What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Thérèse Raquin, the novel by Emile Zola, which I took from a bookshelf in my mother’s room when I was about seven years old and which she snatched from my legs—I was sitting on the floor, reading with the book on my thighs. It’s a book for adults, she said. That prompted me to keep it hidden and read what I later learned was a lustful story of adultery and murder, because my childish curiosity wanted to unravel the mystery my mother had uncovered: what adults read. I ended up bored by all the naturalism—years later I also learned that Zola pioneered what is known as “literary naturalism” with that very book—and I returned to the other one, the truly exciting read that I consider responsible for making me the writer I am today: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Thomas Mann and his magic mountain… A literary gem that nevertheless left me dumbfounded by what I consider to be a colossal absurdity: dying, not of cancer, but of the most stupid insistence on loneliness, the most selfish and absurd disease of what we call the higher species, a being undoubtedly made to live in a herd, like any other animal worthy of the name.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but in reality you only read because of aesthetic pressure?
Although for many in my country it sounds like heresy:
Paradiso, by José Lezama Lima, which I read, not even out of aesthetic pressure, but because the critic, and one of my literary mentors, Salvador Redonet, threatened to fail me in literature at university if I didn’t read that “pinnacle of Cuban literature” after I confessed to him that I thought it was a poorly written novel with thousands of narrative and dramatic problems. I read it and remember that afterwards I decided to detoxify myself from so much soulless Lezamian literary artifice by rereading three true gems: El siglo de las luces by Carpentier; La carne de René by Virgilio Piñera; and El pan dormido by José Soler Puig.
Which literary character would you like to have as a partner, even though you know you’d end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
The bad girl, protagonist of the novel Travesuras de la niña mala, by Mario Vargas Llosa. That insufferable and sensual nonconformist, adventurous, pragmatic, manipulative, and restless woman is the woman every man needs to discover all the limits, secret and public, of sensitivity, and to experience firsthand the most genuine sense of frustration, deception, and human misery.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because you’re too anxious to admit that it bored you to death?
There is no story more boring than the entire saga of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. They say he wrote in a room lined with cork to isolate himself from noise (others claim he did so to protect himself from the suffocating allergies caused by pollen).
Proust forgot that very few people would have the opportunity to lock themselves in a cork-lined room to read his soporific novels, which are, admittedly, full of immortal moments. But you have to wade through a lot of cheap verbiage and unnecessary descriptions before you get to those moments. With a good pair of scissors, it would have been a perfect work.
What is your secret shameful read?
Corín Tellado and the countless romance novels my mother bought when she was young. I read them in secret, analyzing every page, every scene, every dialogue, trying to figure out how this woman managed to become the most widely read writer in the world, in every language and in almost every culture. I lost my shame when, years later, I heard Vargas Llosa defend her as a brilliant creator, an expert on the female soul, an expertise that every writer and every man desires.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you would detest an ex?
Borges, without a doubt. What little talent God gave me has gone into prose: short stories, novels, but one of my frustrations is that, when it comes to poetry, a genre I consider the greatest, the dean, the pinnacle of literature, I don’t have a drop of talent.
Once, when I was starting out, I dabbled in poetry and, luckily, I stumbled upon a newly published copy of Los conjurados, back in 1986. It was a book that someone, I think it was Eduardo Galeano, gave to my literary mentor, Eduardo Heras León. That book cured me instantly. That book made me understand that I had nothing to offer in poetry. But since then, I have been left with the trauma of being able to read and reread Borges’ unsurpassed stories, but reading his poetry hurts me, because there is a nagging, insidious little voice whispering to me: “See, stupid? This is poetry.”
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining phrases does not mean you understand them?
José Soler Puig, one of my first literary teachers, introduced me to the art of underlining phrases, not to understand them… but to learn that someone had been there before us. He advised me to repeat those phrases until I memorized them, to avoid copying them into my own writing. Perhaps that’s why I know by heart entire sentences from dozens of books that have marked me and that I marked, as old Soler Puig advised, with “ink that no one can erase.” But that taught me that you never fully understand most of the sentences you mark: it’s simply your interpretation, and for any other reader that same sentence may have other meanings.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book and thus sound more intellectual?
