What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov—especially when I read that novel in English—and Pale Fire, by the same author.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Emily Brontë. I would kiss her a lot and whip her. I can’t do without Heathcliff anymore, and to top it all off, at some point in the time I have left to live, I will need to write a novel about those years he was absent from Wuthering Heights.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
Ulysses, by James Joyce.
Which literary character would you like as a partner, even though you know you’d end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
Connie Chatterley.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because you’re too anxious to admit that it bored you to death?
The Trial, by Franz Kafka. I prefer his short stories. Or The Castle.
What is your secret shameful read?
I’m not sure. Maybe Anaïs Nin’s short stories.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them like you hate an ex?
I think that would be Thomas Pynchon. Or maybe Jérôme Ferrari.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
Years ago, I went to give a lecture on language, pornography, and simulation in José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, and I wanted to improvise, not read. I only had the novel with me and a bunch of underlined sentences. It was chaos, but it turned out really well.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
Rotundo, rotunda.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
Well, it really was like that, but without the witchcraft component. A very fine edition, made by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, of the poems of P. B. Shelley, annotated and prefaced by herself. The outside of the book was all gold and leather. In fact, years later, I took a naked photo of myself, erect, reading the book. A genuine case of sensory idolatry.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Since my ego changes a lot in size and shape, I would use the Three Fatal Sisters from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Métrica española, by Tomás Navarro Tomás. In college, during my degree in philology. It’s very useful, very vicious, and taught me about stylistic euphony. I mean it.
What physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
Here in Cuba? Uff, none. And I don’t think I’d find anything like it outside of Cuba either. Since 2020, I only read electronic editions on a good-quality iPad. That’s where I have what I might call my library.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “damn genius”?
It was a book: Reader’s Block, by David Markson.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in your taste in books?
No, not really. I understand (and I could be very wrong, of course) that the first thing to survive in a relationship is that singular brilliance acquired by the foreground of sex, which also becomes the last holdout before dissolution. Although, certainly, differences in taste in books would be a sign that something is wrong with me or the other person. I couldn’t have anything (whatever that might be in erotic-sentimental terms) with someone who devoutly reads Mario Benedetti or Pablo Neruda.
Where is your favorite place to read as if you were a character in a Murakami novel? A hipster café, a rainy window, an existentialist bed? Anywhere else?
The bed is best for me, with a high pillow. I can go from Lovecraft to xvideos.com, for example. And vice versa. Or abandon, bored, an erotic video chat on Telegram, and enter the wholesome pages of Clive Barker.
What book do you use to impress cultured people and have never finished?
Once, when I was young, I did that with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Franz Kafka, who is also a literary character.
Which dead author would you invite to your funeral just to read something devastating and elegant about your mediocrity redeemed by your love of books?
If Dr. Samuel Johnson considered me mediocre, I would like it to be him. Another possibility: George Steiner.
What was the worst literary betrayal you ever suffered? A bad ending, an atrocious adaptation, or your favorite author professing an ideology incompatible with your principles?
Although the transition from literature to film has always been fraught with tension, there are some good adaptations. Of course, there are also adaptations that fail to take advantage (or don’t know how to take advantage) of the sparkle of certain works. This is the case with Rest, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, a highly recommended Swedish novelist. The resulting film is called Handling the Undead, by Thea Hvistendahl.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
“Ah, I understand you!” But said as if Oscar Wilde were saying it while looking at the frown of the Marquess of Queensberry.
You have a pile of books to read so high that if it fell, it could kill you. Even so, which one(s) did you buy yesterday?
Well, between yesterday and the day before yesterday, I “bought” The Bomb No. 6 and Other Stories, by Paolo Bacigalupi, and Disclaimer, by Renée Knight. (Regarding Disclaimer, I suspect that the series of the same name, starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, is superior to the novel).
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Between La vida sexual de las palabras by Julián Ríos and The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, I don’t know which one to choose.
When was the last time you read something so beautiful that it revealed something about yourself and you wanted to tear your eyes out like Oedipus?
When I turned the last page of Ask the Dust by John Fante.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend out, even if the other person promises you their soul?
I lent out, as a kind of sentimental gift, an old edition (from the 1930s) of Omar Khayyam’s quatrains (the Rubaiyat). And I lost the book.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
The final moments of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” (read in English, or in Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s translation).
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
It may not be literary in the sense that it comes from a book (and, in this case, it does not come from a book). Still, I would say this: “Real reality and its problems are more solid in books than in immediacy. Facing immediacy, there is a veil of Maya, but not when facing books.”
What book slowly burns your conscience because you never finished it and yet you still talk about it as if you were a critic for the Paris Review?
The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell.
If you were a book forgotten on a dusty shelf, what phrase would you put on the back cover so that someone would finally choose you?
“This book is, in short, a master key. The identity of the reader doesn’t matter. The key always works.”
