Activity

I went home and cried on K.’s shoulder. It was both of us who pooled resources together to do what we could for my dad. For months, K. had been dipping his hand into his pocket for the man who almost made us impossible, the man who would hate him on sight. It was somewhere in that breakdown that I …

[...] I’m not the kind of guy who believes in hell, or in a god who imagines a lake of fire. I just can’t see it—you have a mind that’s wider than the sky and that is what you use it to picture? [...]

VILA-MATAS

I fully recognize myself in it! Today I know that the best thing about that whole experience was getting to know Duras. I arrived in Paris tired of “normal people,” and tired, too, of all the prim, proper writers that proliferated at the time—not to mention these days, today there are…

INTERVIEWER

So what, for you, is this connection between poetry and the novel? A quality of vision?

VILA-MATAS

Probably. That quality comes from some writers’ facility for what we might call perception, the art of perceiving what’s going to happen. It’s a skill, an art, that we see very ac…

Yes, because it doesn’t traduce who I am.