What was the book that destroyed your literary innocence and left you emotionally available only for fictional characters?
The Stranger. I read it as a teenager because I heard a friend’s father talking about it. When I saw that it was a short novel, I was encouraged. I had no idea how immense it was. Meursault’s existentialism is very scary. Although I tend to love (non-fictional) characters like that.
Which author would you like to kiss or hug and then hit with an 800-page edition for ruining you emotionally?
Juan Rulfo. I am a protector of Pedro Páramo. It doesn’t matter if it breaks me emotionally. Juan Preciado and Comala are a sensation, a permanent presence.
What is the book that you say “marked you,” but you only read it because of aesthetic pressure?
As I Lay Dying. The stream of consciousness in which the members of the Bundren family express themselves requires me to be subjective when evaluating them, because they become very emotional. And I like to be very rational when reading. I prefer the reality of a madman to the hysteria of a sane person.
Which literary character would you like as a partner, even though you know you’d end up crying in a bookstore with jazz playing in the background?
Farraluque, in Paradiso. He’s very passionate, daring, and open-minded. Although it would be a very short relationship. We’re too alike.
What book do you consider a “necessary classic” but only because it makes you anxious to admit that it bored you like a Latin mass?
The Magic Mountain. I read the novel because I had to in college. I’ll never forget how I settled for the minimum passing grade in that seminar.
What is your secret shameful read?
Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel. I read it on sleepless nights. It’s so corny that it can knock out even the most amphetamine-fueled person.
Which modern author do you find so brilliant that you hate them like you hate an ex?
If by modern you mean contemporary, well… Abilio Estévez. I have a devotion to his prose: his peculiar way of narrating, his stylistic proverbiality, his testimonial characters. Tuyo es el reino, Los palacios distantes, among other novels, and plays such as Perla marina, La verdadera culpa de Juan Clemente Zenea, and El enano en la botella are works of literary brilliance.
At what point in your life did you discover that underlining sentences doesn’t mean you understand them?
As a reader, I always mark passages so I can return to them. I also used to make other kinds of marks, like a literature professor preparing for a lecture. It was the latter that I had to do for more than 15 years.
What is the most pretentious word you have used to talk about a book in order to sound more intellectual?
When I was preparing my doctoral thesis (which I never defended), I was studying novels in which the protagonists were crazy (really mentally ill). I had read a lot of Fromm, Foucault, and Lacan, and in my eagerness to demonstrate that there can be a lot of lucidity in delirious discourse, and not just from a metaphorical point of view, I wrote the big word “cordulocura.” Luckily, Maggie Mateo convinced me to remove it.
What edition of a book did you buy just because it had gold edges and looked like a Victorian witchcraft object?
I have the book in my library in Havana and I don’t remember the publisher, but it was a very old copy of The Divine Comedy with gold trim and a leather cover. In the end, it was impossible to read because the paper was so thin and the print so small.
Which literary character would you use to tell your ego the truth?
Rastignac. I’ve always wanted to argue with him.
What book were you forced to read in school that you now pretend to love out of trauma and habit?
The Metamorphosis. There was no way I could reconcile myself with that. Especially because of the Marxist approach that awful prep school teacher gave to the concept of alienation.
Which physical bookstore is your financial ruin and your emotional sanctuary?
A bookstore in El Vedado, Havana, called Cuba Científica. It was on Calle I between 23 and 25. They were all practical books and had nothing to do with the exact sciences. The owner was a kind, cultured man, and that place was like his living room. Perhaps he was the one who represented that other side for the buyer, the emotional side, and he acted as a chaplain for individual reading experiences. Like the bookseller in the story of the same name by Julio Garmendia.
What was the last literary phrase that made you say, “damn genius”?
There are three, preferably in this order: “it was a body of spent flesh,” in the last chapter of The Kingdom of This World; “my Aleph is unalienable” and “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night,” both by Borges.
Have you ever had a relationship that ended because of irreconcilable differences over books?
One night I almost kicked a friend’s partner out of my house because he told me (even though he had been warned about how I was with literary matters and knowing that I taught Latin American Literature) that Rayuela was a failed attempt at a novel. I went into a rage and almost sacrificed him. I ended up leaving my own house for a while. When I came back, he apologized. Then I did everything I could to get him and my friend to break up.
Where is your favorite place to read as if you were a character in a Murakami novel? A hipster café, a rainy window, an existentialist bed? Anywhere else?
Lying on the floor of my house in Havana. At night, naked, with a shot of vodka and a cigarette. But I don’t live in Havana anymore, and I don’t smoke either. I haven’t found the right park in Madrid yet. Maybe it’s because I can’t get naked in any of them. I don’t know.
What book do you use to impress cultured people that you’ve never finished?
The book I use to impress people is The Master and Margarita. But I did finish it. It’s one of my favorite novels. There’s only one author I can never finish reading, Leonardo Padura.
Which literary character would you entrust your diary to?
Cobra, the character who gives his name to one of Severo Sarduy’s novels. But I would also entrust it to any character by Manuel Puig or Carlos Felipe.
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?
Virgilio Piñera.
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?
La aprendiz de bruja by Carpentier. Because of the poor translation from French in the only Cuban edition. I really regret that one of my favorite and most admired writers as a novelist is Carpentier, because he was a communist.
What is the most refined insult you have thought of for someone who says, “I don’t like to read”?
May the last shadow come and take you to the white day.
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?
I would buy Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio again, even though I already have two editions. But I have an obsession with Carlota. A fascination with her torrential madness.
What “profound” book did you find to be an elegant fraud full of smoke, loose quotes, and hipster bookstore pseudo-mysticism?
Memoirs of Hadrian.
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?
Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes. I recently read it in its entirety. The generic hybridity of the discourse and the way the self flows from the point of view of the narrator left me perplexed.
What is your “fetish book,” the one you won’t lend to anyone, even if they promise you their soul?
The first edition of Celestino antes del alba, the Cuban one, from 1967. And my copy of El nombre de la rosa. Both books are crammed with marks I’ve made at various times.
Which author would you summon in a séance to ask why they left you with that ending?
Dostoevsky. And not for one, but for several endings.
What is your secret reading ritual that makes you feel that the world makes sense, even if only for ten pages?
There are three. The poetry of Antonio Machado and anything by Miguel de Unamuno. The third? Montaigne.
What literary phrase do you use to justify your addiction to reading instead of solving your real problems?
“I’ve always trusted the kindness of strangers,” Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.
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?
Sab, by Avellaneda. But not on purpose, because the copy was very damaged and the last few pages were missing. I never looked for another one to finish it.
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?
I would steal a title from Pedro Lemebel, Tengo miedo, torero. Precisely because fear is not one of my most frequent emotions.
