What book ruined your ability to enjoy “light” literature forever?
The Shadow of the Wind.
Which author would you like to invite to dinner, just to argue with them for three hours?
Teresa de la Parra. But I would only argue with her so she would talk and talk; she was too brilliant.
What book did you pretend to have read with the most conviction?
I guess The Divine Comedy. I haven’t been able to read it all, but some parts of it move me, so I assume I’ve read it all and enjoyed every page.
Which literary character would you kill yourself?
I can be very irascible, but I can’t imagine murdering a fictional character. Sometimes I felt like slapping the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces.
What “classic” book do you consider a punishment to read, yet still defend in public?
Paradiso, by Lezama Lima. I’m shipwrecked in its prose and rhythm. But I think that kind of novel is necessary to break the normality and repetition of narrative.
What is your guilty literary pleasure, the one you hide behind a fake copy of Proust, Kafka, or Joyce?
I don’t suffer from literary guilt.
What book do you treat as a sacred object, but whose first page remains more pristine than your new Kindle?
Some books my mother gave me. I couldn’t get into them, but the fact that she gave them to me made them objects of affection.
Which author would you trade places with, even if it was just to get a scholarship to the Sorbonne?
I should say none. But there are months in April when I would trade places with anyone who sells a hundred thousand copies so I could then say how sad they are because the critics don’t respect them.
Which bookstore has stolen the most money from you with your consent?
The Suma bookstore in Caracas; the Portonaris bookstore in Salamanca; the Antonio Machado bookstore in Madrid.
What books have you started more than three times without getting past page 40?
Paradiso, by Lezama Lima. The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende. The Vain Yesterday, by Isaac Rosa.
What Latin phrase do you use to sound profound, even though you don’t really know what it means?
I don’t think I have one. I love languages with the desperation of someone who could never master them.
Which literary character would you like to have as a therapist, knowing that they would ruin you emotionally?
Martín Romaña, the protagonist of Bryce Echenique’s novel.
What is the most absurd edition you have bought just for its aesthetics?
I don’t know if I would call them absurd, but perhaps I don’t check if they are my kind of books. The thing is, when I see books from El Acantilado, I go into a trance. I smell them, look at them, caress them. I usually like that catalog a lot, but even when I don’t connect with one of their titles, I still look at it, entranced.
What literary genre do you pretend to despise because your intellectual friends do?
My friends tend to despise crime novels and microfiction. Out of solidarity, I should despise them too, but I’ve written books in those genres, so it wouldn’t be very credible.
Which contemporary author do you pretend to be uninterested in but secretly wish you had written their books?
I don’t pretend to be uninterested in Sábato. He has ceased to interest me, and reader friends tell me not to reread him in order to preserve the tender memory of my youth. But at one point I wanted to write some of his books.
How many books do you have left to read, and how many do you still buy each month?
Hundreds of books are waiting to be read. It’s a reason to live. Everything that remains to be read… every month, I add three or four books to that nebulous time called the future.
What literary scene made you close the book and stare at the ceiling as if you had experienced something?
Several moments in Percussion, the novel by José Balza. The beginning, for example, when an inexplicable metamorphosis occurs and the character regains his youthful body and in a minute relives his entire existence.
What book would you give away just to test whether someone is worthy of you?
The Exaggerated Life of Martín Romaña.
What is the most heinous literary crime? Dog-earing pages, underlining books, or not reading?
I love to stain, crumple, and underline books. I love that there is life in them. I could tell you that not reading them is a crime, but I wouldn’t; the wonderful freedom of literature is the best tribute you can pay to certain books when you leave them untouched.
Do you read the author’s blurb before starting a book, or do you prefer to ruin the experience later?
I read them. I read them. I’m very nosy; I like to know who that person is whose words I’m going to devote a piece of my life to.
What fictional library do you deserve according to your level of literary neurosis?
I don’t know.
Have you ever stolen a book? Which one(s)?
Not on purpose. Not intentionally. Sometimes I find books in my library whose origin makes me wonder, and I think that maybe they were left behind and I can’t make it right. I recently found a book by Bryce Echenique in Caracas dedicated to someone I don’t know. I imagined it was someone who should have contacted me to give it back, but they didn’t. I took it with me when I went out and left it in a taxi. Books find their own way…
What is your greatest achievement as a reader: surviving Ulysses or finishing Don Quixote?
Neither. Having read almost all of Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes. You know that on a flight to Mérida, the plane carrying García Márquez and Vargas Llosa began to lurch, and García Márquez, frightened, thought it was the end, so he said to Vargas Llosa, terrified: “Tell me the truth, did you read all of Terra Nostra?”
What book would you have liked to write just so you could sign it and show it off?
Piedra de Mar, by Francisco Massiani.
At what age did you realize that reading didn’t make you a better person, just more unbearable?
At 24. I met a guy who said he read to be a better person; he was a horrible person: envious, toxic, scheming, in fact, he ended up becoming a Chavista. When I heard him say that, I realized that reading doesn’t make us better.
Which supporting character deserved more prominence than the main character?
Huckleberry Finn comes to mind, but Mark Twain decided to give him that prominence eight years after writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
How many bookmarks do you own, and how many do you actually use (besides the lottery ticket that you didn’t win, of course)?
Dozens of them. I don’t use them much. I end up putting a pencil on the page I’m reading. But I haven’t forgotten that María Fernanda Palacios said that a friend of hers insisted that you shouldn’t mark pages in books. That sounds interesting: getting lost in a book, repeating a passage, skipping another, finding exactly where you left off.
Which author do you think is brilliant, but would rather not have at dinner?
Hemingway.
What phrase do you use to justify not finishing the books you start?
Life is short and paisa trays are long.
If your life were a book, on which shelf in the bookstore would we find it: “unnecessary drama,” “pretentious fiction,” or “essay on disappointment”?
Pretentious dramatic fiction about disappointment.
