Midway through September, a Spanish influencer decided to confess an uncomfortable truth: not everybody likes to read. He did so with the forcefulness of someone who has just discovered fire: “We’ve got to get over the fact that there are people who don’t like reading. And you’re not any better because you like reading.” These words—a sort of post-literary manifesto—were enough to set social media, cultural supplements, and email inboxes alight with threats.
This incident was nothing new, but the accent was. In Chile, a few years ago, a government minister—an economist who had studied at some U.S. university, and a guaranteed success by any measure of achievement—declared, with similar candor: “I don’t read novels because I don’t have time. I prefer to learn new things. Life is short. Reading novels takes away time that I could spend learning something.”
Both cases reveal the same modern superstition: that reading is only any use if it teaches, if it produces, if it improves performance. And that pleasure—that useless remnant of another age—is a waste of time. Their statements are not so serious in and of themselves, but the way they dismiss that which does not interest them provides ample evidence of their gaucherie.
These sorts of controversies and arguments have always happened, and, generally, they go nowhere. Perhaps we have never arrived at a convincing motive or explanation for the function of art—or, in this case, of reading. This laboratory has given birth to essays, sentences, and studies that have sought to approach an answer, in which the defense of uselessness has prevailed. They are interesting approaches—sometimes inspiring or poetic—but they do not reach a clear, concise definition, as is demanded by these times of digital acceleration, when reading must be justified.
There are also approaches from the neurological point of view, which suggest fascinating phenomena beyond linguistic decoding and the transmission of knowledge. One is the mirror neuron system: when we read a narrative, the brain areas associated with perception and action are activated as if we were experiencing the situation ourselves. This effect is all the more remarkable in the case of complex literary narratives, where the characters display psychological ambiguity and ethical dilemmas.
Writing is not born in a vacuum. Every text brings with it, whether explicitly or secretly, the tracks of its author’s past readings. In some cases, this presence is veiled behind the fiction of originality; in others, it is transparently made clear, as if reading and writing were just two phases of the same act. In the books of Álvaro Campos (Diarios, Laurel, 2022 and Negocio familiar, Tusquets, 2025) and in the pieces that make up Francisco Díaz Klaassen’s Mínimas (Alfaguara, 2023), reading is presented as neither an adornment nor a distant source. It is presented as constitutive matter: the engine, framework, and tone of the writing, and its implications for experience. In these books, we take note of a new element of the phenomenon: how it affects life itself.
Díaz Klaassen is the author of the novels Antología del cuento chileno, El hombre sin acción, La hora más corta, and En la colina, and of the book of short stories Cuando éramos jóvenes. He currently teaches English literature at the Universidad Católica de Chile.
The epigraph by Benjamin Constant with which he opens Mínimas gives an idea of the journey he means to take: “People’s real nature matters so little that I prefer that with which they substitute it.” This substitution or way to complement nature is not literally revealed: the author does not mean to explain or clarify anything. When he wants to give an example of what it means to be “well connected,” in a few lines, he intertwines Casanova, enmeshed in courts and palaces. He also mentions Constant visiting the most influential German writers of his day, and describes his long sojourn in Uruguay, where he wrote—following the beer’s orders—to a woman writer he knew only superficially, not entirely sure of his own intentions.
Mínimas deliberately works with the aphorism and the short essay, whose tightly enclosed contents must be loaded with as much expression as possible. These pieces function as a response to what has been read: mini-essays on authors, intertextual games in the hands of a voice that comments, observes, ironizes, and converses with traditions of fragmentary writing (from Pascal to Cioran, from Barthes to contemporary aphorists).
Past reading is not hidden from sight: it is the raw material that becomes literature by way of reflection, through which the author places the reader at the center of the game. Each “minimal” fragment demands complicity: the complete meaning is not always to be found on the page, but rather in shared knowledge, in the reference the reader should recognize or, if not, go and look up for himself. Some pieces are just a few lines long; the longest get up to two or three pages, and are framed by titles that sometimes repeat in serial fashion: “Literatura y realidad,” “La soledad del escritor,” “La crítica,” “La imaginación,” “Ego y yo.” The author thus builds a continuous arc throughout the book, despite each piece’s autonomy. There are also footnotes that are not mere clarifications (he thus enters into dialogue with Sterne, Amis, Nabovok in Pale Fire); they are comments, new information, extensions emerging from the original subject, as if from a second voice conversing with the first.
His manner of exploring is not free of a ludic, sometimes caustic mannerism: glints of criticism that spare neither exasperations nor fancies. This is where the book’s originality lies, in the author’s point of view and the transitions between each piece and the notes. Díaz Klaassen plays with connections throughout the book, be they real, fortuitous, or matters of chance:
“We tend to lay circuits based on which writers we read and enjoy the most, and through them we understand not only literature, but often life itself […]. We all have our own circuits, which we have reached as if by chance (the plots one learns in university tend to be unmade only when one starts to reason for oneself) and which, in a sense, are closed by that same nature that creates tension between chance and fate.* Bioy–Constant–Schnitzler–Casanova is one of mine.”