I don’t remember using any, as I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than sounding intellectual, so, to put it in Christian terms, I am very mundane in my intellectual considerations. Perhaps that is why academics and essayists who are more attached to labels, purism, and the academic rules of the genre seem to disregard my essays and critical articles… The most overwhelmingly intellectual and enriching book of essays and criticism I have read is called El infinito en un junco (Infinity on a Reed), by the Spanish author Irene Vallejo. It is a model of what an essay should be, and can be read not only by readers of the genre. I prefer her to all those smug people who think that to analyze a book seriously and deeply, you have to mention those even more smug and incomprehensible people who were Bloom, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault… names that you just have to throw into any gibberish disguised as an essay or critique to receive applause for your genius and intellectual superiority.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a piece of Victorian witchcraft?
Arabescos mentales, by Guantanamo-born Regino Boti, in a very old edition restored by someone who obviously wanted to preserve the greatest value of that book—fortunately unknown to the seller—with those gold edges and metallic borders: the copy dedicated by Botti to the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío in 1914 was annotated on many pages in Darío’s beautiful handwriting—his letters were almost drawn—praising entire verses by the Guantanamero. How that book returned to Cuba and ended up in the hands of a bookseller who had worked for the Bacardi family is something I never found out. And I never will… During the blackouts of the 1990s in Cuba, my mother, clearly unaware of the value of that gem, used its pages to light the firewood with which she cooked in the courtyard of my house during those hard years of the “special period.”
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Sancho Panza. I don’t know a more naively honest character. It is said that children and drunks always speak the truth. Sancho Panza speaks the truth like a temple, seasoned with the wisdom of the common people and the naivety of someone who fears nothing, owes nothing and, even better, wants nothing and hides nothing.
What book were you forced to read in school and now you pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Platero y yo, by Juan Ramón Jiménez. My elementary school literature teacher, Elia Figueredo, loved it and raved about the author and the book, although at the time I thought it was just a silly story about a talentless donkey who plays the flute by chance. But now I don’t have to pretend anything. I love this book for the genius with which it unifies poetry and prose in what I believe is the best collection of prose poems in Spanish literature.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
There is no ONE bookstore. I buy my books everywhere I set foot, and luckily I spend a good part of my life jumping from one place to another in this wide and increasingly alien world (to use the words of Ciro Alegría) and, in addition, week after week, I order physical books from any of the many sites/bookstores that exist on the internet today, starting with Amazon (hated by many, I know, but a fertile source of my latest reads, thanks to its ease of access and wide selection).
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “damn genius”?
Recently, to immerse myself in the monastery atmosphere I need for a novel I’m writing, I was rereading The Name of the Rose. There, Eco comes out with a gem—there are many in that novel—that made me exclaim something very similar to “damn genius,” although in more mundane words: “When it has no weapons to govern itself, the soul sinks, through love, into the deepest ruins,” a phrase that could sum up the plot of much of world literature.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in taste in books?
A certain Cuban writer on the island tried to convince me a few years ago that there was such a thing as “black literature, because a black writer cannot write like a white writer.” I agreed because having black skin has historically meant radical differences in individuals’ life experiences, and it is well known that literature is, in part, the result of our life experiences. But everything fell apart when he tried to impose on me the idea of the superiority of one type of literature over another (he contrasted them in a clear scheme: “white literature vs. black literature”), and I told him that there were only two types of literature: good and bad, and that the superiority of literature written by black people, women, gays, and any other classification was an invention of insecure people who sought to stand out in the guild by highlighting obvious differences and hanging those labels on themselves.
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?
An armchair in my study that is almost shaped like my body. In front of it, if I put my feet up on a wicker stool, I can see the treetops of the condominium where I live moving rhythmically, with that resigned calm with which trees sway in a city like Berlin, except in times of storms or during the April winds. If it’s winter and there’s that oppressive gray haze stuck to the sky, I dive into reading completely.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
That’s a difficult confession because I won’t be able to use that intellectual ploy anymore, which, I should clarify, I don’t use against all the cultured people I rub shoulders with, but only those who go through life pretending to be cultured, that is, only those who boast about being cultured. But without a doubt, I use another book by José Lezama Lima that I found unbearable and frankly minor: Oppiano Licario, a rambling monstrosity that Lezama labeled a novel and which, like everything he did, generates rabid defenses that make me think that perhaps I am the one who is wrong.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Dr. Watson, by Arthur Conan Doyle. My life is so hectic—my friend, the novelist Guillermo Vidal, said that Amir Valle was not a human being, but a consortium of dwarves with my figure, each dedicated to a different task—that I would need someone with that loyalty, that docility, and that capacity for sacrifice to come close to everything I have experienced, because if there is one thing I value, it is having lived every day of my life intensely.
