The pleasure of reading lies in time travel—when I lend my imagination to the page and arrive in worlds that have vanished entirely. I am not talking about historical fiction, far from it, but about works that were, back in the day, groundbreaking and revolutionary. For surely not all my attention should be squandered on the incessant trickle of novelties, trivialities, and insubstantial drivel paraded across bookstore displays, fueling the fear of missing out. Missing out on what? Is literature ephemeral? I don’t think so.

Last week, I combed Gustave Flaubert’s walrus mustache—strictly from a personal, intimate, and evocative perspective, of course. I also made a few observations regarding his harsh, chauvinistic disposition as an unrepentant whoremonger, which was common currency in his time. Who among us hasn’t heard the term “The French Pox” used to describe those suffering from syphilis? An attentive reader shared a clever pun with me, describing Flaubert simply as “a flawed person.”

His greatest contribution to literature was his full embrace of Realism—which, as he wrote to his favorite correspondent, demanded a narrator who “must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; felt everywhere, but nowhere seen.” After the stylistic excesses of Romanticism, it was a welcome return to common sense.

Hence, his crowning achievement was dissecting the adultery and eventual ruin of a woman married to a country doctor in a small town in Normandy in Madame Bovary. It is not my intention today to linger on that fatalistic mammoth of a novel; nearly everyone has had occasion to read it.

An avid reader of novels—especially one willing to run the risk of writing them—derives the greatest joy from weaving them together across time, nationality, and style, uncovering unexpected connections and shared currents. An author without references beyond their immediate horizon has little to offer save for their own audacious ignorance.

Back in 1856, in Second Empire France, Gustave Flaubert scandalized his readers to such a degree that he was put on trial for offenses against public morality—a trial that provided Madame Bovary with invaluable free publicity. That very same year, the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer ignited a widespread public debate, resonating even across America, known as Kvinnofrågan—the Woman Question. What a time, when a novel was a portal of human consciousness!

With Hertha, Fredrika Bremer does not merely portray a domestic drama; she raises a blistering indictment against the legal guardianship system that condemned unmarried women to perpetual legal minority. Under the absolute authority of a father or an appointed male guardian, a woman possessed no legal standing whatsoever. In the novel, Director Falk is no mere household tyrant; he is the very incarnation of the paternalistic state. By hijacking his daughter’s maternal inheritance to crush her spirit, he turns the home into a financial prison and obedience into a life sentence.

There is a bitter paradox at the foundation of this drama: centuries before the adoption of Roman law and state codification locked women inside the cage of legal guardianship, High Middle Ages Scandinavia granted them an autonomy unheard of in the rest of the continent. The mistress of the estate during the Viking Age, carrying the keys to the homestead at her belt, managed property, exercised the right to divorce, and held sole ownership of her wealth. The confinement of 1856 was not the inertia of an ancient tradition, but the refined craft of modern paternalism, which had reduced women to perpetual minors. Seen in this light, Fredrika Bremer’s outcry in Hertha demanded no unthinkable utopia, but the restoration of an ancient sovereignty buried by law.

One must not misjudge the weight of faith in the North. If Catholic dogmatism built an insurmountable wall against female autonomy in Southern Europe, in Protestant Sweden Lutheranism operated as a double-edged sword. The State Church preached blind obedience to the father as a divine command, yet Luther’s own theology demanded that every woman read the Scriptures for herself. Universal literacy was the fracture in the foundation. Fredrika Bremer did not need to renounce her faith to demand emancipation; it was enough to remind the King and his bishops that a soul bearing individual responsibility before God could no longer remain, under human law, the property of a guardian.

The impact was seismic. In 1858, barely two years after Hertha was published, the Swedish Parliament passed the law restoring legal majority to unmarried women. While Flaubert’s Emma Bovary was consuming her tragedy in the suffocating solitude of provincial Normandy, Bremer’s fiction was becoming the blueprint for a new civil code in the North.

The contrast between these two endings reveals the chasm separating Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetic determinism from Fredrika Bremer’s pragmatic reformism. Both heroines succumb, yes, but their deaths belong to entirely opposite moral and political orders.

Emma Bovary dies in the atrocious agony of arsenic poisoning, amidst the absolute collapse of her finances and her fantasies. Lacking analytical tools or any awareness of the civil structure suffocating her, Emma mistakes her legal and economic captivity for a mere lack of romance. Her tragedy is intimate, sterile, and private. Flaubert, in his surgical coldness, grants her neither solace nor transcendence: Emma’s death does not transform Yonville; it merely confirms the crushing victory of bourgeois mediocrity, embodied in the final decoration awarded to Homais the apothecary.

Hertha, by contrast, consumes her health in the struggle, but not in sterility. Though illness breaks her body following the devastation of the city fire, her end is not a shipwreck, but a sowing of seeds. Hertha does not daydream about shop windows or sensational lovers; she identifies the legal foundations of her oppression with anatomical precision, establishes a school for the education and autonomy of young women, and leaves behind an enduring network of collective consciousness.

Therein lies the ultimate counterpoint of 1856. Flaubert contemplates the world from a stance of impassibilité, convinced that art should not cure society, but diagnose its ugliness with unyielding beauty. Bremer, conversely, writes from the trenches of purpose-driven literature, convinced that a novel is a lever capable of shifting civil law. Emma Bovary’s agony is the destruction of a victim who does not know the name of her cage; Hertha Falk’s death is the deliberate sacrifice of someone who has just shattered her bars.

1856 was not merely a date on the timeline of the European novel; it was the crossroads where modern fiction parted ways. On one side stood the pragmatic conviction that literature can rewrite civil law and restore dignity to human consciousness; on the other, the cold certainty that art should serve only as a clinical mirror, deaf to the weeping of its own creations.

Within that tension lies the ultimate lesson of this intersection. Emma Bovary and Hertha Falk represent two possible responses to the same 19th-century suffocation. Emma is the tragic ghost of dissatisfaction, consumed by a system she cannot begin to comprehend and trapped by fantasies that finish her off. Hertha, on the other hand, is the lucid mind that names her legal executioner, converts domestic injury into a political cause, and transforms suffering into law. One leaves me with the desolate beauty of an incurable diagnosis; the other, with irrevocable proof that fiction can shatter the legal order of a nation.

