asymptotejournal:

First one must live, Claudia would say, and it was difficult not to agree: before writing one had to live the stories, the adventures. I wasn’t interested, not then, not in telling stories. She was, which is to say she wasn’t, not yet; she wanted to live the stories that, years or decades later, in some uncertain and calm future, she would tell. Claudia could not have been more of a Cortazarian, although her first experience with Cortázar was, in reality, a disappointment: after reading Chapter 7 of Hopscotch she realized that her boyfriend used to recite it to her as if it were his own, so she broke up with him and started up with Cortázar, a romance that perhaps still lives.

from Alejandro Zambra’s Cyclops, translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Fisherkeller

FD