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?
An unforgettable person I have already mentioned here, the great Cuban novelist Guillermo Vidal, who died at the age of 52, in the prime of his literary career. I would love to see him mock my death, just as he recreated and mocked his own in several of his novels. He and I knew, and we talked about it a lot in the last moments of the terminal illness that took him away, that our funerals would be merely the introduction to our journey toward eternity with the God to whom we both gave our souls.
What was the worst literary betrayal you ever suffered? A bad ending, a terrible adaptation, or your favorite author professing an ideology incompatible with your principles?
That my mentor, someone I in many ways saw as an example of almost supernatural intelligence, insisted that I should see beyond what he called “the shadows of the Revolution”: “If you focus only on the shadows, you will never see the light,” he would say, and the truth is that I spent decades trying to find that light, out of loyalty to that teacher who, one day, decided to put those supposed “higher revolutionary and humanistic principles” before the brotherhood we had built since I had the privilege of becoming his student at the age of 16.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says “I don’t like to read”?
A phrase attributed to Saint Teresa of Jesus: “Read and you will lead; don’t read and you will be led,” although I don’t think it has any effect, because anyone who is capable of saying, without blushing, “I don’t like to read,” won’t care what you say about that “little problem.”
You have such a tall stack of books to read that if it fell, it could kill you. Even so, which one(s) did you buy yesterday?
The Penguin edition of a novel by Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I had been meaning to read it for a while, but I decided to look for it when his death was announced a while ago and I realized that this writer, considered one of the great African storytellers, had written the novel A Grain of Wheatin 1967, the year I was born. And that’s a vice I have: collecting works by universal classics that were written that year. I started with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Das Kapital by Karl Marx, the supposedly monumental and essential work that has deceived the most and generated the most ideological stupidity through the string of misconceptions it contains, the one that has captivated the most useful idiots, the one that has done the most damage to the world in the entire history of humanity.
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?
More than eccentricity, gouging out your eyes over something so trivial is utter stupidity. Even so, I confess to feeling exposed recently when rereading one of the novels that defined me as a writer: La parcela de Dios, published in Cuba as La tierrita de Dios. There, the story of the Waldens filling their plot with holes, hoping to find the gold that would rescue them from their miserable lives, reminded me of my childhood years in a poverty-stricken village in the “revolutionary” eastern part of Cuba, where I met characters who seemed to have stepped out of Erskine Caldwell’s novel, even with the same flaws and vices. No denunciation has ever been written as starkly beautiful as that story.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you would never lend to anyone, even if they promised you their soul?
The Reina Valera edition of the Bible, which was given to me almost thirty years ago by a woman who was determined to prove to me that there was no more important decision in a human being’s life than to recognize Christ as Lord and Savior. It’s old, worn, well-thumbed, and has traveled with me all over the world.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
I don’t summon anyone, least of all in a séance, as it goes against my beliefs. If anything, I might launch my memory into a crazy attempt to revive Ernest Hemingway.
If we could meet in Cuba, I would invite him to sit with me at his Finca Vigía, on the outskirts of Havana, to ask him, among many other things about his creative technique, about the many loose ends he left for us to guess at in his most famous story, “The Killers,” including that devastating ending.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
I don’t have to read a single page to know that the world makes sense, because it is God’s greatest creation, even though we humans are determined to deny that wonder and, on top of that, to destroy it. Carnally speaking, I have an almost orgasmic relationship with reading, a reverent respect for the simple act of reading. Every page I read, even those of terrible works that obviously also fall into my hands, are a face-to-face encounter with different scales of human intelligence.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
I don’t have to justify anything, because I usually solve my real problems with the same passion with which I indulge in other addictions less practical than living, but in any case I would have a quote from the writer George RR. Martin: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The person who never reads lives only one.”
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’m a masochist as a reader: there isn’t a single book I’ve started that I haven’t managed to finish. Although I’ve suffered a lot, I always get to the end. And out of respect for myself, I’ve never talked about a book I haven’t read.
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?
Here is the story of a different kind of dead man, but it could be your own story. I refuse to believe that my death will be like any other: nothingness, silence, a tunnel, and a light at the end. What a disappointment!
