What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Platero y yo, by Juan Ramón Jiménez, in 1952.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug, and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
The question implies a very amusing but false paradox. Between Gustave Flaubert and Thomas Mann?
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read because of aesthetic pressure?
Semiotics, by Bulgarian Julia Kristeva, and other volumes from that French-inspired addiction to structuralism.
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?
Maybe La Maga, Aura, Remedios la Bella… Although it’s definitely Rosario, from Los pasos perdidos. I’m haunted by Rosarios, like María del Rosario, my central literary partner.
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?
The Episodios Nacionales by Benito Pérez Galdós.
What is your secret shameful read?
Heinrich Lausberg’s Manual of Literary Rhetoric.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you would detest an ex?
Emil Cioran, but I wouldn’t send him back to Transylvania.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
When I entered the School of Letters at the University of Havana at the age of 18.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
“Undoubtedly.”
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
A certain Sigmund Freud, from Psychoanalysis, a well-known Viennese novel recommended by Harold Bloom.
What book were you forced to read in school and now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Cecilia Valdés by Cirilo Villaverde.
What brick-and-mortar bookstore is your financial ruin and emotional sanctuary?
Amazon, of course. Although La Moderna Poesía on Obispo Street will always be my sanctuary. It will never close here.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “damn genius”?
“It’s nothing, we’re not from here, we’re leaving tomorrow.” It’s not the last, but I repeat it to myself often. Marguerite Yourcenar attributes it to her father, Michel-René Cleenewerck de Crayencour.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in taste in books?
A stunning reader of Corín Tellado, sixty years ago.
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?
A park bench in Boston or Tokyo, after losing a marathon to Murakami. But I might prefer to read upside down on my bed.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, among others.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Dr. Bernard Rieux from Albert Camus’ The Plague.
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?
Virgilio Piñera.
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?
My friendship with Cintio Vitier and Fina García Marrúz.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
They must be very entertaining.
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?
Un bárbaro en París. Textos sobre la cultura francesa (A Barbarian in Paris: Texts on French Culture), by Mario Vargas Llosa (I read it at the Aventura library and now I’ve ordered it), Desde la última vuelta del camino (From the Last Turn of the Road) (Memoirs of Pío Baroja).
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
De la gramatología (Of Grammatology), by Jacques Derrida.
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?
Don’t exaggerate, no gouging out my eyes. Just a few octosyllables from Bodas de sangre, which say: “Because I wanted to forget / and I put up a stone wall / between your house and mine./ It’s true. Don’t you remember?/ And when I saw you from afar / I threw sand in my eyes. / But I was riding a horse / and the horse went to your door.”
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
La cantidad hechizada, by José Lezama Lima.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Juan Rulfo.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
It starts at dawn and consists of not looking at the clock.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
Since reading is my most real problem, it would be “Reading for pleasure.” Pleasure of the palate, of pleasure, of dressing… Also of the useless: It was for pleasure.
What book slowly burns your conscience because you never finished it and yet you still talk about it as if you were a critic for the Paris Review?
Forgive my petulance, but I usually admit that I’ve dropped them from my hands or ironically confess my mental poverty. I couldn’t get through Juan Cristobal, nor Los endemoniados, among dozens of others in the Western canon. Nor could I get through many poets. For example, from the Spanish generation of the 1950s, the only one I reread with pleasure is Jaime Gil de Biedma. From the Cuban generation, Heberto Padilla.
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?
Don’t even think about it.
