What book destroyed your literary innocence?
Trilce. That was where I understood that poetry could behave like a grammatical accident with spiritual consequences. Before Trilce, one believes that language exists to communicate.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for emotionally ruining you?
Cioran. First I would hug him; then I would hit him with his own notebooks, affectionately, of course, because no one has the right to leave behind such perfect sentences about the uselessness of everything and, on top of that, sound convincing. Cioran is that friend who tells you life has no meaning, but does it so well that you end up inviting him for coffee.
What book do you say “marked you,” when in reality you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
One of those books one reads at twenty to seem more doomed than happy. Perhaps Being and Nothingness. At that age, one does not really read certain books; one mentally photographs oneself reading them.
Which literary character would you want as a partner, even though you know you would end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
Nadja, from Breton. It would be a sentimental catastrophe with cafés, shop windows, enigmatic phrases, and walks where every corner would seem like a sign from the beyond or an unpaid debt. I would end up crying, of course, in a used bookstore, while Bill Evans plays and someone places in the display window a French edition I can no longer afford. Very dignified, all of it. Very lovely. Very ruined.
What book do you consider “a necessary classic” only because admitting it bored you like a Mass in Latin gives you anxiety?
Les Misérables. I recognize its moral grandeur, its architecture, its ambition to contain all of France and part of the solar system. But in some passages I felt that Hugo had invited me to dinner and, before bringing out the soup, spent forty pages explaining the complete history of the spoon. Admirable, yes. Also slightly punitive.
What is your secret shame reading?
Auction and antiquarian catalogues, travel magazines, bad biographies, minor diaries, correspondence by complete unknowns, inventories of private collections. It is not a particularly spectacular shame, but it reveals something worse: that I am a reader with the tendencies of a nervous antiquarian.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate him the way one hates an ex?
Thomas Bernhard. I hate him with the same intensity with which one discovers oneself imitating him after reading him, which is the worst form of surrender. Bernhard is contagious: one opens one of his books and, three pages in, is already thinking in long, furious, circular sentences full of contempt for family, culture, Austria, prizes, theaters, critics, the living, and the dead. He irritates because his verbal illness works. And because, after him, even complaining seems like a lesser form of literature.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences does not mean you understand them?
When I began rereading books I had underlined myself and discovered that my previous self had confused enthusiasm with intelligence.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book in order to sound more intellectual?
“Device.” It is a dangerous word, almost an academic switchblade. One says “the textual device” and automatically seems to have read Foucault with a fever and Barthes without blinking. I have also abused “constellation,” “drift,” “genealogy,” and “uncanny.” Some survive because they are useful. Others should spend some time in lexical rehabilitation.
What edition of a book did you buy only because it had gilt edges and looked like an object of Victorian witchcraft?
Several, too many, almost an entire section of my domestic guilt. I have bought books for their gilt edges, for their typography, for their spine, for their smell, for the city I was in, for the promise of seeming more intelligent at a table. The bibliophile begins by reading and ends up defending objects as though they were unjustly accused relatives.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
The narrator of In Search of Lost Time. No one better to explain to my ego, over hundreds of pages, that behind every vanity there is an insecurity decorated with good taste. I would sit him in front of me so he could tell me that even my noblest gestures conceal a small worldly strategy. And he would be right, that beautiful wretch.
What book were you forced to read in school and now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Some school volume of José Martí, read under the compulsory climate of veneration. I admire Martí, but school sometimes achieves a terrible thing: it turns greatness into homework, beauty into a commemorative date, and prose into a morning ceremony. Later one returns to Martí on one’s own and discovers the immense writer; first, one had to survive the bust and the slogan.
What physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional chapel?
Any well-run used bookstore can ruin me with courtesy. But my true chapel, my little Vatican of disorder, is my library of more than eight thousand books, with first editions, rarities, letters, objects; a kind of Wunderkammer where reading coexists with relics. On a trip to Amsterdam, at the end of last year, I saw in an antiquarian bookstore a little figurine that still haunts me: a big-nosed old man, seated, reading a book. I left it to buy on the last day of my stay, with that idiotic confidence one mistakes for prudence; and on that very day the bookstore was closed. Since then I have dreamed of that figurine, cursed myself regularly, and confirmed an elementary law of bibliophilia: what is not bought in time becomes a domestic ghost. Sometimes I think that, rather than books and objects, I collect material alibis for not fully accepting reality.
What was the last literary sentence that made you say, “damn genius”?
I return often to this sentence by Pound: “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” It is a definition, a threat, and a fine. And alongside it I would place that intuition of Proust’s: “Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère.” Between the two sentences, almost everything is said. Literature begins when language stops obeying docilely and becomes a charged, strange, dangerous substance.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable bookish differences?
