Chilean Poet

by Alejandro Zambra

He pages through the final chapters of Ulysses, which he’d read anxiously, erratically, back when he still lived with his parents, and he thinks that at some point he should reread that novel honestly, with a real willingness to play the game. He opens a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, and as he reads the first five pages he recovers the laughter and sense of complicity and he even feels hungry thinking of the pizza and garlic bread he used to eat in his minuscule apartment in the days when he read that novel, not long before his reunion with Carla. He reads the back cover of To the Lighthouse, a novel he read at fifteen years old during a stormy week, and he remembers having thought or felt that Virginia Woolf’s words had the ability to intensify the rain. He reads the first paragraphs of ‘The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,’ his favorite of Clarice Lispector’s stories, and he recalls the icy counter of the library at the College of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Chile. He reads the final pages of The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, which he’d read straight through, as if it were a page-turner of an adventure tale, one long weekend when Carla and Vicente were at the beach. He lingers over the stories of Cathedral, by Raymond Carver: he reads the first lines of ‘A Small, Good Thing,’