What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
None. In fact, I’m increasingly interested in non-fictional characters. And I’ve been interested in them since I wrote that poem called “Mao” in the nineties. But the first fictional character who fascinated me was Raskolnikov. Because of his morality, his philosophizing, his chest-thumping, his caricature. I was 13 or 14, and Crime and Punishment was the first novel (a neighbor who had read it a few years earlier lent it to me; it was still almost new in that two-volume Cuban edition) that made something click in my head.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Gorky. I read The Mother in tenth or eleventh grade because my school made me. Something in the book hooked me and I devoured it in one go, even though it made me very sad. Gorky was a Russian Benedetti, although I didn’t know that at the time. If I could go back in time, I would kill both of them, Gorky and the Uruguayan. There’s nothing worse than emotional or ideological blackmail in literature.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
I don’t know exactly what “aesthetic pressure” is, but I don’t think you can write fiction today without having read The Making of Americans by tata Stein. It’s an essential book (for its style, its irony, its repetitions, its reading of the “America” device), but very difficult to get through to the end (although it’s the struggle that counts). A phármakon.
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?
Bartleby, because he hardly ever talks. People who never stop talking drive me crazy.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you to death?
The four books of the virtuous knight Amadís de Gaula.
What is your secret guilty pleasure read?
Well, if it were so secret, I wouldn’t confess it. But I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve read some of the books by the abominable Norberto Fuentes. Someone should brush him off before he perpetrates another 500 pages of falsetto and rat-like egotism.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them as much as you hate an ex?
Not so much hate, but it would be nice to be as perceptive a writer as David Markson.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
From the very beginning. I underline them because, above all, I don’t understand them.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book and thus sound more intellectual?
Barrococó (Baroque + Rococo). In the 1990s, I wrote, read at an event, and published an essay on Sarduy in which I claimed that Severo, especially in his cycle of novels after De donde son los cantantes, was Barrococó. I recently came across the word again in a well-known critic who was applying it (oh, coincidences!) to the author of Cobra. The road to hell is paved with bad thefts.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a piece of Victorian witchcraft?
None, but I liked the tiny editions published by the Mexican publishing house Aguilar, with Bible paper and gold edging. Now I’ve lost my eyesight to devote myself to reading them.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Bustrófedon, by Cabrera Infante.
What book were you forced to read in school and now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Cecilia Valdés.
What physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
Todocolección, an online platform for Spanish books. And when I’m in Barcelona: La Central, Finestres, Nollegium, Laie, and all the used bookstores.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
“Here ends Poliphilo’s struggle for love in dreams, lamenting that it was not longer and that the envious sun brought forth the new day.”
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in taste in books?
In friendship? A few.
What 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, a cat, a window, and winter.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
None. I hate any kind of “epatancia” (pretentiousness).
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Bouvard and Pécuchet, so they could turn every note and every doubt of mine into endless blabber.
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?
Reinaldo Arenas.
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?
Andrzej Kuśniewicz. I thought his two novels translated into Spanish (La lección de lengua muerta and El rey de las dos Sicilias) were wonderful. Later I found out that he had belonged to the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (the Polish KGB) and that he had been a complete son of a bitch. A disappointment.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
Covfefe.
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?
The Life of Images: Iconographic Studies in Western Art by Fritz Saxl, and Memoirs of My Dead Life by George Moore.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, loose quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Landscapes of Communism by Owen Hatherley. A book about the architecture of power in former communist countries.
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?
Specimens of Bushman Folklore, one of the books I discovered thanks to that huge thing that is Crowd and Power by Elias Canetti.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
Fidel and Religion. I have it taped to a board and I use it (I used it, but the book is now in pieces) to throw darts at whenever I’m stressed about something. Ten darts in each of Castro’s eyes will relieve anyone.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Kafka. I’d like him to come down and finish writing that tragicomic gem that is Amerika, also known as The Missing Person.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
That varies. But it could be Bernhard, the short story writer, or Deleuze, in A Thousand Plateaus or in one of his conversations, or Mandelshtam, with The Joy and Mystery of Poetry… although there are others.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
“As long as there is death, there is hope” (The Leopard).
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?
Museo de la novela de la Eterna.
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?
“Come on, you frozen slut, / Come on, let’s go to hell!”
