What book ruined your ability to enjoy “light” literature forever?
I think that reading The Odyssey and then The Iliad when I was twelve and being so fascinated by mythology that I wanted to do my own research on the subject must have awakened a certain appetite and predisposition in me. Although later, during a certain stage of my adolescence, I was an avid reader of detective novels, to the point that it cured me of ever returning to them.
Which author would you like to invite to dinner, just to contradict them for three hours?
To argue with, it would be any anti-capitalist Western writer like Mark Fisher (who, besides soccer, didn’t understand anything), who posed as democrats while being Maoists and pro-Castro. Or even some “democratic socialist”—an oxymoron!—as Günter Grass described himself in an interview just so he wouldn’t get bashed by the left. I’d like to ask Joan Didion a couple of questions about her book on Miami. A long chat with Knut Hamsun and Joseph Roth wouldn’t be too far off the mark either. Even so, as someone once said, wanting to meet a writer because you liked one of their books is like enjoying a good pâté and wanting to meet the duck.
What book did you pretend to have read with the most conviction?
A treatise would have to be written on the importance, Freudian or not, of “having read.” Every good reader would like to have read everything or almost everything. I read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov very early on, but Crime and Punishment was an adult read, as were Don Quixote and The Magic Mountain. As I am fond of lists, I once began to write down the more or less famous writers I had never read. I was filled with shame. Now, to be honest, who, when asked about a certain book by acquaintances, does not say, “I read it when I was young”? No one should feel ashamed because instead of reading all of Balzac or the sagas of the Thibaults and Joseph and His Brothers, they got distracted reading Sostiene Pereira, El tercer Reich, Canción de tumba, Boarding Home, Seda, La uruguaya, Stoner, Cómo me hice monja or Temporada de huracanes, all good novels that may not become part of that damned monstrosity called “literary history.”
Which literary character would you kill yourself?
Joe Christmas, Popeye from Sanctuary, Johnny Abbes, Ramón J. Sender (son) from Bolaño, Nurse Ratched, the doctor from The Magic Mountain…
Which “classic” book do you consider a punishment to read, yet still defend in public?
Most of those cathedral-like classics, which are only boring at times, defend themselves. The most recent one I found soporific was The Death of Virgil. But for the reader that I am, reading is not only leisure or pleasure, but also knowledge, so I never abandon them completely. As for The Death of Virgil, I’ll try again, but with another edition.
What is your guilty literary pleasure, the one you hide behind a fake copy of Proust, Kafka, or Joyce?
For a long time, I thought that reading writers’ diaries was one of those “guilty pleasures.” Until I came across four of them: those by Paul Leautaud, Ernest Jünger, Ricardo Piglia, and Andrés Trapiello’s “novel in progress,” of whose 24 volumes I have already read about thirteen. Gombrowicz’s are not to be sneezed at either.
Which book do you treat as a sacred object, but whose first page remains more pristine than your new Kindle?
As a sacred object, I treat books dedicated by the authors, such as those by Lorenzo García Vega that I have, but I frequent their pages. This happens especially when the library begins to grow and you receive a new edition of Chekhov’s complete short stories from Páginas de espuma, for example.
Or a collector’s item like the complete correspondence between Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, which is over two thousand pages long and I hope will one day be translated. But if I had to mention one, it would be The Invention of Freedom, 1700-1789, by Jean Starobinsky.
Which author would you trade places with, even if only to have a scholarship at the Sorbonne?
Who doesn’t envy Montaigne? What a great title for a book that would make.
Which bookstore has stolen the most money from you with your consent?
The now defunct The Book Depository, the four or five times I traveled to the Guadalajara Book Fair, Barnes & Noble, and now Buscalibre is growing. As the gods know what they are doing, they didn’t want me to go live in Spain, I would be living under a bridge or committed to an asylum for unattainable desires.
What books have you started more than three times without getting past page 40?
None, because for me reading is not just leisure or pleasure, but also knowledge that can involve effort. I’m not very Borgesian in that sense. I’ve abandoned some, of course, but only to pick them up again later.
What Latin phrase do you use to sound profound, even though you don’t really know what it means?
Although I’ve never been one to pose using phrases in languages other than English, and I never studied Latin (I secretly envied my Quintero scholarship friends who studied literature because of it), I like one by Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, Cyril Connolly’s favorite phrase, which he considered the perfect motto for a library: Sapientum templa serena, something like “The serene temples built with the doctrine of the wise” or “The temples of the wise shine.” Also this one: Ars longa, vita brevis, which a mischievous Cabrera Infante turned into “Ars brevis, Rita Longa.”
Which literary character would you like to have as a therapist, knowing that they would ruin you emotionally?
Any of what Harold Bloom calls the “funeste muses” that populate several of the best novels of the American 20th century. They would lead me to the psychoanalyst’s couch, of course, but only they carry the antidote. I feel that the narrator of The Good Soldier or even The Great Gatsby, with their insight and restraint, would qualify for the job.
What is the most absurd edition you have bought just for its aesthetics?
During my wanderings through the discards of public libraries in various American cities, I have found some gems. Perhaps the editions are not absurd, but the decision to acquire them is. They are usually very cheap. The latest would be Time Pieces, John Banville’s Dublin memoirs, or some guidebooks to Paris, Japan, and India, and Joyce’s iconography presented by Anthony Burgess. Also many biographies, including those of authors I may never read or reread, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Oriana Fallaci, Joseph Heller, and Sibilla Aleramo.