In the end, this dialogue between Yonville and Stockholm leaves me with a question that continues to challenge literature today: Should a writer contemplate the cage from the icy distance of an invisible god, or do they have a duty to forge their words into a lever to tear down the bars? Flaubert bequeathed me a masterpiece of human anatomy; Bremer gave me the draft of freedom. And in the space that separates the tragic silence of Yonville from the reformed laws of the North, history proves that the word, when bound in mighty books, still possesses the power to change the world.

Yet changing a law is merely unlocking the cell door—and that is where Bremer’s crusade runs straight into the stone wall of Flaubert’s fatalism.

The enduring violence of centuries under patriarchy was never just the statutes written on a paper. It was the physical blows, the murders, the quiet omissions, and the stories spun over and over until the silence fell and obedience became total submission, until its very origins were duly forgotten. But the deeper, more insidious injury is what that untold violence did to my imagination without me ever suspecting it or asking the right questions.

When I attempt to picture true liberation, my starved mind instantly defaults to matriarchy—a simple, uninspired mirror image. I swap the actors, rename the power, and congratulate myself on a revolution, while remaining inside the exact same patriarchal cage.

I tried today to conflate Flaubert’s cold male cynicism with Bremer’s passionate female reform, convincing myself that I was choosing between tyranny and freedom. But I fail over and over; if liberation only means swapping one master for another, I haven’t escaped the trap—I’ve just redecorated it.

Bremer proved that a book can alter a statute. And if this is what I devote myself to, body and soul—if I dare to think out loud—it is because flattening the world into black and white is a failure of imagination. To erase the grays, the whole blessed chromatic scale, and the two hundred thousand shades of green my primate eyes were built to distinguish, is to settle for a delusion.

So let me drag Leibniz into the room and cut straight to the bone.

His Identity of Indiscernibles dictates that if two entities share every structural property, they are not merely identical-looking; they are literally one and the same object. Swapping the master while keeping the cage builds no new world. By Leibniz’s law, patriarchy and its matriarchal mirror share every single property of control. They are numerically identical—the exact same tyranny wearing a different title.

And as long as I remain blind to those true colors shining through that idiotic binary, Flaubert gets the last laugh from the grave: the anatomy of human bondage is absolute.

I am blessed with an inexhaustible optimism, and every moment I live feels as though it overflows with infinite meaning, provided I give it my undivided attention.

That is why I read aloud like someone eating after a long fast, savoring every bite slowly. And now, having finally learned to handle the audio console—after tweaking the knobs of the irons for four long years, and no longer recording rumble and hiss—it strikes me as quite an achievement, one that still feels as fragile as it is surreal; until now, my performances were simply winged words scattered to the wind, given their ephemeral nature. That is to say, I am now capable of recording my dreams without anyone else’s help.

Forty years ago now, as beach days drew toward the end of summer, the coarse sand of these coastal latitudes required no towels, and the suffocating heat had given way to fair weather, I used to read Gustave Flaubert aloud to a girl who had come to visit me. For a soundtrack, I had only the murmur of the waves.

Even back then, I was resolved to follow in the footsteps of the old masters, to write relentlessly for the rest of my days—which is hardly the same thing as merely stringing words together. In fact, I had already been writing poetry since 1980, though I now realize they were actually love songs.

Like the rock songs I was listening to at the time. I say this without the slightest petulance, because when I began reading true poets, I immediately realized they did not write to sound “pretty”; rather, they wrote words with weight, in the manner of sculptors carving marble, stripping away everything superfluous from the words until, from a raw block extracted from the quarries of Carrara, they brought forth the wonders of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Unless you think them—unless you make them your own—words can find themselves reduced to the murmur of the waves. That was precisely why I had chosen Flaubert’s Novembre to entertain the correspondent who had actually come to say goodbye, having found the love of her life.

Novembre is considered a work of juvenilia in the French writer’s canon, written when he was twenty and still steeped in the Romantic movement soon to be displaced by Realism. In fact, Novembre was published in 1928, nearly fifty years after his death. Like any true-to-form juvenilia, the magnificent writer Flaubert would later become is right there, devoid of the slightest artifice, pure and raw literary talent.

The plot could not be simpler: a sexual initiation tailored to the era he inhabited—that is, at the hands of a prostitute who charges him nothing for her services, swept up, perhaps, by the ardor of the young protagonist. Though this last detail, clearly, is another romantic fantasy.

Flaubert was such an inveterate whoremonger that he ended up consumed by syphilis. That walrus mustache of his mature years seen in all his portraits—he is, after all, an icon of French literature—was actually grown to conceal the teeth he lost to the mercury cure, those blue pills that wrecked his gums. But this biographical detail stirs no pity in me; if anything, pity is what one ought to feel for those poor prostitutes.

Eulalie Foucaud, fifteen years his senior, initiated the young and reckless Flaubert at the Hôtel Richelieu in Marseille in 1840 while waiting for a ship to carry her to French Guiana, where her husband, a colonial official, awaited her. Perhaps all too aware of the severe hardships awaiting her, she feasted upon the jeune écrivain, who was likewise waiting for a ship to carry him to Corsica.

Marseille in 1840 was the gateway to the Mediterranean for Frenchmen enduring the harshness of continental cold, naturally and effortlessly inviting relaxation. What is more, the lovers met at summer’s end, a time when farewells in the port city—heading toward destinations as exotic as they were sunlit—disposed one to all manner of sexual adventures.

It is said that Eulalie was smitten with the jeune écrivain and wrote him letters he didn’t even deign to answer—perhaps caught up with the prostitutes of Corsica, insufferable in his erotomaniac delusion, beyond any doubt. Furthermore, her marital peace came to an early end in French Guiana, as her husband passed away a year after arriving.

Gustave Flaubert’s romantic fantasy, for its part, transformed his rite of passage into a first-person novella under twenty thousand words. Naturally, he renamed Eulalie Foucaud simply Marie—a courtesan rather than the young mother he balled—whose backstory she narrates herself, following the classic story-within-a-story framework. Though I like to think that, in truth, the lovers surrendered to quiet confidences between acts of unbridled passion; after all, not everything is meant to be a sexual postcard.

Marie, much like the immortal Madame Bovary would be years later, fell prey to her runaway romantic imagination, to lovers who were devout only before consummating their passions, to betrayals, lies, and other unkept promises. The first-person narrator—the jeune écrivain filled with infinite melancholy in a world without a hint of beauty—seems to truly listen to her as earnestly as he loves her.

