In the vast and often self-congratulatory universe of literary biographies, El corazón del asunto (Gog & Magog, 2024) by writer Daniela Pasik doesn’t just stand out—it flips the genre off entirely. This bold exploration of the life and work of poet Irene Gruss doesn’t lean on the usual narrative crutches of chronological drama or melodramatic revelation. It wants none of that. No fireworks. No climaxes. No magical childhoods in the prologue or luminous deaths in the epilogue. Instead, there are ghosts. Opinions. Poets who remember, who argue, who hesitate. And that’s the twist: this isn’t a biography, it’s a gathering of voices that refuse to settle anything.
Gruss, a vital figure in Argentine poetry—especially within the so-called Generation of ’80—was born in 1950 and died in 2018. She published books, founded poetry groups, led workshops, wrote for papers and magazines, worked as a copyeditor, and moved through the cultural life of that distant, strange city called Buenos Aires. Her life was quiet. She never became a monument. She didn’t seek posterity. She preferred the periphery, the fringe, the neighborhood bars, where the smell of burnt coffee mingled with the murmur of poetry talk. She stayed home and watched TV. Her writing was surgically precise and furiously quiet. Her name didn’t fill stadiums, but it cut across generations. And Pasik gets that. She respects it. That’s why she doesn’t shove her into the spotlight. That’s why she calls her in from the margins, through peripheral voices, through stories that remain open-ended, through small, burning moments. In a literary culture that often confuses noise with significance, this restraint is both revolutionary and deeply refreshing.
The structure of the book is deliberately anti-heroic. There are no grand exploits. No redemptions. Instead, it unfolds as a choral fabric—more ethnography than chronology. As if Pasik had staged a kind of anthropological ritual, summoning those who knew Gruss—poets, editors, disciples, friends, family—around an impossible campfire to speak of her. And in speaking, to bring her back. Not to idealize. To argue. To misremember. To love.
There’s something profoundly philosophical in that gesture. The self isn’t a sealed unit—it’s a constellation of relations. Gruss is that: a web of echoes. Her life isn’t told; it’s pieced together like patchwork, as if Pasik were insisting there’s no other way to narrate what’s been lived. It’s a move close to Cooley’s “looking-glass self”: we become who we are in the gaze of others. This book doesn’t try to capture Gruss, but to encircle her. To speak with her ghost using borrowed words. It suggests our identities are less solo constructions and more collective tapestries, woven out of the threads of our relations.
Still, it’s not a scattered book. There’s a subterranean architecture. A rhythm. A cadence that holds the chaos. Because Pasik doesn’t just listen. She edits. Cuts. Arranges. Tightens. What feels spontaneous is intricate narrative goldsmithing. It’s a book written with the ear. With that rare ear that can tell the difference between testimony and performance, between emotion and cliché, between memory and myth. One of Gruss’s poems is called “You Twist the Anecdote”; what Pasik does here is twist the biography.
It might look like a way of dodging the big themes. It isn’t. She tackles them all—just sideways. Death. Posterity. The canon. Envy. Friendship. Forgetting. Above all, time. The time that corrodes, that scrambles, that turns stray comments from a poetry reading into legend (“qué demagogo, Zurita”). El corazón del asunto is also an essay on how we remember. On who gets remembered. And on who chooses—with fierce dignity—not to be turned into a statue.
Historically speaking, the biography (yes, we’re still calling it that) doesn’t shy away from context. But it doesn’t over-explain. It doesn’t cast Gruss as either victim or heroine of her era. She was a poet who lived through dictatorships, democratic transitions, economic crises—but she never bent her writing to circumstance. Gruss wasn’t a “poet of her time.” She was a poet of the everyday. And against time. Or better yet: in spite of it. Pasik gets that too. At one point she even writes, “time doesn’t exist.” And so Gruss is never locked into history. She’s allowed to speak in the present. Like a ghost with a Buenos Aires accent.
Some might say the book is arbitrary, scattered, that it lacks a “thesis.” But that kind of critique betrays a nostalgia for dead forms. This isn’t lack of rigor. It’s narrative freedom. And it’s a political move, too. Because in an age where everything is measured, ranked, monetized—where even cynicism comes barcoded—this book dares to be tender. And there’s nothing more radical than that.
The writing itself is disarmingly beautiful: “It’s beautiful and sad to be a guest in the world of someone you loved who has died.” Pasik doesn’t just write well. She writes with precision, with wit, with intelligence. Yes, she’s talented. But this goes beyond talent. There’s something in her prose that overflows. That can’t be taught. A voice. A sensibility for the smallest detail, for the rhythm of a sentence, for just the right touch of irony. Reading her feels like talking to someone with nothing to prove.
By the end, when the ghost is left sitting in a small bar in Buenos Aires (“She’s reading. Her coffee’s gone cold. Something pulls her from her concentration and she looks up. She sees, she recognizes, she smiles. She waves like a harvest queen. Lifts her chin just a little. It’s an invitation. To go. Or to leave her be. Both at once”) the book leaves a soft sadness. Not because it closes a story, but because it leaves a space open. The space Gruss once filled. A gap in the language. A voice still ringing after everything’s gone quiet. And you find yourself crying—not for what’s been lost, but for what’s been understood: that some lives don’t need monuments. That some people were poetry, even when they weren’t writing.
El corazón del asunto isn’t just the best possible biography for a poet. It’s something else entirely. A new way of being with the dead. An ethical act of remembering. A commitment to conversation, to uncertainty, to friendship among words. It’s a book that makes space. That refuses closure. That leaves the back door open. Like Gruss did. Like all great books do.