What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
I was always more of an essay reader than any other genre. Of course, when I first started reading, I didn’t know what genre a particular book belonged to. But I always found reflective prose more appealing than narrative and poetry. Then I realized that you had to read everything and learn to read and know how to wait to understand some authors. Fortunately, I was rarely disappointed because I didn’t have to face books that weren’t right for me yet. Before Ortega y Gasset, before Mañach, I heard my dad talk about José Ingenieros. I read El hombre mediocre (The Mediocre Man) when I was about 18, but I liked La simulación en la lucha por la vida (Simulation in the Struggle for Life) better, which I bought from a used book seller for thirty pesos, which was expensive at the time. From there I moved on to more complex and interesting authors. Today, I wouldn’t recommend starting to read essays by José Ingenieros. Well, actually, I started with José Martí. As a child, I wasn’t a reader of adventure books. I always started with essays.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition to ruin you emotionally?
William Faulkner or Herman Melville, who belong to that less realistic and more symbolic and universal tradition than Twain or Hemingway. I like the latter two, and they are also imaginative and universal, but they don’t fascinate me as much as the former. The silences in Moby Dick, with the irregularities of the novel, are more mysterious and challenging to me than Hemingway’s iceberg theory.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
It has always been The Bible. But I return to it more than once a year. It’s not that I reread it completely.
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?
Huckleberry Finn, who I like better than Tom Sawyer. He’s more daring, his universe expands in a different way. The atmosphere of Finn’s adventures gives you the feeling of a very different journey of personal growth. Finn is less optimistic than Sawyer, but he is consistent in his goals.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like Latin mass?
La Araucana. They make you read it. They rave about Alonso de Ercilla. But there are classics that you just can’t get into. Some classics have lost their status as historical books and that’s it.
What is your secret guilty pleasure read?
It’s a biography that I can’t remember right now. I read some biographies that I thought were self-help books. Deep down, that genre has a lot of that in what an author chooses to tell you about the life of a figure who is supposed to have overcome adversity to go down in history as “great” or at least “very interesting.”
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them like you hate an ex?
I had written James Joyce before, but it’s Gabriel García Márquez, who I thought was brilliant in his main work. I don’t like the rest of his work.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
When I read Ortega y Gasset’s The Rebellion of the Masses at the age of twenty. But that changed when I reread it. I prefer rereading to discovering new authors.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
“Enormous.” But I said it to imitate a friend. I actually use ‘tremendous’ more than “enormous.”
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
Something by Oscar Wilde. I collect all the editions of Wilde I can find. I recently came across the two Spanish volumes of Frank Harris’s The Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde, but I couldn’t afford them. They were very expensive.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Sophocles’ Ajax has always caught my attention, as much as Oedipus and Odysseus. I would love to put together a book of essays on Odysseus. Which would lead me to talk about Ajax.
What book were you forced to read in school and now you pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
La Edad de Oro? No, it’s The Little Prince, which is more quoted than read and has more quotes attributed to it than Cervantes put in Don Quixote’s mouth.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
No idea. Although, yes, I have a friend who sells old books at his house, which is also a bookstore. Every time I go to see him, he shows me gems he knows I can’t afford. He does it to annoy me.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
Something by José Martí, from an art review: “They want, through the tireless thirst of their souls, the new and impossible; they want to paint like the sun paints, and they fall.” I’m quoting it from memory, so it may not be exactly right. It’s from his best art review, on the Impressionist painters, a text that’s better than four or five volumes on Impressionist painting.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in your reading tastes?
No, not yet. I tend to look for relationships with people who are completely different from me in every way, and that includes reading and writing. I don’t need my ego to be boosted because I read and the other person doesn’t. Besides, it would be false to flatter someone for something they haven’t experienced.
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?
My sixty-year-old mahogany armchair in my windowless room, where I plug in three fans. I often read with earplugs, although I can concentrate and read in a noisy space.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
The Aztec Image by Benjamin Keen. But I don’t do it to impress cultured people, just some friends who visit me for the first time and I quote passages from the book, exaggerating everything. That’s the book I use.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Oliver Alden from The Last Puritan. Santayana’s character is so cynical at times, but reserved.
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?
Marcus Aurelius with one of his confessions about reading.
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?
The letters of María Zambrano to Reyna Rivas. When you read the ones she wrote around the time of José Lezama Lima, for example, it’s a little disconcerting. But she always had one hand in front and one behind. She couldn’t talk all the time about the divine, the soul, the dawn, poetic reason…
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says “I don’t like to read”?
Good for you.
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?
A 1965 edition of Oros viejos by Herminio Almendros. I bought it as a gift, but it’s a book I still enjoy.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Art, Love, and Everything Else by Aldous Huxley. And when one of the characters starts talking trash about Melville, I said, “No way.”
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?
Siren Land by Norman Douglas. I wrote, I think, more than just a review.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
El hombre y lo divino (Man and the Divine) by María Zambrano.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Melville’s Benito Cereno.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
Very early in the morning or after a sleepless night, reading and still being able to piece together the image of what you read. If I can’t compose the image, it means I’m really not well. Then I watch a light-hearted movie.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
“Love your cell if you want to enjoy the wine cellar” (paraphrasing Thomas Aquinas).
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?
Hollywood by Gore Vidal.
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?
“It’s not the best thing you’ll ever read. But it offers another view of the world.” I think that’s very pretentious.
