What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
Altazor by Vicente Huidobro, especially that verse that says: “What evil angel destroyed your smile?” I read it in Piura when I was 17 years old, and it showed me that my beautiful, orderly, super Catholic childhood world had been shattered.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page book for ruining you emotionally?
I would have liked to do that to Allen Ginsberg, but he’s dead now, so I can’t.
What book do you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
Jean Paul Sartre’s La Náusea.
Which literary character would you like to have as a partner, even though you know you’d end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
La Maga, without a doubt.
Which book do you consider a “necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like Latin mass?
The Odyssey.
What is your secret shameful read?
Los genios by Jaime Bayly.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you detest them as you would detest an ex?
Vargas Llosa.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
I still underline.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book to sound more intellectual?
Splendid.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a piece of Victorian witchcraft?
A Bible, many years ago.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Lolita.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
Treasure Island.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
Barnes & Noble.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “Damn genius”?
Where there is no decay.
Have you ever been in a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable book differences?
Not really.
What is your favorite place to read as if you were a Murakami character? Hipster café, rainy window, existentialist bed? Any other?
The interior terrace of my house.
What book do you use to impress cultured people and have never finished?
Ulysses.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Robinson Crusoe.
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?
Vallejo.
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?
It would be Pound, but I don’t really care.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
Animal.
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?
Complete Poetic Works by Borges.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, loose quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Les dedico mi silencio, by Vargas Llosa.
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?
Pound’s The Cantos.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Nabokov.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel like the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
Going to the library in Westmont, New Jersey with a delicious coffee and a bacon, egg, and cheese beagle.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
I am my books.
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?
Tres tristes tigres.
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?
Take me or you’ll die.