How I read Novembre to my correspondent amid the murmur of the waves remains in my memory—not because of the jeune écrivain Flaubert was, nor for the foregone farewell itself, but because of the cruel whip-crack life would gift me just a week later, with the furies of the autumn equinox. And I use the verb gift advisedly, for ever since, weightless words—words lacking gravitas, those that fail to lock together like the stones of the sunken cathedral in the depths of time, those that stir in me nothing but weariness and boredom, empty chatter—ceased to matter to me forever.

To a greater or lesser extent, all authors have Charles Dickens as a pebble in their shoe. No matter how much I want to forget his narrative mastery, he is always there, trashing any delusions of grandeur, making me feel like a complete klutz.

My childhood preferences always went to Great Expectations, and later, somewhat more grown, to Scrooge’s second chance in A Christmas Carol. But it is in this wiser age that A Tale of Two Cities astounds me, above all for the perfect musical cadence of its first page. For that very reason, a week ago, I naively thought I could rejoice in the new series Amazon made. And into a well all my joy fell.

To excuse the butchery of A Tale of Two Cities, critics offer a lazy false equivalence: Dickens took liberties with the French Revolution, so screenwriters and casting directors can take liberties with Dickens. Égalité, perhaps. But there is a vast gulf between a 19th-century novelist harnessing history to serve the story, and Amazon destroying the story to serve compliance.

This “Tale” fits what has become a predictable pattern among literary adaptations, and period pieces in general. The artificiality isn’t just about painted backdrops and CGI mobs. It’s about overly noble characters, their stagy exchanges, the manicured squalor of the poor, and, for the rich, an opulence that might have arrived courtesy of Wayfair. Again, this isn’t something specific to A Tale of Two Cities or its presenters. There seems to be a stylistic monopoly at work among the streamers of “original content” that renders innovative storytelling—and any semblance of cinema—invalid.

This afflicts nearly all historical dramas today, and I despise it. I don’t want to watch a period drama with all the characters acting like contemporary people. Part of the allure of period pieces is seeing how people at the time acted and felt, and how profoundly that differs from today.

Nor do surface details escape this contamination. A production will invest heavily in authentic townscapes and domestic architecture, only to cap the illusion by adorning the women with modern hairstyles foreign to the epoch. The visual slip is telling, but the psychological anachronism runs deeper: their sensibilities are neatly calibrated to satisfy a contemporary ideological template, entirely severed from historical reality.

By the way, I have no problem with Black actors finding employment, but the clear violation of historical accuracy is jarring. The so-called color-blind casting only goes one way. Imagine the outcry if a white actor played Martin Luther King.

It is fascinating how we have fallen headlong into such stupidity, how we are wrecking our immense cultural capital without anyone raising an eyebrow or protesting, simply for fear of being called a racist. Though this we actually deserve—we’ve even begged for it! Because I must force my memory to recall any actor playing Jesus who was a Jew, instead of an Aryan with blue eyes and a blond mane. Or an actress playing Cleopatra who was truly Egyptian and not an American beauty like Elizabeth Taylor.

George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens: “When one reacts very strongly to an individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have.”

While Orwell points to the reader’s kindness toward the author, by the will and grace of the imagination, this gives no moral ground for us to adapt however we please, in accordance with the idiot narcissism of presentism. I remember very well my efforts to reflect the historical truths of a medieval trilogy, thinking how I was going to put down in black and white the fear of being skinned alive in the woods of France by brigands during the Hundred Years’ War.

Two thousand years ago, Cicero made the function of the fiction writer quite clear in Latin: docere, delectare, et movere—to show, to entertain, and to move.

Call me a dreamer, but if I write, it is because reading Charles Dickens convinces me that one can show without plagiarizing a Wikipedia entry on a historical epoch, and naturally, without appending the clumsy wedges of overt indoctrination; entertain without collapsing into delirious fantasies, endless pursuits, and wholesale slaughter; and move an audience without indulging in the cringing, nowadays-fashionable victimhood, which poses as though we had endured the indignities of a savage African war. That is simply laying it on thick.

While Dickens shows, delights, and moves us through the horrors of the workhouse and child labor during the Industrial Revolution—as he did in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Hard Times—he never once strains to impose a Marxist analysis, which carries a rich, dark irony, given that he was a contemporary and, from 1849 onward, practically a neighbor of Karl Marx.

Naturally, this pathetic Amazon streaming production is a visual medium. That entails constraints from which the novel is exempt, standing as a superior art form wherein the reader must supply the imagination and cannot remain passive before the page.

The novel is a timeless, intimate, and silent encounter. The novel is a mysterious kiss between two absolute strangers. No matter how utterly the author has spent himself in creation, without a reader who arrives unhurried at the proposed rendezvous, the novel does not click. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.

Alas, the storyteller who uses the human voice like the curlicues of his fountain pen goes to the back of beyond. Like my mother did long ago, when she worried because I didn’t speak so much as a single word, and instead delighted my ears with amazing stories about my Castilian ancestry. Those stories about the Old Country, where I never lived except in passing, explain who I am, what I did with my fleeting life, and why I shall write dangerously until the end of my days.

Truth be told, I am not a fan of writing eulogies for people I haven’t met personally. But today, September 3rd, I will make an exception to this rule. Because it catches me in a soft spot due to my condition as a lunatic who doesn’t want a cure, nor would I want one if it were offered. I have always pampered the sources of imagination and those who awaken it; the more you let yourself be carried away by it, the more it begins to make sense. Just like life itself. And like a good book.

I will start with the departure that hurts the most, the singer Cassandra Wilson, to whom I owe a personal debt. For the times she rescued me from the edge of the abyss, so many years ago now, that I don’t consider myself the same person, even though in reality I am.

It was the last year of the previous century; I had returned from a trip to the hellhole where I lived, where I couldn’t even fit the white sofa I owned because there was no room. But as long as the desk, the books, and a mattress fit, I could keep writing passionately. By twists of fate, from having a bright apartment on the beach, I had gone to living as if I had been kidnapped in that f*****g hellhole, where at night cockroaches crawled out of the shower drain. Thank goodness it didn’t have a kitchen, only an electric coffee maker. But I couldn’t complain, as I had a window facing west, even if it was barred.

