What book ruined your ability to enjoy “light” literature forever?
I don’t really understand what you mean by light literature. If you mean bad, commercial literature, the only bestseller I’ve ever read was The Da Vinci Code, and that was enough to put me off trying again. When you’ve read One Thousand and One Nights and The Decameron at the age of ten, it’s hard to settle for something that claims to be entertaining but is little more than pretentious and flabby.
Which author would you like to invite to dinner, just to argue with them for three hours?
Foucault, for wanting to turn every school into a Gulag. And I can’t stand schools! Or Cioran, a curmudgeon who I suspect was funny. I would have loved to pick his brain for three hours. (In fact, I do that whenever I can with José Abreu Felippe, a great novelist and curmudgeon of the highest order. And boy, do I have fun!)
What book did you pretend to have read with the most conviction?
I’m terrible at pretending.
Which literary character would you kill yourself?
Any Cuban character in Padura. I feel like I’d be doing them a favor. But they’re so unbelievable that I don’t know if I consider them characters.
What “classic” book do you consider a punishment to read, yet you still defend it in public?
I would defend Paradiso, I suppose, which you rarely understand what’s going on, but you have to read if you want to understand what has happened to Cuban literature since then. Or Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, with its continuous geometric demonstrations. Everyone understands that they are great books, even if they are only enjoyed in bits and pieces, but the truth is that I have never felt the need to defend them publicly.
What is your guilty literary pleasure, the one you hide behind a fake copy of Proust?
I read for pleasure, not out of guilt.
What book do you treat as a sacred object, but whose first page remains more pristine than your new Kindle?
I have a strange relationship with books: I only consider those I handle sacred. And I’ll say something that will sound like heresy in this questionnaire: my Kindle is more promiscuous than the Count of Casanova.
Which author would you trade lives with, even if only to have a scholarship at the Sorbonne?
I’d say Hemingway’s, which from the outside seems fun and varied, but then I remember that I end up committing suicide and I get over it. But if I think about decency, elegance, and intellectual courage, I’ll go with Albert Camus, with the final accident and all, and no Nobel Prize necessary.
Which bookstore has stolen the most money from you with your consent?
The now defunct Altamira, in Coral Gables. Every time I went there, I spent a fortune. To a lesser extent, Laberinto in San Juan. That’s thinking about spending per visit. But if I think about the accumulation over time, it would be Strand, the famous bookstore in New York.
What books have you started more than three times without getting past page 40?
Swann’s Way. I’ve gotten past page 40 more than once, but I haven’t finished it. It’s not that I’ve given up on reading it, but I guess the time hasn’t come for me to enjoy it as it deserves. On the other hand, there’s a novel by a fellow countryman that I haven’t been able to get past page 60 on three occasions, but since the author is still alive, I’d rather not say anything. In that case, though, I do feel defeated.
What Latin phrase do you use to sound profound, even though you don’t really know what it means?
I avoid sounding profound. Quite successfully, I might add.
Which literary character would you like to have as a therapist, knowing that they would ruin you emotionally?
Joseph K., obviously. A guy like that, so malleable, but who thinks he’s so tough, should understand anyone. And at the same time, it wouldn’t do you much good if he understood you.
What’s the most absurd edition you’ve bought just for its aesthetics?
I don’t buy books for their covers. I’m starting to suspect that this questionnaire wasn’t written for me.
What literary genre do you pretend to despise because your intellectual friends do?
My disdain is usually genuine, even if it’s not justified. I never read Tolkien—the king of heroic fantasy—when everyone else was reading him. I guess I didn’t do it out of pure personal snobbery. And now I think it’s too late to get into that world. And I regret it.
Which contemporary author do you pretend not to like, but secretly wish you had written their books?
This questionnaire has made me realize how healthy my literary relationships are. I only talk intensely about literature with my wife, who is a much better reader than I am and than most people I know. And in that case, what’s the point of pretending in front of your wife? I wish she liked my books as much as she likes Paul Auster’s, which only captivate me at times, especially in the first few pages.
How many books do you have waiting to be read and how many do you continue to buy each month?
I probably have many more books waiting to be read than I have read. I buy very few books now. I can hardly fit them all in my house, which isn’t small. But I pirate about twenty digital books a month, if not more.
What literary scene made you close the book and look at the ceiling as if you had experienced something?
