What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
I’m torn between Milan Kundera’s The Joke, Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads, and Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel (Professor Unrat). They were all disturbing reads, each in its own way, but also in a good way.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page book for ruining you emotionally?
Yukio Mishima or Reinaldo Arenas. For more emotional reasons, one of my suicidal friends (Juan Francisco Pulido, Heriberto Hernández).
What book do you say “marked you,” but you only read because of aesthetic pressure?
I’m still reading it.
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?
Helen of Troy, Lisbeth Salander, Holly Golightly, Scheherazade. Not all at the same time, of course.
Which book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like a Latin mass?
I don’t believe in “necessary” classics; every author must construct their own canon, regardless of scholastic conventions. This is a friendly debate I had several times with Heriberto Hernández, who leaned toward initiatory readings “that every writer should have.” Homer didn’t read Borges, I replied. But if I were forced to choose one, I think I would lean toward Joyce’s Ulysses.
What is your secret guilty pleasure read?
Any of the Enid Blyton series—it’s my comfy reading. It detoxifies me from pretentious reading and attitudes. It’s the mashed yams with black bean broth of literature.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you detest an ex?
László Krasznahorkai.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
It must have been very early on because I’ve never done it (not even in textbooks). But I agree, we underline (highlight) what surprises us or what we find difficult to understand.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
Seminal.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft artifact?
I’ve lost several libraries between exiles and moves, so I put those whims aside in the past. I’m now more inclined toward a bonsai library that fits in a tiny Manhattan apartment. Which is a challenge because I don’t read digital books.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Holden Caulfield, from The Catcher in the Rye, or Hamlet, depending on my mood.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Everything by José Martí. When I’m honest, I only admire his journalism, his notebooks, and his campaign diary.
What physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
Secondhand and rare bookstores—although I often browse and don’t buy anything. I find a strange pleasure in denying myself whims and resisting temptation.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
I don’t remember, but there are two that I find sublime in their simplicity. One is in that passage where Mr. Raymond (To Kill a Mockingbird) describes the smell of Coca-Cola (leather, horses, and cotton seeds)—since then, on the rare occasions when I drink it, it tastes like nothing else to me. There’s also a passage by Javier Marías at the end of one of his novels that I haven’t been able to forget (although I don’t remember which one and I don’t have his books handy) in which someone calls on the intercom and when they answer, he just says, “It’s me.” —to conceive of a moment like that, suspended by such an ordinary phrase, yet so psychologically eloquent, whose sophisticated purpose may go unnoticed by many readers, you have to be a very capricious genius. I enjoy writers who demand a lot from you as a reader, who hide layers of interpretation.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in your taste in books?
No, but I don’t rule out the possibility.
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?
Lying in bed, covered by a light blanket that belonged to my daughter, while it snows or pours rain outside.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
I have many, although I only use them to trip up those smug, pedantic intellectuals who enjoy dragging their conversation partners into the pit they’ve dug for themselves. What boring, single-minded people! I’ve finished most of them, but if they don’t have the desired effect, I’ve even made up titles and authors.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
If I had one, to Kate, the protagonist of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
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?
Borges, of course.
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?
I read with fairly low expectations. I know how hard it is to produce a few ounces of good literature and that the chances of something seducing you are extremely rare. It’s enough for me to be left with an idea, a phrase, a verse, an insinuation. There are, of course, authors who diminish over time and you feel like an old love is dying, betraying the old passions of your youth. That is perhaps the worst literary “betrayal.” You should never return to books that once made you happy, to paraphrase Félix Grande.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
Me neither.
You have a pile of books to read so high that if it fell, it could kill you. Even so, which ones did you buy yesterday?
Treatise on Geometry, by Tana Oshima, and the Impedimenta edition of Theodoros, by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Marian Ochoa de Eribe. I was torn between this one and Sean Cotter’s English translation—his translation of Solenoid won the 2024 Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, although it didn’t make it to the finalists—and one thing leads to another, there are several of the finalist novels I’d like to read (fingers crossed).
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Anything by Paulo Coelho, but I must confess that the three I’ve read (The Alchemist, The Winner Stands Alone, and Brida) end up captivating the reader.
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?
I know that feeling that is so much like envy and leaves us with a gentle nostalgia for what we would have liked to write, like when the wind blows your favorite hat off a cliff in Iceland, but since writing is above all a way of venerating reading, we end up revering writing. The most recent episode I remember is, precisely, one of Pablo de Cuba’s Estampitas para santos menores (Stickers for Minor Saints): the one dedicated to the “refined explicit” drawings of Édouard-Henri Avril with their “scenes (that) gasped in Latin.”
What is your ‘fetish book,’ the one you won’t lend out, even if the other person promises you their soul?
It used to be Umberto Eco’s The Absent Structure, which was a rarity in Cuba at a time of bartering, scarcity, and promiscuous and endogamous reading. I still have some fetish books that I reread as a spur while I write and sometimes accompany me on long trips: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, for example. They are modest editions, pulp, softcover, with no bibliophile value. I don’t lend them out because of their practical and emotional importance: they are mental gymnastics and they are not contagious.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov).
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
I wait until everyone is asleep—not just in my house, in the city, in this part of the world—then, with the lights off and only the lamp focused on the book, I advance in my reading as I penetrate the night, I feel like I’m moving forward amid its muffled, distant noises (an alarm going off, a car horn) as I stay awake because of the intensity of the plot or slowly sink into the drowsiness of light sleep.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
“Existence has its own order that no human mind can comprehend” —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian. Or Scarlett O’Hara’s final line in Gone With the Wind: ”After all, tomorrow is another day.”
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?
Several neglected books burn my conscience, none of them unfinished—I finish them with stoic discipline, reading with four outboard motors. I don’t even leave bad movies unfinished: I finish them by speeding up the playback. I have that naive faith in man that tells me, things will get better at some point. What can drive someone without talent to such an enormous and poorly paid sacrifice?
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?
“This is the lost book of instant gratification that your successful neighbor has hidden from you. Here you will find what you need to know to achieve fame and fortune in a flash. Keep reading and you will be haunted by poverty and calamity.” Or something like that, taken from the scam manual and summarized in less than 280 characters. Of course, I wouldn’t be interested in that kind of reader.
