Waiting for Perec, first published in a bilingual Spanish/Italian edition in 2015, is Mario Melendez's fourth full-length collection of poems. As poet, translator, and associate professor of creative writing at Princeton Katie Farris has noted, "It is a tightly woven book of visions in which truly only three characters appear: God, Death, and a passive Christ. Then there are the cameos a brilliant and bewildering crowd of artists, poets, actors, characters, and creatures who step in and out of the dance of these three characters, doing imitations of God or tracking him, holding Christ's bone in his mouth, running ahead of Death on a wooden tricycle, and generally making shenanigans with corpses, being corpses, or digging graves."
As the Colombian writer Piedad Bonnett, winner of the 2024 Reina Sofia Prize for Iberoamerican Literature, has observed, Melendez's poetry is "nourished by obsessions." Indeed, Waiting for Perec is a poetry obsessed with the notion of writing as an art of reassemblage. Melendez developed this mode of writing where the poet is a bricoleur who obsessively combines and recombines images and words and churns out new visions of the world based on fragments and references culled from the dusty attic-trunk that keeps the bits and bobs high and low culture in his previous collection Death's Days Are Numbered. The cameos that comprise the collection include painters (Pablo Picasso, Fernando Botero), musicians (John Lennon, Charlie Parker), novelists (Jules Verne, Julio Cortazar), film actors (Buster Keaton, Marilyn Monroe), poets (Cesar Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik), fictional characters (Phileas Fogg, Madame Bovary), and religious figures (Judas, Mary Magdalene). This incomplete list, which omits Kafka, Heraclitus, Salome, Diego Maradona, The Sex Pistols, and others, shows the range of references used by this book to build an absurd world where fiction and poetry melt into the philosophical and the theological.
Like the work of Fernando Pessoa, who makes an appearance in these poems, Waiting for Perec is written under a heteronym, that of an anonymous urn maker who scribbles down these ecstatic visions. Yet, as Anthony Geist, Professor of Spanish at Washington University and celebrated translator of Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Luis Hernandez, has noted "every poem begins with 'I saw...' What is less clear is who saw: the poet or poetic persona, Heraclitus, God, Christ'." This ambiguity is a sort of no space, a utopia, the ashes of a funerary urn.
While the book plays with the absurd and with nonsense, it does so in the utterly serious tradition of Lewis Carroll and Italo Calvino. The title alludes to the Irish author Samuel Beckett, a practitioner of literary nonsense, and the French novelist George Perec, member of the Oulipo group and a lover of word play. Melendez, like Beckett and Perec, plays with the absurd and like them his world is tinged with melancholy. To quote Farris, again, in this collection, "Death has never seemed so lively; like Blake's hell, the realm of Waiting for Perec is thriving. Like Christ reading Cortazar, I find myself wanting to read Mario Melendez, in his own words 'so as not to cry/ he makes my loneliness disappear/ as if by magic'."
