[...] Strange to think but when I first wrote the tale I hadn’t yet read a single word by Italo Calvino, Jean Rhys, Borges, or Thomas Bernhard, nor Clarice Lispector. I had read Of Mice and Men, and Lolita, and ‘Kubla Khan’, and The Diary of a Young Girl. I had not yet read The Go-Between or Wuthering Heights or ‘A Season in Hell’ or Orlando. I had read Jacob’s Room and Nausea and The Fall and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and ‘The Hollow Men’ and many Imagist poems, one of which had snow in it and a white leopard I think, or, more accurately, it was a leopard that had no outline – maybe it was penned by Ezra Pound, I don’t remember. I hadn’t yet read A Sport and a Pastime or Wittgenstein’s Mistress or Moon Tiger or ‘The Pedersen Kid’ or ‘A Girl of the Zeitgeist’ or ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’ or ‘The Trouble With Following the Rules’. I had read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and A Sentimental Journey and One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Silence of the Lambs and The Sea, the Sea, which I bought from a stall at Glastonbury festival and read lying down in the top field with a paper cup of chai tea and a packet of Jaffa Cakes. [...] I had not yet read Cassandra at the Wedding or The Calmative or Unfinished Ode to Mud or Birds of America or The Grass Is Singing or The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or The Man of Feeling: ‘Manur lowers his glasses though he does not take them off, and peering over the top of them with eyes accustomed to being flattered by the things of this world, he does not reply immediately’ is a line I’ve copied out of Marías’s novella with a trembling hand into more than one notebook. I had read Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and The German Ideology, by Marx and Engels, which we all referred to as ‘The GI’, and On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, and a book on ethics and animals by Peter Singer, and a badly printed book by Edmund Burke – the letters were so thick and small and all cramped together, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I had not read Das Kapital nor anything by John Rawls and I still haven’t, and I certainly hadn’t read anything at that time by Vivian Gornick or Natalia Ginzburg or Lynne Tillman or Joan Didion or Renata Adler or Janet Malcolm or Marina Warner or bell hooks or Anne Garréta. [...]