(*As Johnson said, “It is better when a man reads from immediate inclination.”)
Too many authors are cited to count, and they reveal a good deal of learning, though not of the stifling kind displayed by those who drop names unceasingly. Each of them serves the purpose of an idea. Benjamin Constant, Casanova, Sergio Pitol, Isabella Bird, Kafka, Ovid, Houellebecq, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Rulfo, Thomas Mann, Bernhard, Zweig, Goethe, Schwob, Bioy Casares, Schnitzler, Borges, Chesterton, Dickson Carr, Onetti, Faulkner, Conrad, Al-Latif, James Purdy, Arlt, McCarthy, Sherwood Anderson, Sterne, Shawkat Toorawa, Bacon, Philip K. Dick, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Bradbury, Saroyan, Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Gogol, Mrożek, Markson, Roth, Carver, Chekhov, and Márai are just a small sample of a list that cannot be compiled in so few pages.
Not all these entries arouse the same level of interest, but their average float is astonishing. Along the way, Díaz Klaassen brings in a wide variety of subjects, linked somehow or another to the book. These are not essays simply “on literature”; he connects them with our human condition, our perceptions, feelings, fears, failings. The figure of the non-academic intellectual (and artist) stands out. In his quotations as well as his own experience, he expresses his distance from the academic world: “Today, it is the hiding place of those who, thinking themselves different and original, raise prefabricated flags that smear and flatten any hint of individuality.” He speaks of the ego, of how Montaigne “hides the self by displaying it as an end by which to discover humanity itself,” while “our age promotes the most encompassing collectivities, almost always driven by individualistic selfishness.”
He speaks of the difficulties of writing about love and the happiness that comes from encountering great characters in fiction: “remedies against time, antidotes to the future, escape routes from the present.” Of how literature is a solitary business, no matter how many workshops, book clubs, or Instagram accounts strive to prove the opposite. Of jealousy, of the pleasure of late-coming discoveries, of how vast the imagination can become. Of how much fun it can be to ponder and how good it can be for us to waste time having fun. Of fiction and seduction: “the lover’s lies, as long as he’s in love, are never false. Incidentally, that’s how literature works.”
In Sciascia’s notes, he finds the humanity of a kindred spirit. Of someone who buzzes with art and suffers the earthly, brainless reality that surrounds him. He shares his urge to make believe that fiction is not fiction, faced with the gracelessness of writing reality. He is critical of certain writers’ fixation on the so-called “literature of parents” and “of children.” And of the deceit hidden in books that sell lots of copies: “They would have us believe we are not alone. True literature is sincere because it shows us we are.”
He also shares doubts regarding the importance of his own body of work and its reach: “My friends assure me that they read me, and that they do so with pleasure, but more often than not the things they say (or stop saying) about what I write call these words into doubt.”
In the midst of his observations on Al-Latif’s The Eastern Key, Mandeville’s made-up journeys, or a defense of Casanova’s work against Zweig’s estimation, there appears an amusing anecdote of how a group of students prepared to ride out the winter in a little U.S. university town, or the author’s reaction to the photo of his ex-wife’s son that a friend showed him. And then he returns to David Markson, to remind us that the cat’s fur changes color every time he is mentioned in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, “like Emma Bovary’s eyes change.”
Díaz Klaassen has written a book each of whose brief texts resounds with a recurring echo, made up of profound associations and references that turn on the book and on reality. He tries to find their site of connection, where they touch, where they come together: “Reality in literature is like the vanishing point in a drawing: a spot at which everything converges, but from which that same everything is always pulling away.”
Álvaro Campos is a different case; however, he shares with Díaz Klaassen a conception of reading as the active ingredient of writing and of life. In both, we find connections, resonances, the echo of one book that leads inevitably to another.
Campos started publishing his texts on his Facebook account, a space where he continues doing so today. Despite this social network’s erosion, his page is still an active place, not without arguments, controversies, and crossfires of comments. He has thus brought together a community of loyal readers, defenders and detractors in equal measure.
His writing, which he presents as that of a diarist, moves between personal notetaking, the chronicle, and literary thought. He explores the self through everyday experience, elevating the routine—the daily commute, trivial conversation, some minor gesture—to writing material. He does so with a skeptical perspective on the Chilean literary world, in which irony serves as a defense mechanism and well founded provocation as a form of thought. Campos seems to shy away from any sign of solemnity, and this irreverence makes him a unique figure within the present-day panorama. “I want to apply for a literary grant so I can buy myself a couch, like Mario Levrero.”
For a time, he signed his writing as “Álvaro D. Campos,” a playful reference to the Pessoan heteronym to which the Portuguese poet granted “all the emotion forbidden to oneself and to life”—the one who aspired to “feel everything in every way.” This wink is no minor detail: it reveals a will toward distance and division, a search for authenticity camouflaged under the mask of anonymity.
We know, from Campos himself and from the biographical notes in his books, that he writes on his cell phone while running a shop in the commune of Pudahuel. This biographical fact reconfigures the image of the writer in a peripheral context, where literature coexists with work, without therefore giving up his capacity for thought.
