What book ruined your ability to enjoy “light” literature forever?
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith.
Which author would you like to invite to dinner, just to argue with them for three hours?
George Orwell, just to present him with some Creole annotations on 1984.
What book did you pretend to have read with the most conviction?
The Discreet Hero, by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Which literary character would you kill yourself?
The damn boring Buck Mulligan, from Ulysses.
Which “classic” book do you consider a punishment to read, yet still defend in public?
Don Quixote, it’s a third too long.
What is your guilty literary pleasure, the one you hide behind a fake copy of Proust?
Rereading passages and more passages from Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel… and the worst part of The Postman by Antonio Skármeta, “so metaphors…”
What book do you treat as a sacred object, but whose first page remains more untouched than your new Kindle?
Tokyo Blues by Murakami (not even with a can opener).
Which author would you trade places with, even if it was just to get a scholarship to the Sorbonne?
Jack Kerouac, but with a plastic liver so I could drink even the water from vases.
Which bookstore has stolen the most money from you with your consent?
Barnes & Noble… at gunpoint.
What books have you started more than three times without getting past page 40?
Señor y Perro, Tonio Kroger, by Thomas Mann; almost everything by Orhan Pamuk except the monumental Me llamo Rojo; a couple of Dostoevsky and in recent years I’ve ended up crossing the street every time I see an Amos Oz.
What Latin phrase do you use to sound profound, even though you don’t really know what it means?
Vitanda est improba siren desidia, by Horace (a professor at the university forced me to learn it). It means, “You must remain alert to the evil temptation: laziness,” but the last noun gives me away—I hardly ever use it anymore.
Which literary character would you like to have as a therapist, knowing that they would ruin you emotionally?
Fushía, from The Green House (MVL).
What is the most absurd edition you have bought just for its aesthetics?
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.
What literary genre do you pretend to despise because your intellectual friends do?
Crime novels.
Which contemporary author do you pretend to be uninterested in but secretly wish you had written their books?
Chuck Palahniuk.
How many books do you have left to read and how many do you continue to buy each month?
Seven hundred. If I can’t get that number down to 5 or 10 books a month, I’ll look for a pro bono therapist.
What literary scene made you close the book and stare at the ceiling as if you had experienced something?
In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, there is a character simply called The Boy, who is constantly being tested as a warrior. An evil ex-priest appears before him and incites him to kill a mentally disabled boy known as The Fool.
Kill him, he said.
The boy spun around looking for the judge, but the ex-priest called again in that hoarse whisper.
The fool. Kill the fool.
Two paragraphs down, you have to stop reading.
What book would you give away just to test whether someone is worthy of you?
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (a deluxe edition containing various maps of Paris).
What is the most heinous literary crime? Dogging pages, underlining books, or not reading?
Dogging pages.
Do you read the author’s blurb before starting a book, or do you prefer to ruin the experience for yourself?
Blurb, always.
Which fictional library do you deserve based on your level of literary neurosis?
The one that contains all the books Camilo José Cela was too lazy to read.
Have you ever stolen a book? Which one(s)?
Two different editions of Rayuela by Cortázar; a Cabrera Infante worth a fortune (no names mentioned) and an absurd number of “pretty” copies from Spanish publishers… in Cuba.
What is your greatest achievement as a reader: surviving Ulysses or finishing Don Quixote?
(Re)reading Ulysses.
What book would you have liked to write just so you could sign it and show it off?
The Savage Detectives, by Bolaño.
At what age did you realize that reading didn’t make you a better person, just more unbearable?
Wrong way. Reading makes me a better person than I am the day before I read. My unbearableness is not associated with the leisure activity of reading.
Which secondary character deserved more prominence than the main character?
Sancho Panza. Don Quixote would be funnier.
How many bookmarks do you own, and how many do you actually use (apart from the lottery ticket that you didn’t win, of course)?
Two or three for years… and I move them from book to book.
Which author do you think is brilliant, but you’d rather not have around at a dinner party?
Virginia Woolf.
What phrase do you use to justify not finishing the books you start?
“Literature goes beyond certain obligations.”
If your life were a book, on which shelf in the bookstore would we find it: “unnecessary drama,” “pretentious fiction,” or “essay on disappointment”?
“Essay on disappointment,” definitely.
