyphonic narratives about the indecencies performed by the disturbed writer, Gustavo Baudelio. It is true that Baudelio used the sexual transactions to, in a sense, write life onto the pages of grotesque behavior that filled his notebooks. He believed that he had to witness (Stanley would say execute) the act itself before it could appear in its purity through language. It – the act, the image, the sensation – had to be dragged into the unknown and then followed back so he may write it (Stanley would say so he was obliged to write it). It was mechanical for Baudelio, a means. Yet Stanley wrote an inspired defense of Baudelio’s imprudence on poetic grounds, something about life and fiction cross-pollinating, something about giving language a body. In any case, I wasn’t particularly surprised to read in the paper the terrifying account of Stanley Fischer’s murder, with an editorial tribute to his distinguished career. The public is poorer that he is not with us to review the new novel I was obliged to write, about the murder of a critic.