His writings’ being published in these two books has made a phenomenon of Campos, especially starting with Negocio familiar. This has led him, not without some discomfort, to a position of prominence: to be commented on beyond his Facebook profile; to giving interviews and, to some extent, to showing himself, without concealing a certain conflictedness and ambivalence toward this exposure.
This discomfort is justified when we observe the focal point of some of these interviews and articles, which have ignored the reader, the analyst, the intellectual (yes, Campos is one) to concentrate instead on the neighborhood shopkeeper, writing on his cell phone between customers. This is indeed a striking image, but it leaves a scent of condescension. If these words came from other communes—better-off, more progressive ones—would they get the same attention? It is an uncomfortable question, a blemish that distracts the eye. No more distractions:
The passages of these Diarios tend to be crisscrossed by quotes from, winks toward, and comments on other readings. These are no mere ornamentation; they form part of the text’s flow as an extension of the everyday: what Campsos reads affects how he narrates his lived experience. He quotes or recalls books not to venerate them, but to contrast his experiences with them. He does not do this to show off his expertise, but rather to inscribe his personal experience within a tradition that predates and sustains it. This list of authors is also vast and difficult to encapsulate. It is as if Campos has read everything.
The way he inserts these readings varies in each entry; sometimes he simply transcribes a quote from Saint Augustine or a fragment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Other times, while he is talking about the display windows that social media has created such that failures can stare at the triumphs of others, he concludes with a sentence from Tocqueville: “Resentment is the engine of history.”
His memory of undergoing a colonoscopy while the doctors listened to dance music leads him to think of how terrifying any simulacrum of or approach to death can be, and this in turn leads him to think of Dostoevsky awaiting his execution in Saint Petersburg—of those hours when the Russian writer was convinced he was going to die: “an epiphany that left its mark on all his future work.”
Stendhal’s ugliness, the uselessness of the writer’s craft, vanity as literature’s worst disease, Proust and the neuroscience of smell and its direct link to images from our past. The banality of evil on the morning shows, hearing sharply enough to tell a gunshot from a firework, certain ways and customs of coca paste smokers, communism, consumption, money, social media behaior interlaced with the presence of his son. A presence from the first entry on, where he masterfully links a bird’s early-morning song, a note from Christopher Columbus’s diary dated October 9, 1492, a legend about the prisoners of Auschwitz, and how the sleeplessness caused by his baby’s wakefulness gave him the gift of the first birdsong at dawn:
“We can never hate someone we have watched sleep,” wrote Canetti, but watching your son sleep is a devastating experience. It eradicates any and all intellectual certainties, everything you used to think before you spent your nights awake, standing beside a crib, fondly keeping watch.
In Campos, intellectual certainties pale in comparison to other realities or are relocated in the flow of everyday life, whose essence he captures with concise, playful language. In Negocio familiar, we find the same kind of observations, with glimmers of intelligence and irony, but now directed toward the subjects of work, effort, and ambition. Perhaps some of the naturalness of the Diarios is lost, but this is mostly due to how the book is put together. The essence is the same, although the author’s character is more exposed; we see him more clearly, acting behind the shop counter; we see him feeling pleased when he watches an old vendor buying his bread while showing off a wad of bills or writing down “google price” on a piece of paper, after seeing a photo of Fidel Castro wearing two Rolexes on the same wrist while a lady is buying a bag of rice. Or trying not to lose track of his notetaking while a cigarette buyer tries to scam him with a fake bill.
During his sleepless nights, he underlines Lord Byron’s diaries while wondering if this act is motivated by vanity: “The curiosity, as La Rochefoucauld said, ‘which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.’” He then adds nuance with the claim, “But, in general, the quotes I underline are purely trivial, lacking any wisdom. For example, Byron’s problem with food.” Which leads him to think of some authors’ fear of gaining weight, such as Nietzsche and Kerouac, and of those men who do so with total indolence after their marriage, unaware of the power and fragility of the sexual market.
In Campos’s writing, we catch a glimpse of the diaries of Iñaki Uriarte (perhaps one of the best-kept secret writers). But his perspective is unique; he makes us a part of his world, his subjectivity, the voraciousness of his reading and the originality of his perspective; rebellious, ironic, truthful, maybe even necessary. Every line reveals other voices, other pages underneath.
In Mínimas, as well as in Diarios and Negocio familiar, there is an echo of readings that condenses until it becomes a spark, and this spark ignites our curiosity. A pleasant, stimulating curiosity. These books have something of the intellectual in the public square, who tries to make us see that which we no longer stop to think about. Reading ceases to be a passive act or an intellectual luxury. It is not an ornamental complement to experience, but rather that which enriches and questions experience. Both authors show us that reading is neither a utilitarian act nor an educational procedure: it is a form of thought that seeps into our actions. They offer neither answers nor guarantees. But they remind us that, between past and present, between tradition and everyday life, in the midst of the restless current in which we are immersed, we can still afford to pause and think of the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes.1
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
1 In certain passages, Flaubert mentions that Emma had eyes “of a complicated color.”
