Ten years have passed since the tragic disappearance of Ignacio Padilla, and time has confirmed something we barely intuited at the moment: the Micropedia is not only the center of his narrative universe but also one of the most ambitious and coherent short-story projects in Spanish-language literature of the last decades. Critical distance today allows us to read it with a different perspective and to verify that its extraordinary relevance does not respond to nostalgia or homage, but to the modernity of a work that continues to question contemporary readers.
The Micropedia is one of the most compact, self-referential, and meticulously planned narrative projects in Spanish-language literature of the recent decades: fifty-four stories, six hundred forty-two pages, a chest in which an entire universe fits (because its editor, Juan Casamayor, managed to physically realize Padilla’s idea for the edition of his Micropedia completed). A total work that was built piece by piece over more than twenty years in a completely self-conscious manner and that occupied a central place in his narrative universe.
The storytelling vocation of Ignacio Padilla appears from his early literary days. Let us recall the prize he won in high school in 1984, which fostered the meeting with Jorge Volpi and Eloy Urroz, the foundational episode of the Crack Generation, which would eventually renew Mexican narrative. But, beyond that biographical anecdote, what is truly significant is that Padilla understood very early that the short story was neither a minor genre nor a stepping-stone toward the novel, but the space of maximum literary demand. His defense of the short story was always explicit and solidly theorized. He declared that the short story seemed to him the most complete and most daring genre. Hence his provocative and ironic self-designation as a storytelling physicist: “I am a storyteller, a storytelling physicist, I write because I could not not write, because I am sick of writing, because it makes me very happy to tell and read stories.”[1] It was not merely a witty statement. That image of the “storytelling physicist” summarizes quite precisely his way of understanding literature: writing as a laboratory, the short story as a space of experimentation, and imagination as a rigorous form of knowledge. That search for precision also explains another of his obsessions: to gauge down to the last detail his own literary universe.
No less revealing is the fact that the work he admired most, the Quijote —which he knew almost by heart after listening to the audiobook more than a hundred times— also fascinated him for the idea that Cervantes had initially conceived the novel as a tale. Padilla saw in this a confirmation of his own poetics: “I am too neurotic, I am quixotic, I don’t want to be wrong. That’s why I go into the short story.”[2]
“I have at least the consolation that, in this ultramodern empire of the novel as contingency, the short story is still granted an honorary place. In our tradition, the short story survives as an old, ghostly, providential king who often finds it necessary to resemble his crazed offspring so that it does not forget its lineage and can avenge those who tried to kill it.”[3]
Read ten years after his death, these words acquire a new intensity. Far from a simple defense of the short story, they seem the definitive articulation of a literary ethic. In a landscape where the novel had come to occupy a hegemonic position, Padilla always defended the short story as the space of maximum artistic concentration, the territory where literature achieves its most refined form.
The idea (the plan) of the Micropedia had arisen very early. According to Jorge Volpi, it began to take shape during Padilla’s Salamanca period, while he was writing his doctoral thesis on the devil in Cervantes’ work. Even the very name contains the fundamental keys of the project. The reference to the Micropaedia of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is not merely a scholarly wink, but a true aesthetic statement. The neologism created by Mortimer J. Adler, derived from the ancient Greek — micro (“very small”) and paideia (“education”) —, summarizes the totalizing vocation of a work that aspires to build an encyclopedia of the minimal, of the unexpected, of the eccentric and also of the strangely necessary. That early omnivorous vocation inevitably aligns him with Borges and his labyrinths, with his imagined libraries and his alephs, but it also reveals a very personal will to raise an autonomous universe that would end up becoming the true center of all his literary production.
“After so many conversations with Nacho over more than three decades, it became clear to me that Nacho’s masterpiece was this Micropedia and that he knew it was. He always wanted the four books to be published together, as an organic whole to which he gave special importance (…) The greatest task, then, consisted in finding the final manuscript of the last volume, in choosing the order he would have preferred and in correcting a few typographical errors. For me it is both an act of friendship and a form of literary justice, that the Micropedia finally appears in the manner most similar to how he envisioned it.”
If the Micropedia constitutes the core of Ignacio Padilla’s narrative, it is because all the main strands of his poetics converge there and reach their most finished expression. Padilla shared with the Crack writers a conception of literature as a complex, self-referential, and deeply ambitious structure. However, the Micropedia takes that aspiration a step further by turning the short story into the privileged space of aesthetic experimentation. In it one repeatedly recognizes an extraordinary fabulist imagination, a conception of the fantastic as a form of subversion of reality, an exceptional command of both contemporary language and Baroque and classical registers, the use of humor as a structural principle, a deliberately eccentric gaze, the coexistence of apocryphal and real data until they become indistinguishable, the permanent questioning of canonical rationality, and, finally, the creation of his own bestiary and of narrative spaces where the strange ceases to be perceived as anomaly and becomes a natural way of inhabiting the world.
Because that is the key to the universe Padilla created: the possibility of traversing it with a calm sense of astonishment and a normalized strangeness. The latter relates to the peculiarities Padilla possessed as both creator and individual: there was always a continuum between reality and fiction, between life and work. Those who knew him know there was a fuzzy, malleable line between what was lived and what was imagined. He narrated, lived, and created with the same naturalness and with all the different planes integrated into a single overarching, indistinguishable macro-plan. One never fully knew what in Padilla was reality, what was fiction, or whether it was a majestic and brilliant hybrid of both. It is not anecdotal, trivial, or extraliterary to point out this fundamental aspect of Padilla as a creator because it absolutely determined his work and his manner of narrating.
In fact, that creator’s worldview shapes its outcomes in a drastic way: that approach to the fantastic, to the strange, always emerges from normalization and calm, as if the level of the extraordinary could be absolutely integrated into everyday reality, as it was for him. He was the total writer, the true writer. Those of us who knew him did not know where the man began and the writer ended. What Jorge Volpi calls the famous “Nachito data” were an inseparable part of his life and his work: they were the bricks that formed this Micropedia in which the reader begins by looking up every new unsettling element in the dictionary or on the internet until he stops because he realizes, finally, that the fundamental thing is that all that universe exists because it exists in the text and because the text has already come to life. Padilla was an omnivorous collector of everything new, different, and unsettling. He was an alchemist and an experimenter. And also, as we knew then and confirm now, Ignacio Padilla was a pioneer. Everything he built in the Micropedia feels extraordinarily current today: do we not recognize as fully contemporary many of the features that run through his narrative universe?
Ten years later, the Micropedia remains a fully timely work, extraordinarily modern, and continues to challenge us as readers. Its four books formulate, in theory and in practice, a narrative proposal of unusually original character, capable of dialoguing with the great literary tradition — Cervantes and Borges are inevitable references — to prolong it, update it, and even take it one step further.
That is why, if I had to offer a recommendation to those who do not yet know Ignacio Padilla’s work, it would be very simple: read the Micropedia. Read it to expand your world, to understand it and yourself better, to learn to imagine complexity in a time dominated by flat ideas, polarization, intolerance, and simplifications.
And to those who have already read it: return to it. The Micropedia belongs to that rare class of books that transform with every rereading. Wonder is renewed, intelligence is confirmed, and that private, intimate chuckle that always accompanies great literary discoveries returns.
——————
[1] Adolfo Córdova: The Narrative Physicist: Nacho Padilla, La Gaceta del Fondo de Cultura Económica, October 2016.
[2] David Marcial Pérez: All the monsters of Ignacio Padilla, El País, December 13, 2018.
[3] Ignacio Padilla: the accident of the modern novel, Revista Luvina, University of Guadalajara, 20th year, no. 84, Fall 2016, p. 22.