I used to write at night back then, rolling myself a cigarette laced with weed—not too much, lest I lose the necessary eloquence. I had the solitary life I always wanted. Because there is a difference between unwanted loneliness and deeply desired solitude.

This didn’t mean that from time to time I didn’t miss a redheaded girl I once knew, who had dumped me very sensibly upon realizing she was wasting her time with a textbook lunatic. The thing is, lunatics aren’t in as high demand as achievers, what can you do?

For such nocturnal trances, I used to put on some music, but always at a low volume so as not to disturb the neighbors’ rest. Cassette tapes were still in vogue, especially the ones where I recorded my favorite radio show, where a velvet-voiced announcer presented her musical discoveries.

And that was how, on one sweet solitary night, I started crying my eyes out listening to Cassandra Wilson covering Cyndi Lauper’s highly famous song Time After Time. Because that redhead, up close and properly intoxicated by alcohol, had for me the spark of Cyndi Lauper and the majesty of Kate Pierson, one of the singers of The B-52s.

The human voice is certainly intangible. But when I searched YouTube for that aforementioned Cassandra Wilson cover, I heard it much better than on that tape—not because of the obvious advance in audio technology, but because I am inordinately happy. How could I not be? I must have had a scandalous number of farewells to get to today. And yet, I now find meaning in what I left behind, so much so that I can time-travel at will without any fear.

The second eulogy goes out to Glo, a woman of boundless courage, known as Gloria Steinem. I confess I have a certain weakness for the feminists of the ‘60s, when everything was still left to be done. And when I say everything, I mean things we take for granted today, forgetting the defiance and the struggle that destroyed the lives of many activists back then, for they were true pioneers in a world full of cojones.

On top of that, she was an intrepid reporter. The night she infiltrated a party at the New York Playboy Club as a Bunny in April 1963 remains for the annals of journalism history. A Bunny’s Tale is a faithful portrait of how women were treated without the slightest respect, even by the very women who never even considered questioning the status quo. Because they mistakenly thought that deep down it benefited them to have a sugar daddy. By the way, I say this thinking about OnlyFans, which is a nightmare return to the past.

In fact, a large number of women without education or resources are tempted by OnlyFans. Because they can’t find well-paying jobs or have debts. Even college-educated women find in this odious app a way to finance their university debt.

That is why A Bunny’s Tale is as relevant today as it was 63 years ago. I know some will say I’m losing the plot for comparing a harmless app for w*****s with harsh physical reality. But the nature of the transaction, even if consensual and economically beneficial for the girl offering herself digitally, is still a step backward.

Just when it seemed women were no longer sexual objects, new ways to reverse the situation arrive. That is why feminism still has so much to do. Because the patriarchy has had the upper hand for thousands of years—exactly since we ceased to be a nomadic hunter-gatherer society.

These two goddesses who have left a massive void in me today, even though I didn’t know them personally, once served as my inspiration to try and stop being a scoundrel and a rogue, even if in reality I haven’t succeeded. Heaven knows I try.

I think masculinity is in crisis and digital natives are having a really hard time because they are incapable of handling rejection, have lost the spirit of adventure, and end up as involuntary celibates, also known as incels. The poor b******s prefer to w**k themselves to death watching rapey porn. I also think I would have liked to chat with Glo about the mess we are currently in—if not outright calling it decadence—with birth rates hitting rock bottom and baby strollers turned into doggie strollers.

Innovations in literature are born from the author’s natural drive to create. There is an audience that quickly tires of being sold the same story, told the exact same way, over and over again. This claim, however, is countered by the many authors who, once they stumble upon a fictional character that lets them churn out a series, prefer not to risk their good name in the slightest.

Look no further than the fictional detective Jules Maigret, to whom Belgian writer Georges Simenon dedicated no fewer than 75 novels and 28 short stories over four decades of cyclopean output.

Assuming risks, being willing to lose the favor of an audience that just wants more of the same—meaning the author would have to suppress their natural drive to create—is the succinct reason why modernist writers remain so fascinating. This holds true even when they openly mocked all those cowardly authors who defaulted to writing whatever happened to be trendy at the time.

For a good laugh, look at Virginia Woolf’s delightful essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Or the pastiches a young Marcel Proust wrote in Le Figaro, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide”, a psychological piece written in 1907 analyzing an acquaintance who murdered his mother, exploring guilt and maternal bonds with dark precision.

Of course, for savage mockery aimed at cheap, baby-rattle prose—neatly folded and clean as laundry in a drawer, meant for quick consumption without taxing the intellect too much, once known as commercial entertainment—nothing beats two Irishmen in Paris who took the City of Light as their adopted home.

Rivers of ink have been spilled over their work, of course, because their innovations were truly mind-bending. While one wanted to trap the entire world within a single day, the other wanted to strip time of all meaning, leaving it in an infinite loop where absolutely nothing happened.

Between these two Irishmen settled in Paris—far removed from the suffocating, idiotic nationalism that had taken over their island—a relationship formed that nearly ended in family ties during the first half of 1930. The first was at the very pinnacle of the literary ziggurat following the publication of Ulysses, thanks to Sylvia Beach, an enthusiastic bookseller who poured her soul into the work to publish it with meticulous care. The second was a 23-year-old sorcerer’s apprentice with no published work, save for two pieces in literary magazines dedicated to enthusiastically buttering up the first. I am talking about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Let the record show I’ve avoided mentioning either author until now precisely to keep myself from buttering them up. While I always crack up reading “Circe”, the 15th chapter of Ulysses, or lose myself in Molly Bloom’s final monologue, the rest of the book is relentlessly over the top. As for Samuel Beckett, I can’t stand his later mental tailspins, nor was I ever a fan of the Theater of the Absurd. Still, his organic transition from English to French is fascinating, as is the reason he gave for it: to write “without style”—the primary motivation for so many other transnational authors. It must be because beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language, when they strain syntax, alter rhythms, and bring an unprecedented cadence, forcing readers out of their comfort zone to project their own imagination into the gaps of the text.

Joyce was in a highly delicate spot as a writer because he had gone completely blind in his left eye and only had about ten percent vision left in his right. This was the result of a severe bout of glaucoma, iritis, and cataracts—a nightmare in that pre-antibiotic, pre-laser-surgery era. Just picturing it makes me blink out of sheer apprehension.

