What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From the moment I read what Mark Twain wrote on the first page: “People who try to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; those who try to find a moral will be banished; those who try to find a plot will be shot.” I was a kid and didn’t understand that warning, but I sensed that something important was at stake.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Emotionally isn’t the right word, but the author is José Martí. I would hit him with an 800-page blank edition of Escenas norteamericanas or Diario de campaña. For the invention of Cuba.
What book do you say “marked” you, but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
The first part of Don Quixote marked me, but only because of pressure, not so much aesthetic as kinetic, to get to the second part, which was what really marked me.
Which literary character would you like as a partner, even though you know you’d end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
Kate, the narrator of David Markson’s The Lover of Wittgenstein. Or Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. In neither case is there jazz playing in the background, let alone bookstores.
What book do you consider a “necessary classic” but only because you’re too anxious to admit that it bored you to death?
Trilce by César Vallejo.
What is your secret shameful read?
Twitter.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them as much as you hate an ex?
David Foster Wallace. His exes hated him too, I think. DFW is the ex par excellence.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
Since I started underlining sentences.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
That one: “pretentious.” I don’t have a very large vocabulary.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
You’ve caught me in the wrong social class for a book like that.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Irene Adler. The only Victorian witch I’ve ever known.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
The Kingdom of This World, by Alejo Carpentier.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional chapel?
None. I walk into bookstores already broke. Financial ruin prevents you from bookish ruin.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
Any block of text by César Aira.
Have you ever been in a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable bookish differences?
No. Books are perhaps the most reconcilable of all differences.
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?
Onetti’s bed and Levrero’s screen. (That was a very Uruguayan answer).
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
I try not to draw the attention of cultured people, Edax.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Guy Montag, the fireman in Fahrenheit 451. So he could return to the fold and remember why “it was a pleasure to burn.”
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?
Philip K. Dick. But on the condition that he doesn’t read anything. He can just walk around among the attendees holding a copy of his novel titled Let My Wet Eyes Flow, Said the Policeman. (That phrase printed on his sweater works for me too).
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?
The film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, perpetrated by Peter Jackson. By then Tolkien had completely lost my interest, but faced with that video game, Tolkien suddenly became Literature again.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
“That’s why you’re so successful as a writer.”
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?
In case my answer to question 13 wasn’t clear: I don’t have enough money to buy books. But recently, as a library loan, I added a book by Joseph Roth and one by Guy Davenport to my to-read pile.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
That’s such an elaborate question that there has to be a book behind it. But to know which one, the wording would have to have come from me. So I’m not sure. Something by Benjamin Labatut? The latest stuff by Rodrigo Fresán?
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?
About a decade ago. A few pages of Monasterio, by Eduardo Halfon. I don’t know if it was beautiful, but it was very sad. It’s the only time a book has brought tears to my eyes.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
I don’t want anyone’s soul, but if someone made me a promise like that, I’d lend them all my fetishes.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
I guess I’m not very original here: Franz Kafka. But I don’t think any spiritualist is ready for that session.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
Certain poems by suicidal Cuban poets.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
I would resort to the most boleristic Borges: “It is not love that unites us, but fear / that is why I love her so much.” He was talking about Buenos Aires and I am talking about reading, or what amounts to the same thing: literature.
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?
I barely made it through Purgatory and didn’t have the strength to finish Paradise, but Dante’s Inferno has everything and everyone, including the critics of the Paris Review.
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?
The tombstone Kilgore Trout imagined for himself, according to Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions:
SOMEBODY
(SOMETIME TO SOMETIME)
HE TRIED.
