Monsieur Hernández de Valcroix

He writes with rhetorical passion, references to lost manuscripts, and such intense affectation that even readers feel guilty for not having read 'The Thousand and One Nights' in its original Persian. He was born on a Caribbean island “when books were still written with quill and smoke,” as he likes to say, and combines his education in medieval philology with an almost religious devotion to Afro-Cuban jazz and timba. He believes that the rhythm of sentences should be danceable. He never writes without first listening to Monk and Medoro Madera the night before. He wears a linen hat, smokes a pipe, and doesn't distinguish between a literary chronicle and a bolero medley with intertextual references. He believes that the tragedy of the West is that language has lost its swing. And if he is invited to an academic colloquium, he first asks if there is a piano.

Scroll to Top