What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Two books that I read as if in a horse race. One was The Count of Monte Cristo. I read it when I was nine, in the midst of a paralysis of my knees that forced me to learn to walk again. I also discovered the infinite possibilities of literature. The other is Huck Finn. It didn’t just do that the first time I read it, but every time I reread it.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo. No one mentions it. But it was like being put in a meat grinder or sawed in half like Isaiah. I owe that book my first volume of short stories and two of my later stories: “En el vórtice” and “El brazo y el lienzo.” I know they’re nothing alike, but behind the words I can see the same smoke and blood.
What’s the book you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
Any book by Hesse other than Steppenwolf. I read them like someone who needs to go on a low-carb diet. German coldness is only good for winning World Cups.
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?
Margarita, the character created by Darío-Bulgakov-Ramírez-me. Or maybe someone real; most people become characters in their diaries. I choose Anais Nin: her Havana-born father would introduce her to me at a concert in Paris or somewhere like that. We would write an endless erotic story together, which she would burn, or say it was hers and dedicate it to Miller or June. Can’t you hear the jazz playing in the background?
What book do you consider a “necessary classic” but only because you’re too anxious to admit that it bored you like a Latin mass?
Joyce’s Ulysses. I first read the interior monologue in a Cocuyo edition, if I remember correctly, which I liked very much. I got the brick later and it held up a corner of my bed for a while. I must admit that it was in good company with The Brothers Karamazov, which also caused anxiety, but for strictly different reasons.
What is your secret shameful read?
Good, mediocre, bad, and terrible crime fiction, and its chocolate factory in the movies. I can’t help it. Netflix is happy with me.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them as you would hate an ex?
I invoke the Fifth Amendment. It could be a modern Cuban classic much loved by my interviewers.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
Reading semioticians and structuralists. I never understood how they could dissect the living bodies of literature as if they were dissecting corpses.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
Implode. No book implodes, only readers do. Books explode in our faces.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
Bought, no. Stolen, yes. I know several Casa de las Américas and Alejo Carpentier prize winners who are real hitmen at book fairs and who have allowed me to read great works on loan. However, I have been a bad thief. Like the character in Les Misérables, who stole the silver candlesticks, the only book I ever stole was a leather-bound one with gold-edged pages. I have never seen that 1929 Modern Translation of the Bible, which I like even more than the Reina-Valera, in print again. A treasure that mysteriously disappeared from my childhood home. For example, Psalm 72 began something like this: “They shall fear you as long as the sun lasts and in the presence of the moon, throughout all generations.” And it ended: “like the rivers upon the corners of the earth.” Writers who despise the Bible should start there. They would write better.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Any of the dead characters in Spoon River Anthology. Or a character from Angela’s Ashes, that memorable, self-parodying book. Black humor is always a good antidote to vanity.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Perhaps Martí’s Versos libres. It’s much shorter than his Versos sencillos and, above all, than his Diario.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
El Camino, on 27 de Febrero Street in Santo Domingo. Theology books are more expensive than secular ones. I’m addicted to them, almost sinfully so.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
A poet that no one reads, a dandy whose ghost still haunts the streets of El Conde, a cursed storyteller named Pedro Peix. He said, “Poets are still useless.” The beauty or uselessness of literature is a beautiful mystery.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences over books?
Sure, how can you love Neruda more than Vallejo?
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?
For reading and writing: the Santo Domingo Metro. It’s a clean, well-lit place. I wrote my poetry collection Una casa llamada sueño (A House Called Dream) there, on my way to university. And the bed, the bed, the bed, as Onetti would say.
What book do you use to impress cultured people and have never finished?
Something unbearable, either by the erudite Barthes, the admirable Bakhtin, or the wise Steiner, without a doubt. I have read them with admiration and carelessness.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
I will never write a diary. One writes more truths in the lies of fiction.
Which dead author would you invite to your funeral just so they could read something devastating and elegant about your mediocrity redeemed by your love of books?
Borges. His love of books would make everyone think he was speaking well of me.
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?
The adaptations of the Boom to film are usually unforgivable. It doesn’t matter if the director is European, as was the case with Aura, or if he’s from the Latin American backyard. When weighed against the books, each adaptation is like comparing Emilia Pérez with Goodfellas.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
There were many books between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens.
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?
Personal History of the Boom, by Donoso (who is the author I like least from the Boom). Trastorno, by Thomas Bernhard, which I hadn’t read and is like seeing Cuba, that ruin. El último de la estirpe, by Fleur Jaeggy, who says that her machine writes her novels. I also have a stack of books by Cuban poets in PDF format that I want to read right now: La guagua de Babel, by Carlos Esquivel. Trilogía acéfala, by José Luis Serrano. An anthology of poems by Eduard Encina, el mambí. Lately I’ve been reading more on my tablet, an act of cosmic treason against paper and ink.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
The writings of many postmodern essayists fit this description. I know that The Name of the Rose would probably be impossible without the semiologist Umberto Eco. Even so, I can’t explain how Eco could have written The Name of the Rose. Perhaps, I can’t say for sure, other books by Eco fall into that category of “elegant fraud full of random quotes and smoke,” but The Name of the Rose does not: it is like Mount Olympus. He didn’t need to write anything else.
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?
Yesterday, some devastating poems by Primo Levi. I’m sure I had read them before, but it felt like I was reading them for the first time.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
En la Calzada de Jesús del Monte, by Eliseo Diego, my favorite Cuban poet.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
None. I’m sure a deceitful spirit with little literary talent would speak to me.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
Reading good beginnings of books. It makes me want to live. And to write.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
“This is my only vice. Can I have another coffee?”
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?
I struggle with that. Sometimes I think I didn’t read Don Quixote all the way through. Then I tell myself that’s impossible, because I’ve never had so much fun with another book. I had that beautiful edition, illustrated by Doré. Maybe I reread random chapters later that I liked better than others.
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?
“Be careful. Someone will try to steal me from your library.”