On top of that, alongside Nora Barnacle, he had founded the most dysfunctional family imaginable. Even so, his devotion to his daughter Lucia was boundless: possessing an artistic personality just like her father’s, she was already on the verge of being declared schizophrenic.

None of Joyce’s disciples—who bent over backward to keep the master productive, taking his dictation or bringing order to his massive piles of paperwork as they came and went from his house daily—caught Lucia’s eye quite like the athletic Beckett, a college cricket star and a prime catch.

Nora Barnacle became hell-bent on getting Beckett to date her daughter, who had received an intense, avant-garde, and eclectic education centered on modern dance. To that end, she would invite Beckett over for dinner dumplings, under the threat of banishing him from the literary paradise he had stumbled into.

Beckett knew full well that among Joyce’s distinguished disciples and patrons, he either had to cave in or head back to Dublin. So, he chose to have the dumplings. And while he was no dancer himself, he at least knew how to listen patiently to Lucia—a young woman bursting with talent in calligraphy, design, and singing, who actively collaborated with her father on the deluxe editions of his work.

Some say that the highly complex verbal associations in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake were actually inspired by Lucia. But then again, they said the exact same thing about Scott Fitzgerald and his crazy wife Zelda. While it is true that an author steals expressions and ideas like a shameless pickpocket, books are not made of ideas. They are made of words. Hence Fitzgerald writing in pencil on cigarette packs, napkins, restaurant menus, envelopes...

Once Lucia had filled Nora’s head with wild delusions of an imminent engagement, the charade reached its expected conclusion. Chairs flew, glasses shattered, and the mother of the bride decreed Beckett’s exile. What did Joyce do? Exactly what any father blinded by love for his daughter would do—no pun intended.

Beckett was pushed aside among Joyce’s disciples, who were working tirelessly to deliver installments of Finnegans Wake—then known simply as Work in Progress—in both English and French. Joyce claimed the French translation was rigid, literal. Ultimately, the monumental effort by Beckett and his friend Alfred Péron ended up eclipsed by other collaborators in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1931.

And the schizophrenia of Lucia, the brilliant cross-eyed dancer, became intolerable to her parents and to the brutal psychiatric standards of the era the moment her sexuality came into play. They even tried Carl Gustav Jung, who diagnosed her with schizophrenia—a profound psychic regression compounded by an absolute emotional dependence on her father. Had it not been for Joyce’s steadfast opposition, Lucia would have ended up lobotomized, a horrific therapy that would swiftly fall into total discredit well into the ‘50s.

One of the greatest challenges for a reader of novels is that their way of thinking, their point of view, the scale of their interests, invariably changes. So much so that upon rereading a novel of which they have only a vague memory, it conceals hidden treasures that they will only find when they return to it again, and again, the next day, or years later.

In the previous episode of this literary podcast, I talked about the iconic American novels about daredevils. For reasons of time, I only briefly touched upon the great William Faulkner, an egregious, brilliant madman if there ever was one. At least, that was the reason I tiptoed around his novel Pylon, one of the few that escapes the fabulous Yoknapatawpha County.

Everything Faulkner wrote in the novelistic genre was experimental, ahead of its time, and sometimes even classified as dirty—sometimes because of his insistence on evoking terror, other times because he insisted on testing the limits of freedom of expression, which was rather prudish in the 1930s. And many of his ideas would have been perfectly feasible if only the publishers of his time had chipped in, like using different colored inks so that slow-witted readers wouldn’t mix up the characters.

And then there is the author himself, who, driven by debt, had been working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, rubbing shoulders with another true daredevil, Howard Hawks—not to be confused with the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes.

At that time, aviation was in its infancy, and the film director Hawks introduced Faulkner to flying the Waco biplane for nineteen months, starting in April of 1934.

When he was young, Faulkner had enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Air Force branch in Canada; the experience was cut short by the unexpected arrival of the Armistice. Although this didn’t stop him from parading around his hometown in a military uniform, cane in hand, faking a combat limp and putting on a British accent in Mississippi, which earned him the nickname “Count No ‘Count” from his mocking neighbors.

Howard Hawks, for his part, before arriving in Hollywood, had been a flight instructor in Texas and a mechanical engineer, which meant that the flying scenes being filmed needed someone who knew the ins and outs of aviation. He went on to direct six films centered on the subject.

Faulkner and Hawks shared the missed opportunity of participating in the First World War, following the values of dedication and sacrifice that today seem irrational, mostly due to its meat-grinder nature. But that was the spirit of the time. And the foundation of their friendship.

Airplane prices were not exactly affordable in the midst of the Great Depression. The red Waco, an enclosed four-seater with a 200 HP engine, cost $6,000. And Faulkner didn’t let the opportunity pass, because he was receiving a weekly check for $500 from the studios, a far cry from the peanuts he had received in royalties for the novels he had published.

Faulkner’s precarious literary reality in the early 1930s is relentlessly reflected in the numbers of his early masterpieces. The Sound and the Fury, published with a meager initial print run of just under 1,800 copies barely two weeks before the crash of 29, brought him a little over $400 in royalties due to its complete lack of initial commercial impact.

A hardship that was repeated with As I Lay Dying in 1930, whose 2,500 copies sold left him with about $600, while he scraped by working the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant for $11 a week.

His previous glimpse of commercial success came with Sanctuary the following year, which sold over 10,000 copies and should have brought in about $3,000, but his publisher’s bankruptcy legally froze the funds and left him with only an advance of a few hundred.

An economic tragedy compounded by Light in August in 1932, whose initial print run of about 4,500 copies gave him a gross return of $1,100, an amount totally insufficient to cover the mortgage arrears on Rowan Oak and his debts at the town store.

I mention all this because of the peculiarity of the matter: that a middle-aged man would decide to revive the broken dream of his youth with the massive weekly paycheck he was receiving, having experienced Franciscan poverty up to that point, betting everything on an uncertain literary career. In fact, the first thing he did was fly over the houses of his mocking neighbors.

But Faulkner’s lucky star was about to rise. At that time, he was solely dedicated to surviving disasters with indomitable courage. Like his engine seizing before landing and doing so without facing the wind, or insisting on taking off in the terrible conditions of open fields, having to clear away cow dung first.

