Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill

Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill (July 15, 1941 – August 21, 2010), who normally went only by his surname, Fogwill, was an Argentine short story writer, novelist, and businessman. He was a distant relative of the novelist Charles Langbridge Morgan. He was the author of Malvinas Requiem, one of the first narratives to deal with the Falklands War. Fogwill died on August 21, 2010, from a pulmonary dysfunction.

Fogwill was born in Buenos Aires, and became a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He published a poetry book collection; he was an essayist and a columnist specializing in communications subjects, literature, and cultural politics. The success of his story "Muchacha punk" (Punk Girl), which received the first prize in a literary contest in 1980, allowed him to leave his job as a businessman, and began what he called "a plot of misunderstandings and misfortunes" that led him to become a writer.

Some of his stories have appeared in anthologies in the United States, Cuba, Mexico, and Spain. He is particularly notable for the short novel Malvinas Requiem (Los pichiciegos), which was one of the very first narratives to deal with the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, and is written from the point of view of young Argentine conscripts. More generally, Erin Graff Zivin notes that in much of his work, Fogwill is concerned with "marginal subjects": in Vivir afuera, for instance, these include "'Jews,' HIV-positive patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, and impoverished artists."

The critic María A. Duran calls Fogwill's Malvinas Requiem "a masterful and disillusioned story of an absurd war." Famously, it was begun before the war had even ended, and finished only a week later, product of a seventy-two-hour writing binge without sleep, fuelled by cocaine. The Argentine critic Martín Kohan compares the book's publication to an earthquake: "you would have to measure it on the Richter scale."

The book's plot concerns a group of Argentine deserters during the final weeks of the land war on the Islands. They have carved out a cave and a small network of tunnels somewhere in No Man's Land and hunker down as the weather worsens and winter beckons. The men call themselves "pichiciegos," after a small armadillo native to Argentina. To survive, they scavenge from the battlefield, steal from the Argentine army, and barter with the British. Occasionally they see (or think they see) extraordinary sights around them. In the end, the majority of the pichiciegos die, suffocated by carbon monoxide as the advancing snow blocks their cave's ventilation. Only one survives, and we gradually learn that he is telling his story to the novel's narrator, back in Buenos Aires.

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