What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
A very important book in my life, which I read after the inevitable War and Peace, The Iliad, Hamlet, Papa Goriot, Rayuela, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, was The Lover because I read it at a time when I had committed myself to poetry, and it changed the way I saw things.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Vonnegut Junior, his Breakfast of Champions is a little book that burns like a bonfire in the middle of the Escambray.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
None, I either liked it or I liked it. If not, go buy some peas at the grocery store.
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?
That Russian woman from The Magic Mountain.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like Latin mass?
None, why lie? I only talk about books I liked.
What is your secret guilty pleasure read?
Lots of fantasy and hard-boiled detective novels, but mostly science fiction.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them like you hate an ex?
I hate Sebald because he had the nerve to die too early.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
Very early on.
What’s the most pretentious word you’ve used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
Diligent.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft artifact?
None.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Opiano Licario.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
In my day, reading the books recommended by my literature teachers only made it harder to come up with the answers I needed to pass the exams, so every reading was an act of subversion.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
El Ateneo on Cabildo and Juramento avenues in Buenos Aires.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
So many.
Where is your favorite place to read as if you were a character in a Murakami novel?
I’m not very Murakamiesque, so I can’t imagine.
Hipster café, rainy window, existentialist bed? Any others?
Reading in bed is perfection itself.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
Reading doesn’t impress anyone, quite the contrary.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
The Marquis de Sade, he wouldn’t understand a word.
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?
Teófilo Stevenson, I always admired him, although I’m not familiar with his written work.
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?
I’ve experienced all three.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
Nevermore, I would say. Or “listen to the dead with your eyes.”
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 Master and Margarita, The God of Small Things, and The Age of Enlightenment, as well as This Is How You Lose Itand the complete works of Toni Morrison.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, random quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
I can’t think of one.
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?
Yesterday.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
My books are in Cuba, but here I have a copy of Greek Myths by Robert Graves, which I love.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Gogol.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
Pedro Páramo.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
If not always understood, always open…
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?
I don’t know, there must be one.
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?
Eternal damnation to anyone who reads these pages.
