[...] 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…
The Teacher raises a glass to her friend the Engineer, who has been promoted. The Teacher can’t afford this restaurant, but the Advertising Executive will pay. She always pays. They crowd around a laptop, perfumes mingling, to watch her latest car commercial. The waiters weave around the obstructio…
After the rape & the bloodbath, the savage king
& his men retired to a long shed built in an open
field by a thin river fashioned for this lull in the pillaging
so the horses could rest. One by one, they scrubbed
blood off their fingers & faces & sat down to devour
a feast of rice & goat serve…
