What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
La vida breve by Juan Carlos Onetti.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
What book do you say “marked you,” but in reality you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
None.
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?
Natasha Rostova, from War and Peace.
Which book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because you’re too anxious to admit that it bored you to tears?
Ulysses, by Joyce.
What is your secret guilty pleasure read?
None.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you would detest an ex?
Roberto Calasso.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
Always. I underline them so I can come back to them several times and see if I understand them someday.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
“Device.” But the worst is “sensorium,” which I never use.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
Moby Dick in the English edition by Chiltern.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
John Sheddan, in The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
What book were you forced to read in school and now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
None. Maybe Baldor’s Algebra. But I neither pretend nor love it. Only the trauma remains. I see the illustration of Al-Khwarizmi with a turban on the cover and tremble at the memory of the math exercises.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
Any bookstore, but especially those that carry editions from Adelphi, Acantilado, and above all, Gallimard’s La Pléiade.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
Saramago in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, when the narrator says, “Over the nakedness of fantasy, the diaphanous mantle of truth.” It’s a play on a line by Eça de Queirós.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences in taste in books?
No. If anything, differences encourage them. They always make me see something I didn’t know how to discover, that I overlooked or misinterpreted. Having a woman correct a quote for me is the sexiest thing there is.
Where is your favorite place to read as if you were a Murakami character? A hipster café, a rainy window, an existentialist bed? Anywhere else?
A high-speed train.
What book do you use to impress cultured people and have never finished?
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I haven’t gotten past page 16, when Jute asks, “Are you ordo?” and Mutt replies, “Hardveces.”
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Natasha Rostova, always the one from War and Peace.
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?
Miklós Szentkuthy. I would ask him to write my eulogy, if the universe allowed for such impossible luxuries. Then I would ask them to play Prince’s Purple Rain on repeat.
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?
Louis-Ferdinand Céline writing Trivialities for a Massacre.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
“You’re not wrong.”
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 Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, by José Saramago, and Selected Poems by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Ernesto Hernández Busto.
Which “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and pseudo-mysticism from a hipster bookstore?
Dune, by Frank Herbert.
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?
Christmas 2024, when I finished reading The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy.
What is your “fetish book” edition, the one you won’t lend out, even if the other person promises you their soul?
My old, underlined edition of Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, published by Alianza Tres.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Kafka, for the ending of The Castle.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
It’s enough for me to reread a single page by Borges, Lezama Lima, or Clarice Lispector.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
None. Let real problems justify themselves.
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?
Infinite Jest, by Foster Wallace
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?
Say no, never, ever.