Not exactly, although a library detects incompatibilities before the heart does. When someone looks at your books as if they were merely accumulated furniture, something breaks. There are people who believe reading is a pastime. That is fine. The world is wide and alien. I always remember that anecdote attributed to Umberto Eco, when someone asked him whether he had read all the books in his library, and he replied, more or less, whether a collector of cups would be required to have drunk tea from every one of them. A library is not a résumé of completed readings, but a form of desire, of threat, of promise. Also a fairly elegant way of knowing who should not stay too long in your house.
What is your favorite place to read as if you were a Murakami character? A hipster café, a rainy window, an existentialist bed? Somewhere else?
In bed, before sleeping, which is perhaps the least glamorous and most truthful place to read, since one begins with great intellectual ambitions and ends up negotiating with sleep after four pages. I also read in the wingback chair in my library, which does allow for a certain illusion of being a literary character.
What book do you use to impress cultured people and have never finished?
Ulysses and The Brothers Karamazov, which are two very different ways of looking good in a conversation and bad before one’s own conscience. I have visited them, circled them, and even quoted them brazenly.
Which literary character would you entrust with your diary?
Bartleby, because he would probably prefer not to — too brilliant — and that is the highest form of discretion.
What dead author would you invite to your funeral just so he could read something devastating and elegant about your mediocrity redeemed by a love of books?
Lezama Lima. No one could turn a reasonable mediocrity into a verbal ceremony with such abundance. He would say something vegetal, cosmic, full of imaginary eras, and in the end no one would know whether I had died or had just entered, somewhat clumsily, into a higher syntax.
What was the worst literary betrayal you suffered? A bad ending, an atrocious adaptation, or your favorite author professing an ideology incompatible with your principles?
When a book, of whatever genre, promises revelation and delivers a moral lesson. I count by the thousands the books I have closed in the first few pages because of that. One begins reading in expectation of form, and suddenly the pedagogical finger appears, an edifying sentence. That is where I abandon ship. Not out of impatience, but out of hygiene.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like reading”?
“What admirable serenity you have: to live without suspecting that the world exists.” Or also: “Congratulations; you have achieved a purely administrative relationship with reality.” Both should be said with a smile.
You have a pile of books to read so high that if it fell it could kill you. Even so, which one or ones did you buy yesterday?
Surely some essay I did not need, a first edition I needed even less, and a rare book I justify with arguments that are increasingly criminal. My pile of unread books is no longer a pile; it is more like a catalogue of remorse. I keep buying because the reader confuses hope with inventory.
What “profound” book struck you as an elegant fraud full of smoke, loose quotations, and hipster-bookstore pseudomysticism?
A couple by Byung-Chul Han. I read him and feel that an interesting idea has been thinned down until it becomes an airport aphorism. Too much smoke and cheap philosophical perfume.
When was the last time you read something so beautiful that it revealed something about yourself and made you want to tear out your eyes like Oedipus?
It happens to me with Bufalino, from the very opening of Perorata del apestado: “O when every night — out of laziness, out of avarice — he returned to dream the same dream: an ash-colored road, flat, running with a river’s gait between two walls taller than a man; then it breaks, plunges into the void.” That beginning has something of the repeated dream, of metaphysical laziness, of an avarice for disaster. One is left rather defenseless there, because Bufalino writes illness, memory, and love with a terminal elegance, almost courtly. It also happens to me with Calasso, when he turns erudition into mental theater, with his gods, sacrifices, books, ghosts, sacred animals, and sentences that seem to come from a library older than the world.
What is your “fetish book” edition, the one you do not lend out even if the other person promises you their soul?
None from my Wunderkammer. Those who have visited me know what I mean.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why he left you with that ending?
Kafka. Although I suspect he would appear, look at me with terrible courtesy, and leave an answer even more unfinished.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
My ritual consists of pretending that I am going to read with monastic discipline: 80–100 pages a day. Five minutes later I have already checked my phone, remembered three unanswered emails, changed books. But sometimes, against all odds, I manage it. Then the world seems to make sense, or at least to fail with better syntax.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
“I’m working,” which in my case can mean reading, writing, editing, buying books, or staring fixedly at a paragraph while becoming younger.
What book slowly burns your conscience because you never finished it and yet still talk about it as if you were a critic for The Paris Review?
Ulysses, again, because some guilts yield a great deal.
If you were a forgotten book on a dusty shelf, what sentence would you put on your back cover so that someone, at last, would choose you?
Something like “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” or “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.” After that, what is one supposed to do?