What literary genre do you pretend to despise because your intellectual friends do?
I was an avid reader of detective novels during my teenage years, as I said before, and although I don’t despise them, I don’t think I’ll be reading them again for the time being. I don’t really understand the posturing around fiction; I’ve always believed that people who say they don’t read it are actually people who don’t read anything or read very little.
Which contemporary author do you pretend not to be interested in, but secretly wish you had written their books?
There are several under the Roman arch that runs from Cela to Aira. But I don’t really pretend to be uninterested in almost anyone.
How many books do you have pending to read and how many do you continue to buy each month?
I have thousands to read. I try to be methodical about it. I read at least fifty a year, which I still think is not enough. In 2023, I read only women writers. This year I tried to read only American literature, but I’m not managing to be consistent. As for buying books, after a break due to lack of space and last year’s move, I’ve resumed one of my greatest pleasures: coming home knowing that a new book is waiting for you in its plastic wrap or cardboard sleeve.
What literary scene made you close the book and stare at the ceiling as if you had experienced something?
The snowstorm chapter in The Magic Mountain. A few pages of Rimbaud the Son…
What book would you give as a gift just to test whether someone is worthy of you?
I would say Montaigne’s Essays or Lezama’s poetry. I think several of these answers may have an expiration date.
What is the most heinous literary crime? Dog-earing pages, underlining books, or not reading?
I was spared such sloppiness long ago. If the person who inherits my library wants to sell it book by book, I would like them to find them neat and well preserved.
Do you read the author’s blurb before starting a book, or do you prefer to ruin the experience later?
I usually read everything. Waves and foam are also part of the sea. Although everything is superfluous in the face of the wonder of finding a text that repairs something that the day has broken. But, really, if you find a book by H.L. Mencken, don’t you read the blurb?
What fictional library do you deserve according to your level of literary neurosis?
In Eco, for example, I’m more interested in his real, labyrinthine library than the one in The Name of the Rose. There’s also a very tempting one, the one belonging to the librarian who is the protagonist’s lover in Klaus and Lucas.
Have you ever stolen a book? Which one(s)?
Once, when I was studying in Quintero, I went down to the city to a used bookstore on Enramadas Street in Santiago. I put a book in my bag and was surprised by a supposed plainclothes policeman. The salesman was none other than a well-known writer, Marcos González, from the 1980s group of Amir Valle and Alberto Garrido. He behaved like what he was, a writer, and said no, that the supposed stolen book did not belong to that bookstore, and the policeman said goodbye. Marcos then said to me, “Go on, pay for it and get out of here,” two words that every occasional book thief is grateful to hear. Incidentally, years later I won a literary prize in Havana and had to go to the financial offices of the Book Institute to collect it. The person in charge of payments was none other than Marcos himself, who I imagine was promoted not exactly for forgiving university students who stole books. As for the book fairs at La Cabaña, I must be banned from returning there. My luggage on the way home was considerable.
What is your greatest achievement as a reader: surviving Ulysses or finishing Don Quixote?
Few books have given me as much pleasure as Don Quixote. It is a novel with a humor, a richness of language and situations, and a freshness that meant that Spain did not have a novelist of stature until well into the 19th century with Galdós. I am sipping Ulysses.
What book would you have liked to write just so you could sign it and show it off?
Steiner’s study of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner. The Labyrinth of Solitude. The Danube. The Demons, by Doderer…
At what age did you realize that reading didn’t make you a better person, just more unbearable?
Too early in the life of a skinny, cross-eyed boy who worried his parents because he preferred to stay in bed reading and stopped in front of every bookstore window wherever the family went.
How many bookmarks do you own, and how many do you actually use (besides the lottery ticket that you didn’t win, of course)?
I have thousands. I never forget to take one with me when I visit a bookstore anywhere in the world. I don’t usually like collecting as a concept when it comes to books—I collect, for example, in a still incipient way, soccer team scarves—for the simple reason that I wouldn’t call a library a “book collection.” However, I could say that I collect bookmarks. For almost ten years, I used and abused an online bookstore called The Book Depository, which is mainly responsible for my modest library growing at a rate of about 500 volumes per year. With each book, they sent a bookmark. I have hundreds of them. I’m also a fan of the tourist flyers they put in the hotels where I stay; they’re ideal as bookmarks for books that aren’t exactly pocket-sized.
You have such a tall pile of books to read that if it fell, it could kill you. Even so, which ones did you buy yesterday?
The latest arrivals are two novels by Peter Härtling, a small book of essays by Rudy Kousbroek, a study of Berlin after the fall of the Wall by Peter Schneider, the novel Atlántida by Camilo Venegas, Post Mortem by Albert Caraco, and Scratch by Ramón Hondal.
Which author do you think is brilliant, but you’d rather not have around at dinner?
Octavio Paz, Cela, Houellebecq, Sloterdijk…
What phrase do you use to justify not finishing a book you start?
It wasn’t written for me.
If your life were a book, on which shelf of the bookstore would we find it: “unnecessary drama,” “pretentious fiction,” or “essay on disappointment”?
Essay on returning to the place where you feel so good, that is, the library with jazz and classical music in the background.