The hub of operations where he felt most comfortable was Memphis and New Orleans. Vernon Omlie’s school in Memphis, Mid-South Airways, was where Faulkner flew to receive advanced instruction, perform maintenance on the Waco, and take local Oxford teenagers for joyrides, inviting them to rise above the earth. But New Orleans was the long-haul destination and where he found the universe he would write about in Pylon.

The inauguration of Shushan Airport in February of 34 was not a simple aeronautical event; it was a display of Art Deco modernity that proclaimed itself the “air hub of the Americas.” Built on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, this complex was an engineering jewel of its time, being the first airport in the world to combine terminals for land and sea planes, anticipating even the great terminals of New York.

Faulkner flew there accompanied by his instructor, Vernon Omlie, finding himself immersed in a feverish atmosphere of Mardi Gras celebrations, air races, and aerobatic displays that gathered the pilots of the day. It was in this ecosystem of danger, speed, and ephemeral camaraderie that the author met a mysterious couple of aviators—he a war veteran and she an aerial acrobat or wingwalker—with whom he shared nights of alcohol, flights, and conversations that revealed to him the nihilistic and rootless psychology of the barnstormers.

That experience, captured at the exact historical moment when commercial aviation was beginning to eclipse the suicidal romanticism of traveling acrobats, became the emotional seed of Pylon, Faulkner’s only novel set in a prophetic and technological present that he himself described as a nightmare of the future.

What is remarkable about Pylon is that, alongside the red Waco biplane, it was altogether an act of procrastination in the face of a manuscript as experimental, complex, and dark as Absalom, Absalom!, which he would not finish until two years later, under contract with Random House.

As meticulous as Faulkner was when writing, in real life he was a walking disaster, and his aviation adventure ended badly. It seems he was incapable of denying the use of the airplane to his younger brother, Dean Faulkner, because they shared a passion for flying, like so many pioneers.

He financed much of his brother’s activity, which, after the accident, left him with a devastating personal guilt, feeling responsible for having provided the very means that would ultimately cost his brother his life, bringing a close to a nineteen months of happiness in the author’s life.

And because of such an outcome, Faulkner never flew again. He would take charge of his brother’s posthumous daughter and ended up finding solace in drinking and in his young Hollywood lover, Meta Carpenter. A walking cliché, he settled into a double life between Hollywood and Oxford, Mississippi.

Few adventurers, and many idiots among them, mostly adrenaline junkies trapped in alpha-male mind frames, and fewer amazons, had been jumping from cliffs using wingsuits to pilot their descent. Some of them, performing as daredevils buoyed by high altitudes and airspeed, actively hunted the proximity—veering toward the slopes instead of gliding away from them.

While it seems impossible to drive what in French is called l’appel du vide—the call of the void—at the edge of the cliff wall, try to add the adrenaline rush of hurling yourself down through a talus slope, where any imbalance of the wingsuit or split-second delay of the parachute’s opening might be fatal.

There is a genre about daredevils in literary fiction, like the barnstormers and wing-walkers in propeller-driven biplanes in Pylon by William Faulkner.

Or the crowning achievement of New Journalism in The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, dissecting the psychology of a brave man like Chuck Yeager, whose military duty was pushing the envelope of the first jet aircraft through the sound barrier and into the stratosphere, paving the way for America’s first astronauts.

I guess I could drop in between the literary debut of James Salter with The Hunters, drawing directly on his experiences as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, cutting through the myth with prose as cold and lethal as the skies he actually flew in.

But comparing pilots with idiots, even if it rhymes, does not make the cut. Especially when amateurs are involved, looking for a viral picture for Instagram or helmet GoPro footage for TikTok, trying to emulate with a do-it-yourself weekend project the cold geometry of the movie star Tom Cruise jumping with a motorcycle off a Norwegian fjord—a maneuver forged through relentless rehearsals and obsessive skydives.

Add to this fatal equation a pair of minor-league television celebrities and anonymous adrenaline junkies who mix climbing cliff walls with BASE jumping, and then you get not the real stuff, but the real pulp instead—the cum shot of a bloody wingsuit. That’s a real story. Don’t you believe me? Get Netflix and watch To the Max.

Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan that “truth is always strange, stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!” With the screenwriter being a solid guy with a proven track record, I guess family constraints made it impossible to illustrate the story of a core group trapped in alpha-male mind frames until their luck ran out. So he wrote a morbid, documentary-style version of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None. And the real story tragically unfolded in the heights of selfie mass hysteria, almost mixed up with the narcissistic idiots of many genders and tribes, tripping at modest heights, but sufficient enough to break their necks. Youth is wasted on the young.

Because the script refuses to engage with the twisted psychology of the call of the void, the middle-aged men simply keep dying paying homage to the first casualty, one by one. By the third death, the film becomes a tragicomedy. As is real life indeed. Watch the raw and unvarnished reality of how quickly one of them crashes against the merlon of a Spanish castle.

I’m not taking sides either. Back in the day, I was young and reckless too. As soon as my father could no longer report a teenage runaway to the police, I served two years in the Airborne. Skydiving was wildly fun, and the propellers of the Caribou on a runway made me cry of sheer joy, anticipating the stairways to heaven of that long-winged bird before a high-altitude jump.

A few years ago, one of my brothers-in-arms was still serving and shared his experiences with me about BASE jumping. Alas, military guys never gamble and follow procedure and rules, and fortunately his name did not come up in the Wikipedia list of fatalities due to wingsuit flying. A list full of middle-aged men, except two daring amazons. Draw your own conclusions.

What I did to drive my own call of the void was trade skydiving for sailing, and as soon as you lost sight of the coastline, listening only to the music of the wind on the sails, yes, you feel the void over the invisible wreckage of sunken ships of the deep sea. That was a peaceful period full of reading, before I got the needed courage to write novels and fail big as often as necessary.

I certainly tried many times to describe with only words things like the alpha-male mind frame of that glorious skydiving time, and it’s not easy. Because the reader is always obsessed with the cum shot, and sorry for the abuse of this graphic word to describe the ghoulish fascination for death. But I never was either, until life became too precious for me after dealing with a delayed opening chute, so I couldn’t see anything but a white landscape while dealing with endogenous shock. Then John the Fearless learned at last the true nature of fear. It was a revelation to rejoice.

