What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Fortunately, my literary innocence remains intact, and the emotional realm of literature is, so to speak, just a pixel in the bigger picture.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
I think Conrad would be a candidate for a farce like that.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
I don’t rule out having said such a thing, but I don’t remember a book. It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you anyway that aesthetic pressure works for me. And, one could say, not without a certain irony, that it is precisely where pressure of some kind is applied that one would expect a mark to be left.
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?
The woman who prepares a crab stew in one of Baudelaire’s prose poems. If I suddenly began to question which woman I am talking about, that is, if such an image were another example of the phantasmagoria of my mind and had not in fact sprung from the poetic arteries of the aforementioned poet, I would feel very fortunate for a few minutes.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like a Latin mass?
Now that I’m overcome by a fit of sincerity, I’ll say it quickly and without anger: The Castle, by Kafka. For some reason, I prefer his short stories. It’s possible that I enjoyed The Castle more for its overall effect, its absurd patina, but not for the journey.
What is your secret shameful read?
Only if shame is in quotation marks: Petrarch’s Canzoniere.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you would detest an ex?
Provided that by modern you don’t mean contemporary, I would like to say Joyce, I would like to say Valery.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
Maybe right now. But beyond understanding, who knows if the impulse to underline overlaps with some unconscious aspiration for timeless dialogue, considering the physical drift to which books are subject. Who knows? But to venture further into this, an underlined sentence could be a bottle capsizing in an inconceivable sensibility, with a blind demon inside.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
I must have forgotten it, along with the book.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft artifact?
A friend and I have found some unusual little books, although with less pomp. That particular one, which had no author, was a repository of a collection of poems (animated by shark-like souls, specters of taverns ravaged by scurvy), which had a profound effect on me at the time. I don’t know what became of that bizarre little book.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
To stay on the ecological theme: an Ahab on powerful painkillers.
What book were you forced to read at school and now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
At school, what I did NOT do was read.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
There isn’t one. Lately, I’ve been mercilessly purging my bookshelves. The physical books that survived my little inquisition have a suspiciously magical purpose. Totemic blocks. For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been living a peaceful digital life.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius!”?
I’m sorry I don’t have any fresher examples, my friend, but here’s a disturbingly gothic one from the 19th century: “As if my sword had minted counterfeit coins on the monk’s skull!” The culprit is Aloysius Bertrand.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences over books?
No. I had a relationship that, believing it saw in books some strange aspect of my being, maliciously attacked certain specific copies. A massacre that, incidentally, would have left Don Quixote bewildered and disoriented on his 400th birthday. But we were restored.
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? Any other suggestions?
The bed is my thing, with or without Søren. I traded it to a Uruguayan in a shipyard in the East for a set of Waterloo teeth!
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
I don’t think I can be credited with gems of that caliber.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
I would only entrust my diary to a character in my diary.
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?
I would invite two without hesitation: Apuleius and Rabelais.
What was the worst literary betrayal you ever suffered? A bad ending, an atrocious adaptation, or your favorite author professing an ideology incompatible with your principles.
Well, without implying that I lead a sterile life, devoid of judgment and personal scale, there is the option of believing that all endings are where they should be and that an adaptation is just an adaptation, nothing more. Otherwise, an author’s principles do not determine any particular attitude on my part toward them.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
No idea. Apart from the fact that reading is not exactly a sport that I can neglect on a daily basis, in some way, and for, I don’t know, several millennia? I understand that today, fortunately, there are very valid and effective alternatives to reading. However, I admit that, depending on the time of day, the type of person and their tone, I might find it almost offensive if someone confided something like that to me.
You have such a tall stack of books to read that if it fell, it could kill you. Even so, which ones did you buy yesterday?
As I was saying, I’m sailing smoothly through digital waters. It’s a different logic, as you know. There, whole shoals come right up to the door of your cabin and demand to be devoured. Although in the end, only a very small portion will decorate your plate. On the other hand, I wasn’t an unrepentant buyer either. I stole like crazy, and I would steal more today if I were seized by the passion I felt 20 years ago.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Killing the Buddha, without a doubt. The production of charlatans is in full swing.
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?
Not without blushing, and dispensing with the usual vehemence, Earthly Foods by André Gide once caused me that kind of intoxication. But afterwards (or before, I don’t know) I begin to suspect everything. Including my own suspicion.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you would never lend to anyone, even if they promised you their soul?
Oh, wait a minute. In exchange for a soul, I would lend anything, even my own soul, with the proper binding guarantee.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
I would summon Kafka, and even though it doesn’t really matter, just to dig into why we were deprived of those endings.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
If I were willing to call conquering maximum uninterrupted solitude a ritual, then whatever that entails would be my ritual. The 10 pages vary greatly.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
Although not without contradiction, I am not afflicted with the devotion you refer to. So I don’t have a phrase like that in my arsenal of excuses. To be inhabited by such ardor, I would need a new configuration of atoms. Assuming that the latter is physically possible, given the effects of the new conditions implied, there would most likely be no one on the other end of the phone and the Atlantic sliding a questionnaire like this under my WhatsApp door from Poland! So better leave things as they are, my friend.
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?
Unfinished books promise my return to Ithaca and, like everything else, are open to any opinion. It’s another thing to don the critic’s jacket and blow the bagpipes.
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?
“For starters, dogs are crazy.” That should suffice. But I’m afraid I’ll probably remain on that shelf.
