5 ideas
Pitol argues that identity is not an inner essence but a sediment of everything absorbed: 'one is the books one has read, the painting one has seen, the music heard and forgotten, the streets walked.' Forgotten experiences still shape the self, so memory's gaps do not empty identity. On this view, autobiography becomes an inventory of influences rather than a chronicle of deeds.
Pitol recounts a stay in Venice without his glasses, drifting through a city he could see only as blurred shapes, light and color. Years later the memory has become half-hallucinatory, and he cannot fully separate what he saw from what he later imagined or read. The episode is his case that impaired perception can produce a more intense and literary experience of a place than clear sight.
Pitol's parents died when he was a small child, and his grandmother raised him in sugar-mill towns in Veracruz. He traces his vocation to this confinement, in which reading replaced a lost family and a world he could not go out into.
The title plays on 'fuga', which means both escape and the musical fugue. Pitol describes a life of deliberate displacement, spent in decades of diplomatic posts in Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow and Prague. He also describes a way of composing: themes are introduced, abandoned and brought back in variation instead of being developed in a straight line. Escaping one's origin and a fixed form becomes the method by which both the life and the book are built.
Drawing on Bakhtin's idea of carnival, Pitol reads comic deformation, masquerade and vulgar excess as ways of overturning official seriousness, not as frivolity. Through this lens, parody and the grotesque become instruments that expose the hidden hierarchies and pretensions of respectable culture.