Gudiño Kieffer, Eduardo (1935–2002)

Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer (b. 2 November 1935, d. 20 September 2002), Argentine writer. Born in Esperanza, he was the son of Luis Gudiño Kramer, who wrote on the legendary gaucho Judíos in Entre Ríos at the turn of the century. Gudiño Kieffer never emerged as a major novelist in Argentina, but he attracted some attention in the 1960s and 1970s for his trenchant satiric characterizations of the mentalities and personalities that emerged from the cultural effervescence before the military coup of 1966 and the resistant countercultures it fueled. The effective destruction of this milieu by the Dirty War in the 1970s, the concomitant pessimism the latter engendered, and the sober (if not postmodern) attitudes that accompanied the return to constitutional democracy in 1983 appear to have left Gudiño Kieffer without much material. Yet his most significant work, Guía de pecadores en la cual se contiene una larga y copiosa exhortación a la virtud y guar da de los mandamientos divinos (1972), with all of its baroque counterreformation intertextualities, is both an acerbic denunciation of the moral righteousness of the Argentine neofascism of the period and a biting characterization of individuals more marked by libertinism than libertarianism. Published at the pivotal time of the brief and ultimately failed transition to a Peronistaled democracy (the 1973–1976 period between almost two decades of military rule), Guía can be read as a parable of the irresolvable ideological dilemmas of urban Argentine society at that time. Gudiño Kieffer's narrative style is also notable for the incorporation of multiple colloquial registers of urban, multimedia-oriented life. Carta abierta Buenos Aires violento (1970) is an essay denouncing the violence in Argentine social life, a recurring emphasis in contemporary Argentine fiction. In honor of his contributions to the literary and cultural life of Buenos Aires, the city named him an Illustrious Citizen.

See alsoArgentina: The Twentieth Century; Buenos Aires; Dirty War; Gauchesca Literature; Gaucho.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raúl H. Castagnino, "Para comerte mejor y la crítica social," in Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana 3, no. 2 (1973): 121-130.

Augusto Tamayo Vargas, "Lo antiguo y lo novísimo en la picaresca de Eduardo Gudiño," in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, no. 295 (1975): 199-203.

Juan Epple, "Entrevista: Eduardo Gudiño Kieffer," in Hispamérica 6, no. 18 (1977): 47-61.

Additional Bibliography

Pueyrredón, Victoria. Mis reportajes. Buenos Aires: Lumen, 2003.

Vélez, Joseph F. Escritores argentinos según ellos mismos. Bogotá: Universidad INCCA de Colombia, 1994.

                                  David William Foster