What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
I suppose it was that anthology printed on newsprint from the People’s Library, which compiled stories by Spanish-American authors. The print quality was so poor that I’m embarrassed to call it a “book.” But that’s where I discovered Borges and Cortázar. I was sixteen.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
The last time that happened to me was when I read Stella Maris, the last novel Cormac McCarthy wrote. It’s perhaps his best novel. Almost no one I know has read it, of course. People read The Road because it’s the novel that bookstores (and Penguin Random House) are interested in promoting: short, simple, and a little sentimental. I always say that the danger of writing a bad novel is that it’s probably the one people will like the most. But anyway, The Road isn’t a bad novel. It’s just not up to the standard of McCarthy’s other great works. The worst thing we publish should still be good; that should be the goal.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
Well, I don’t know if “aesthetic pressure” exists. There is social pressure, academic pressure. Because of social pressure, I read The Savage Detectives (when it was fashionable in the Faculty of Arts and Letters). I thought it was terrible, although I didn’t say so at the time. I did like 2666 (especially the last part), though. Due to academic pressure, I’ve had to read theoretical texts that I find terrifying… forcing students to read Derrida can make them feel that all writing is useless (that it’s impossible to convey anything of value) or worse, the distorted belief that this is how you have to write, in a way that no one understands.
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?
Sappho.
Which book do you consider a “necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like a Latin mass?
I think The Iliad. I know it’s a wonderful book, but only a handful of passages move me. When I read it, I’m moved by something else, let’s say, which is not what is actually told: the idea that it was sung at night by the fire, in camps or in squares, by faces that time has forgotten. On the other hand, The Odyssey is hilarious.
What is your secret guilty pleasure read?
If I said it here, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them like you hate an ex?
I don’t think any living author gives me that feeling, luckily. Or maybe no modern author is as brilliant as some of my exes have been annoying. Let’s just say I haven’t blocked any contemporary writers on Instagram.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
I think the important discovery is that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you’re going to remember them or read them again.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
Any French term that’s mandatory in academia.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft artifact?
Confessions of an Opium Eater, by De Quincey. A hardcover edition. But it’s not that great (the edition, I mean). I think it was the first book I bought in Mexico.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Zooey Glass.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Versos sencillos, by Martí.
What brick-and-mortar bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
I try to switch it up, I don’t have a favorite. In Mexico City, I always recommend El Desastre to people. My new obsession is La Americana, which just opened. I’ve only bought one book there, an anthology by Gris Tormenta, but I figure I’ll visit at least a couple of times a month from now on.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
In Pequeñas memorias, Fina wrote that reality can withstand lies without breaking, but words cannot. That phrase has been haunting me for months.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences over books?
No, but I’ve had many that didn’t start that way.
What’s 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?
My house. My house is my favorite hipster place.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
The novel I’ve been writing since 2020 (and which remains unpublished). Technically, I haven’t finished it. Sometimes I talk about it and its characters as if they were well known. But hey, I talk about it with people who already know me.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
I don’t think I’d ever have a diary. But I could entrust my WhatsApp conversations to a Kafka character. They’d get bored and never finish reading them.
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?
David Foster Wallace.
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?
I was just talking about this the other day with someone: the ending of The Magic Mountain.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
I misread the question. I thought you were asking me for an insult towards a writer who hates reading. I think that mistake was more interesting. Reading Alejandro Zambra’s latest conceptual novels (not the first ones) is like reading the small print of the terms and conditions of a newly installed app.
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?
I answered above that I bought Viajes al país del silencio, Gris Tormenta’s anthology on silence.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Los caídos, by Carlos Manuel Álvarez. It’s not a pretentious novel in the sense that it seeks a baroque language, or that it’s full of quotes from philosophers, or anything like that. It’s narrated from the present as if it were recorded on a phone, and that might not be a bad thing, but the problem is that you use the phone to record clichés, which is what you expect a contemporary Cuban author to write. It is pretentious because it aims to be the novel of present-day Cuba, the novel that had to be written. A forced, committed melodrama, almost in the style of socialist realism. Like the script of the film Conducta. But at least Conducta has other things going for it: the acting, the photography. The writing in Los caídos, on the other hand, is worthy of Juventud Rebelde. No nuances. And I know it may seem strange that I choose to refer to Los caídos to talk about a pretentious book (there are so many: I mentioned Alejandro Zambra’s earlier). I mention it because it is an example of how many publishers and magazines view contemporary Cuban literature. What is expected of us? Well, that we write about the Cuban “theme.” And there are so many people wanting to write the book about contemporary Cuba, because they assume that’s what needs to be written. Cuban literature today is (sadly) more committed than ever, if it still exists. And there is nothing in the world more pretentious than a committed author.
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?
Less than a year ago, I read Alejandro Rossi’s Diarios. Dark pages that made me rethink many things.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
There’s a sky-blue edition of Chesterton’s short stories that I lost years ago and then found again (that is, I found it in a bookstore). I’ll never lend it out.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
The author of the Book of Job. The ending (when God intervenes) is mysterious, not entirely clear. I have my own interpretation, but I’m not sure. The book recounts Job’s dialogues with some faithful followers. Job complains about how unfair the world God has created is, and the faithful tell him that the world has been cruel to him only because he has disobeyed God, committed some sin, or not revered him enough. But in the end, God rebukes the faithful: it makes no sense to try to find logic between the world and your desires; it makes no sense to do what many Christians do, which is to argue that God “punishes” or “blesses” depending on how bad or good you are.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
The stories of Borges. I don’t know if they make the world feel like it makes sense, but they do something more important: they make me feel like literature makes sense.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
I think I’ve always managed to keep reading and writing alive on the margins of my “real problems.” I don’t try to justify them.
What book slowly burns your conscience because you never finished it and yet you still review it as if you were a critic for the Paris Review?
Don Quixote. I confess that I skipped a few chapters, but only a few. I first read it in an abridged Venezuelan edition, and then I read the complete version, but even then I skipped a couple of chapters. I was never interested in The Impertinent Curious.
If you were a book forgotten on a dusty shelf, what phrase would you put on your back cover so that someone would finally choose you?
I was about to add a note to a book I published two years ago, La intuición de la caída (The Intuition of the Fall). In the end, I deleted it. The note said something like: “The reader is free not only to take things from this book, but also to leave them here, to free themselves from them.”