And whenever I try to rewrite passages of that manuscript, I have to forgive myself for being such a pain in the ass. Always whining like Jeremiah because the typewriter I used on the air base was clunky and noisy. And a cold and arrogant fish to those who were sharing the experience with me. Because I was a bookish guy, very quiet, but a natural-born killer when nightly episodes of bullying—always a coward looking for the weakest link in the chain—came close to my quarters. I couldn’t stand bullies then, and I still despise cowardice today. Seeing those idiots in present times filming with their iPhones while someone really needs help, whether it’s a woman being assaulted in the street by some aggressive male or a person getting robbed in plain sight, just boils my blood.

Few adventurers, and many idiots among them, mostly adrenaline junkies trapped in alpha-male mind frames, and fewer amazons, had been jumping from cliffs using wingsuits to pilot their descent. Some of them, performing as daredevils buoyed by high altitudes and airspeed, actively hunted the proximity—veering toward the slopes instead of gliding away from them.

While it seems impossible to drive what in French is called l’appel du vide—the call of the void—at the edge of the cliff wall, try to add the adrenaline rush of hurling yourself down through a talus slope, where any imbalance of the wingsuit or split-second delay of the parachute’s opening might be fatal.

There is a genre about daredevils in literary fiction, like the barnstormers and wing-walkers in propeller-driven biplanes in Pylon by William Faulkner.

Or the crowning achievement of New Journalism in The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, dissecting the psychology of a brave man like Chuck Yeager, whose military duty was pushing the envelope of the first jet aircraft through the sound barrier and into the stratosphere, paving the way for America’s first astronauts.

I guess I could drop in between the literary debut of James Salter with The Hunters, drawing directly on his experiences as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, cutting through the myth with prose as cold and lethal as the skies he actually flew in.

But comparing pilots with idiots, even if it rhymes, does not make the cut. Especially when amateurs are involved, looking for a viral picture for Instagram or helmet GoPro footage for TikTok, trying to emulate with a do-it-yourself weekend project the cold geometry of the movie star Tom Cruise jumping with a motorcycle off a Norwegian fjord—a maneuver forged through relentless rehearsals and obsessive skydives.

Add to this fatal equation a pair of minor-league television celebrities and anonymous adrenaline junkies who mix climbing cliff walls with BASE jumping, and then you get not the real stuff, but the real pulp instead—the cum shot of a bloody wingsuit. That’s a real story. Don’t you believe me? Get Netflix and watch To the Max.

Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan that “truth is always strange, stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!” With the screenwriter being a solid guy with a proven track record, I guess family constraints made it impossible to illustrate the story of a core group trapped in alpha-male mind frames until their luck ran out. So he wrote a morbid, documentary-style version of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None. And the real story tragically unfolded in the heights of selfie mass hysteria, almost mixed up with the narcissistic idiots of many genders and tribes, tripping at modest heights, but sufficient enough to break their necks. Youth is wasted on the young.

Because the script refuses to engage with the twisted psychology of the call of the void, the middle-aged men simply keep dying paying homage to the first casualty, one by one. By the third death, the film becomes a tragicomedy. As is real life indeed. Watch the raw and unvarnished reality of how quickly one of them crashes against the merlon of a Spanish castle.

I’m not taking sides either. Back in the day, I was young and reckless too. As soon as my father could no longer report a teenage runaway to the police, I served two years in the Airborne. Skydiving was wildly fun, and the propellers of the Caribou on a runway made me cry of sheer joy, anticipating the stairways to heaven of that long-winged bird before a high-altitude jump.

A few years ago, one of my brothers-in-arms was still serving and shared his experiences with me about BASE jumping. Alas, military guys never gamble and follow procedure and rules, and fortunately his name did not come up in the Wikipedia list of fatalities due to wingsuit flying. A list full of middle-aged men, except two daring amazons. Draw your own conclusions.

What I did to drive my own call of the void was trade skydiving for sailing, and as soon as you lost sight of the coastline, listening only to the music of the wind on the sails, yes, you feel the void over the invisible wreckage of sunken ships of the deep sea. That was a peaceful period full of reading, before I got the needed courage to write novels and fail big as often as necessary.

I certainly tried many times to describe with only words things like the alpha-male mind frame of that glorious skydiving time, and it’s not easy. Because the reader is always obsessed with the cum shot, and sorry for the abuse of this graphic word to describe the ghoulish fascination for death. But I never was either, until life became too precious for me after dealing with a delayed opening chute, so I couldn’t see anything but a white landscape while dealing with endogenous shock. Then John the Fearless learned at last the true nature of fear. It was a revelation to rejoice.

And whenever I try to rewrite passages of that manuscript, I have to forgive myself for being such a pain in the ass. Always whining like Jeremiah because the typewriter I used on the air base was clunky and noisy. And a cold and arrogant fish to those who were sharing the experience with me. Because I was a bookish guy, very quiet, but a natural-born killer when nightly episodes of bullying—always a coward looking for the weakest link in the chain—came close to my quarters. I couldn’t stand bullies then, and I still despise cowardice today. Seeing those idiots in present times filming with their iPhones while someone really needs help, whether it’s a woman being assaulted in the street by some aggressive male or a person getting robbed in plain sight, just boils my blood.

I’m not an Apple influencer, but a few of you might be listening to this literary podcast on the move—driving or commuting on the subway, many with an iPhone and those AirPods that are sometimes good. And sometimes really bad for certain things. They are good for pushing a heavy beat when you’re running at full speed. But they are not so good for nuanced voices.

A song that doesn’t rock in a car because it isn’t mastered properly is a song nobody wants. So, this is the only reason Apple tweaked their AirPods badly enough to drive me crazy. Reversing this tweaking was fundamental this morning in the hacking of that ancient Egyptian serpent the Ptolemaic Greeks named Ouroboros—literally, the tail-eater—and it freed me from countless hours of monitoring. I could finally hear my low end without thinking I was channeling Feodor Chaliapin, the legendary Russian bass performing Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov.

I have perfect pitch like a piano tuner due to voice crafting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be competitive enough for the scant audiobook auditions. And for years I’ve had to deal with tweaked AirPods as the ultimate standard. If you look at the pictures, you will see exactly how to fix them. Believe me, tweak the b*****d. It is classic Apple—hiding the actual math behind sleek visual sliders and assuming nobody will care.

