Status Updates From El mal de Montano

“To be a writer is to turn into someone else, into a stranger. You have to begin to translate yourself. Writing is a case of impersonation, of adopting a new personality. Writing is pretending to be another.”

Perhaps this is what literature is, the invention of another life that could well be our own, the invention of a double.

AT THE START of the twenty-first century, as if I were walking to the rhythm of literature's most recent A walking history, I was alone and without direction on some byroad, in the evening, heading inexorably for melancholy. A slow, enveloping, increasingly deep nostalgia for all that literature had once been merged with the mist at dusk. I considered myself a very deceived man. In life. And in art.

Stupidity is loyal and constant, we have known her fron time immemorial, she awaits us in the sweet home to show with us, with imposing resignation, the colossal misfortune not to be intelligent.

O Valéry!

Sad and solitary Madalena. To escape my anxiety, I asked Tongoy what we were doing there. "Visiting Antonio Caiado," Rosa interposed. You'd think she'd have said, "I came to Pico because I was told a mysterious writer lived here. "We watched the four passengers traveling with us disembark from the ferry, getting off the boat with their bags and baskets, in grave silence.