What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Robinson Crusoe, without a doubt. I must have been nine or ten when I read it for the first time.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
I would like to kiss and hug La Maga. And then hit Julio Cortázar with the first edition of Rayuela. It’s a book that awakens a kind of longing that can be very harmful.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but in reality you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
I had been told that Ferdydurke was enormous, and I spent a week reading it. Then I defended that book in some circles, although a dark impulse was making its way into my subconscious. Soon after, I read Cosmos, Pornography, Bakakai, and the diaries… magnificent works! Who knows, maybe I’ll go back to Ferdydurke and change my mind.
Which literary character would you want as a partner, even though you know you’d end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
The jazz background made me think of a certain female character from The Serpent Club, but I don’t want to be repetitive.
Which book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you to tears?
The Divine Comedy. Hundreds of pages skimmed through on autopilot. Dante’s cantos lack the epic traction of Homer’s. The events of the Trojan War are translatable. The same is not true of Dante. His greatness lies not so much in the events he recounts, but in the tension endured by each of the hendecasyllables that make up the colossal structure. And that is not appreciable in the Spanish versions. I have managed to alleviate the situation by reading Dante indirectly. By tracing his influence on other authors, listening to those who descended into Tartarus and returned to tell the tale.
What is your secret reading shame?
I confess that from time to time I frequent the pages of Emilio Salgari. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to realize that this is traumatic, extraliterary reading.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you would detest an ex?
Michel Houellebecq, for writing novels such as Platform and The Elementary Particles.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences does not mean you understand them?
There is no need to highlight what you understand. I mark what I need to come back to. I can’t read without a pen handy. I underline, circle, put in parentheses, write in the margins.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book in order to sound more intellectual?
Intellectuals make my hair stand on end. I prefer to sound like an ordinary person.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
I’m not a bibliophile. You can’t imagine how many books luck has always kept away from me.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Harry Haller.
Which book were you forced to read in school and now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
I’ve only read one book because my teacher required it: Papá Goriot. That novel paved the way for me to discover Dostoevsky. I owe it to Goriot that I started reading Dostoevsky in high school.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
I haven’t spent much on books. I’ve had good friends who have provided me with the necessary reading material at the right time.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “damn genius”?
By saying “literary phrase,” you are conditioning my answer. You are steering me toward narrative or, perhaps, essay. However, I believe that these exceptions to language occur with greater intensity and height within poetry. And when I say “intensity and height,” I am already answering your question.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in taste in books?
I don’t think so, but who knows.
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 place?
There is no book that I can’t take to bed with me.
What book do you use to impress cultured people and have never finished?
Truly cultured people are not swayed by imposters.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Any character by Roberto Bolaño.
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?
This question gives me the creeps a little, but if you press me, I would say Samuel Beckett.
What was the worst literary betrayal you suffered? A bad ending, an atrocious adaptation, or your favorite author professing an ideology incompatible with your principles?
If we discount the inevitable cinematic distortions they have been subjected to, I don’t think I’ve ever felt betrayed by my favorite authors.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says “I don’t like to read”?
A person who doesn’t read is immune to refinement. You would have to insult them in another way, perhaps with a phrase like this: “Get down, this is a hundred below, it’s down.”
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?
The latest PDF to enter my to-read folder is Almas grises (Grey Souls) by Philippe Claudel.
Which “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and pseudo-mysticism from a hipster bookstore?
You’re going to kill me, but I want to be honest: The Western Canon. After reading Anatomy of Criticism and Mimesis, Bloom’s work seemed pretty light, to be honest.
When was the last time you read something so beautiful that it revealed something about yourself and you wanted to gouge your eyes out like Oedipus?
Vallejo, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Lezama, Pound… they have given me metric tons of beauty. These are territories I need to continue exploring. So I don’t plan on gouging out my eyes like Oedipus, and I hope that God, with his magnificent irony, will allow me to continue reading no matter what happens.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend out, even if the other person promises you their soul?
I have some books, heavily underlined, that I would not want to part with. None of them have become fetishes or talismans. I give away beloved books with extraordinary ease.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
I would like to discuss some sonnet endings with Julio Herrera y Reissig.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
It’s not really a ritual, but when I feel unbalanced, I open a book at random and read here and there. A few lines of good literature have an effect similar to a shot of tequila.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
My eternity has died, and I am mourning her.
What book slowly burns your conscience because you never finished it, yet you still opine on it as if you were a critic for the Paris Review?
I still have a few volumes of In Search of Lost Time left to read. The parts I know allow me to gauge the extent of my ignorance. Unfortunately, Marcel Proust is an author who demands minimum conditions for reading his work.
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?
No one chooses a book because of what it says on the back cover.
