Which book ruined your ability to enjoy “light” literature forever?
I didn’t have a logical or structured literary education… I grew up in the countryside, where I read everything I could get my hands on, from magazines and newspapers to history books or novels like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. It wasn’t much, and there was no order to it, so at that age I didn’t have the children’s or young adult books that are essential for the formation of a young reader. Neither Salgari nor Verne nor London were regulars. Perhaps they were abrupt leaps, but in some way they inoculated me against “light” literature, although I must have read some of that too.
Which author would you like to invite to dinner, just to contradict them for three hours?
Jean-Paul Sartre. Or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, although it wouldn’t be to contradict him (Así en la paz como en la guerra still seems to me to be a great book of short stories).
Which book did you pretend to have read with the most conviction?
Perhaps Paradiso by José Lezama Lima or Rayuela by Julio Cortázar. They are still on my to-read list.
Which literary character would you kill yourself?
Roger Chillingworth from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Or Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Or Mersault, from Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Although you run the risk of ending up sympathizing with several of them.
Which “classic” book do you consider a punishment to read, yet still defend in public?
I could say Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy or Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. James Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, or Mann’s The Magic Mountain. But I’ll go with Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I recommend Faulkner, especially his short stories, and I appreciate the technical innovation, which was so influential, of The Sound and the Fury, but I couldn’t finish this, as my edition says, “formidable novel.”
What is your guilty literary pleasure, the one you hide behind a fake copy of Proust, Kafka, or Joyce?
Rereading some of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels.
What book do you treat as a sacred object, but whose first page remains more untouched than your new Kindle?
I have Severo Sarduy’s complete works as untouched as when I brought them from the University of Poitiers last February. It’s a beautiful edition, annotated and with several essays on the work of the Camagüey-born author, of whom I have only read Gestos in its first edition by Seix Barral (1963). It’s still by my bedside and I don’t know when I’ll dare to read it.
Which author would you trade places with, even if only to have a scholarship at the Sorbonne?
Milan Kundera, who ended up living (and dying) in Paris.
Which bookstore has stolen the most money from you with your consent?
Cuban bookstores steal little money. I have yet to leave any of them laden with books.
Which books have you started more than three times without getting past page 40?
Well, I keep coming back to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, maybe no more than three times, but it has resisted me several times (I think my relationship with Faulkner is better through his short stories). I could add Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Germán Espinosa’s La tejedora de coronas, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (although I don’t remember if I finished it or not).
What Latin phrase do you use to sound profound, even though you don’t really know what it means?
Finis coronat opus. I read it as a child on the last page of a dictionary and I haven’t forgotten it.
Which literary character would you like to have as a therapist, knowing that it would ruin you emotionally?
Commissioner Mandrake, a memorable character by Brazilian author Rubem Fonseca. Although I don’t think Mandrake trusts therapists. Or, on another note, Father Jozef Suryn, the protagonist of Mother Joan of the Angels, a novel by Polish author Jarolaw Iwaszkiewicz.
What is the most absurd edition you have bought just for its aesthetics?
I have bought a few new books to replace old editions, but not for their aesthetics.
What literary genre do you pretend to despise because your intellectual friends do?
I read practically everything, but without thinking of despising it, perhaps what I read least is theater.
Which contemporary author do you pretend to be uninterested in, but secretly wish you had written their books?
It could be Murakami, for example. Although I haven’t read him.
How many books do you have waiting to be read, and how many do you continue to buy each month?
I have books that I won’t be able to read for several years. Perhaps a few hundred waiting. But I continue to buy, accepting gifts… There’s no escaping it.
What literary scene made you close the book and stare at the ceiling as if you had experienced something?
I would find it in The War of the End of the World by Vargas Llosa; in Waiting for the Barbarians or Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee; in The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov… Or in stories by Conrad, Mann, Piglia, William Styron, Calvino, Navokov…
What book would you give as a gift just to test whether someone is worthy of you?
The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. And I would give it as a gift with Visconti’s film.
What is the most heinous literary crime? Dog-earing pages, underlining books, or not reading?
I underline books, but I would never dog-ear pages. Although not reading is more heinous.
Do you read the author’s blurb before starting a book, or do you prefer to ruin the experience later?
I usually know the authors I read; I know who they are. I don’t take many risks because there is so much to read, and when I buy books, I go for specific titles or authors.
Which fictional library do you deserve according to your level of literary neurosis?
I think we’ve all dreamed of walking through the medieval library in Eco’s The Name of the Rose. And, although not fictional, walking the halls of Eco’s own library.
Have you ever stolen a book? Which one(s)?
Yes, I can’t stand seeing books gathering dust without being read, especially if they interest me. Seeing them like that compels me to rescue them. I’m thinking now of Under the Sign of Saturn by Susan Sontag; Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino; Las peras del olmo by Octavio Paz… And a few more poetry books.
What is your greatest achievement as a reader: surviving Ulysses or finishing Don Quixote?
I haven’t read either of them. But it could be Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz.
What book would you have liked to write just so you could sign it and show it off?
The Master and Margarita, which Bulgakov was unable to finish or show off.
At what age did you realize that reading didn’t make you a better person, just more unbearable?
Probably in college or in the years after, when I met other unbearable people.
Which secondary character deserved more prominence than the main character?
Behemoth in The Master and Margarita. He’s a demonic, sarcastic, giant cat who talks and occasionally steals the show and even the covers of some editions of the novel.
How many bookmarks do you own, and how many do you actually use (besides the lottery ticket that you didn’t win, of course)?
Many, and I almost always use the same ones.
Which author do you think is brilliant, but you’d rather not have around at a dinner party?
Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, or José Saramago. There are some disconcerting similarities.
What phrase do you use to justify not finishing the books you start?
I don’t usually leave many books unfinished. I would say that it didn’t grab me or that it wasn’t the right time.
If your life were a book, on which shelf in the bookstore would we find it: “unnecessary drama,” “pretentious fiction,” or “essay on disappointment”?
A coming-of-age novel. Or, as the Germans would say, a bildungsroman.