I can’t remember any right now. The ones I do remember are scenes that made you change the way you look at the world. The Tin Drum is full of memorable scenes that twist your perception, starting with the eel fishing with a horse’s head that ends up disgusting Oskar’s mother so much that she becomes ill and dies. Carver’s stories are full of tremendous scenes. Like the one where the narrator tries to explain to a blind man what a cathedral is. Or the one where parents find comfort for the death of their son with the baker who made his birthday cake. Or the presumptuous waiter who, in the midst of Chekhov’s agony, wonders whether it would be appropriate to pick up the cork from the champagne bottle that has fallen on the floor. And I could tell you about lots of scenes from Salinger’s Nine Stories. I was very impressionable when I read them.
What book would you give someone just to test whether they are worthy of you?
I know a few people who are much more worthy than me and at the same time are completely illiterate. Why ruin a good friendship? But if it’s a matter of introducing someone to the gospel of reading, I’d give them anything by Borges or Pessoa. They whet anyone’s appetite.
What is the most heinous literary crime? Dog-earing pages, underlining books, or not reading?
Not reading and then giving your opinion.
Do you read the author’s blurb before starting a book, or do you prefer to ruin the experience for yourself?
Before, but only sometimes.
Which fictional library do you deserve according to your level of literary neurosis?
There was a real library, the one Abraham Moritz Warburg gave to Ernst Cassirer, which, instead of the usual layout, was classified into four sections (Orientation, Image, Word, Action). Mine would be classified as Freedom (or the profound lack thereof, which is the same thing in literary terms, as demonstrated by The Gulag Archipelago), History, Laughter, and Music (for music lovers like me, who can’t read music but love it).
Have you ever stolen a book? Which one(s)?
A few, but all at the book fair in Havana, back when they only exhibited books, they didn’t sell them, and you drooled over taking them home. One of those books was by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, published by Monte Ávila Editores. That’s where I discovered there was a writer named Reinaldo Arenas.
What is your greatest achievement as a reader: surviving Ulysses or finishing Don Quixote?
I haven’t survived Ulysses, but I have read Don Quixote several times and with pleasure. Moby Dick is very uneven, but the pandemic was going on outside and I read it without much difficulty.
What book would you have liked to write just so you could sign it and show it off?
Less Than One, by Joseph Brodsky.
At what age did you realize that reading didn’t make you a better person, just more unbearable?
I’m still very young: I still believe that people like me—physically and socially awkward but intellectually curious—are improved by reading.
Which supporting character deserved more prominence than the main character?
All the supporting characters in the Sandokan saga are more interesting than Sandokan himself, starting with Yáñez de Gomera. Julia in 1984 is more solid than Winston Smith. Her cynicism is much more believable than his naivety. And in The Magic Mountain, Settembrini is more attractive than Hans Castorp. By far. Often the protagonists are characters who do things or have things happen to them to sustain the plot, but those events don’t define their personality any better, or we simply find them a little repellent. The secondary characters, on the other hand, appear on the pages when they want to, they have more freedom, so to speak, and it only takes a phrase or a gesture for us to fall in love with them.
How many bookmarks do you have, and how many do you actually use (apart from the lottery ticket that you didn’t win, of course)?
I have tons of bookmarks, but in the end, what I use most are pieces of toilet paper. That gives you an idea of my reading habits.
Which author do you think is brilliant, but you’d rather not have around at a dinner party?
There are legions of them, although after getting to know them through reading, you think that, under ideal conditions, you could get to know them on a very personal level, as only their best friends do. But if I had to choose, I wouldn’t invite Leo Tolstoy, a guy who was prone to pontificating and, on top of that, a vegan. For me, Anna Karenina is the most complete novel in existence (along with The Brothers Karamazov and Don Quixote), but at dinner time I wouldn’t want to have someone around who would ruin my digestion. Nabokov wouldn’t be a great dinner companion either, I suspect.
What phrase do you use to justify not finishing the books you start?
I think I said it before: I read for pleasure, not to show off.
If your life were a book, on which shelf in the bookstore would we find it: “unnecessary drama,” “pretentious fiction,” or “essay on disappointment”?
I would put my life on the children’s literature shelf, without a doubt. Next to Tom Sawyer, whose protagonist lived in his childhood what I have tried to emulate all my life. What I don’t understand is why I insist on writing books that belong on a completely different shelf.