And One More Thing.

That Spatial Audio for mono does not work, because I’m supposed to be at your twelve o’clock. And that Noise Cancellation, indispensable while commuting, kills the audio signal too.

And again, I am not mad because some of you prefer to read rather than listen to me. That’s the way. But I do this narrator performance not for you, but for the illiterate who cannot read anymore.

According to my July stats, I have thousands of listeners, and a few hundred readers. And the idiotic doom-scrollers out there looking for a dopamine fix—with their TikTok-reduced attention spans and shallow discourse—that cesspool, you can keep it.

It’s true that sometimes the algorithm tempts you to follow the rule of vanity. I never beat the amazing stats of the podcast on the Shakespearean portrait of Trump as Richard the Third, but I’m not here for the likes.

I’m here to write whatever I want and in the way I want. And to read out loud for the illiterate generation we have reaped, who cannot comprehend a sentence longer than ten words unless you sing to the muse. Only a century ago, reading a twenty-five-word sentence was quite normal to get to the point.

Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier had sentences of forty words. Marcel Proust had the same average; however, I could cause shock and awe by reading his longest sentence, which stretched out to 847 words in the original French, and 958 in the Scott Moncrieff English translation.

You know what? F**k it. I’m so generous today that I am going to celebrate the hacking of the Ouroboros by reading aloud that Proustian sentence—it’s a masterclass in coming out of the closet. Don’t worry, I will fade the narration out... to mellow audiobook standards when I exceed your ten-minute attention span.

Let’s have some fun!

“Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy—at times from the society—of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroborationof their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice, but certain among them, more practical, busier men who have not the time to go and drive their own bargains, or to dispense with the simplification of life and that saving of time which may result from cooperation, have formed two societies of which the second is composed exclusively of persons similar to themselves.”

I wrote about the bookstores and libraries I knew before the Digital Revolution, but I forgot to mention several works of fiction based on that cultural scene, because I was just warming up with a few brushstrokes.

Just as struggling actors fight for their dreams waiting tables or working as baristas, struggling writers end up as clerks in bookshops—as did George Orwell and Penelope Fitzgerald, two British authors who used their experience to craft superior, heartbreaking fiction.

Orwell, in the mid-1930s, worked for almost two years as a part-time assistant—just afternoons—at Booklovers’ Corner, a secondhand bookshop in the London borough of Hampstead. He was a real nut job, and probably was dealing with a ton of guilt after his experience in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Indeed, he was a thirty-year-old, but fast and expeditious in translating his adventures into fiction, always peppered with the current leftist ideas of that decade, when Stalinist commie propaganda still wasn’t exposed as a total fraud.

Fitzgerald, in the late ‘50s, worked part-time for four years as a clerk at The Sole Bay Bookshop in Southwold, Suffolk. She was already a forty-year-old mother of three children and the wife of an alcoholic trial lawyer, who was already on his way to disbarment for theft and public disgrace. But Penelope never dared to abandon him, because he had post-traumatic stress disorder from the war, and legend says she began writing fiction just to entertain her husband on his deathbed in the late ‘70s.

I say “legend says” because anything you may read about Penelope Fitzgerald is just heartbreaking. Or maybe it’s me, because of the deep connection I feel while reading The Bookshop. That idea about reading for pleasure or entertainment is total BS for retarded, fat, and bored panda bears. I mean it. Reading is dangerous, and good novels are always written on the razor’s edge. That’s the deal.

While mourning her alcoholic partner, Fitzgerald sat at her desk and channeled her whole love story with authorial control, writing about a childless young widow, Florence Green, who decides to open a bookshop with a small inheritance in the back of beyond.

Call me crazy, but what I feel reading the first page is a dark genius gutting me with a butcher’s knife. Remember the narrative skill required to immerse you immediately in the story and activate your suspension of disbelief? This is it. I’ve read it out loud like a hundred times, and each time my voice breaks. It’s not about empathy; it’s about the narrator’s skill to project Florence Green’s worries onto a heron flying across an estuary while trying to swallow a long eel.

That being said, you are right for thinking: what a drag those writers are! Is this one of those books about books? Well, let me cut it into slices for you. Real writers are too busy writing to care about anything other than books, the money they need to remain tightly focused on their next installment, and the amount of love and dedication they can get from their partners or non-committed relationships to survive the constant ordeal that writing entails. Pulling up all-nighters is not for the faint of heart.

I wrote a novel about The Chocolate Party, the Barcelonian bookstore of my younger years, because I was immensely fortunate with the bookseller, who took my literary ambitions as his own. And we couldn’t have been more different, as I came to realize.

It took me two long decades to find an interesting angle to write about The Chocolate Party, centered entirely on characters, way beyond the usual clichés about the parochial clientele, book clubs, coffee stains, and cigarettes—and I still think it cries out for a third act. Because of the gripping march into the Digital Revolution, and its nefarious consequences both for readership and creativity.

While working the afternoon hours at Booklovers’ Corner, Orwell couldn’t turn on the heat because the owner thought it would steam up the window display and drive potential customers away. Nothing serious, but the frail and moth-eaten Orwell had caught pneumonia during his vagrant years that almost killed him. And all his works shared the same noble obsession with poverty and class warfare—which was, on the other hand, entirely reasonable in the era of the Great Depression.

In his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell goes further because he was in love and, suddenly and for the first time, loved back. So the main character, Gordon Comstock, became a caricature of himself, his war against money, and his search for love. But we should read between the lines, as with all of Orwell’s stories. Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a poet and psychologist, a balm for the socially awkward Orwell, and she married a struggling writer and political activist whom his own family described as impossible to live with.

Sadly, it was too good to last. But they still lived together through ten productive years before she died at age 39 on the operating table. I know it sounds corny, but without Eileen, it’s hard to explain how Orwell chose to be a fiction writer instead of a fierce political activist after becoming deeply disappointed by Stalin’s purges. That, and the trickle of news about the Holodomor that escaped Soviet censorship—the terror-famine that the Soviets inflicted across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus. I can imagine Orwell’s disappointment through reading Homage to Catalonia, which he wrote after witnessing how the commies turned on each other in Barcelona in May of ‘37, where he went from fighting fascists to running with Eileen for the French border, convinced he would be killed by those fools.