Planes Flying over a Monster by Daniel Saldaña París

Author:Daniel Saldaña París
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2024-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Secret History of My Library

Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a secondhand bookstore . . . The history of my library is the history of loss and of an impossible collection scattered around several countries, reconstructed little by little, but forever incomplete.

I don’t possess one of those personal libraries consisting of twenty thousand volumes that writers of past generations could boast of by their early thirties. I live in a 730-square-foot apartment and that fact obliges me to be extremely selective in my curatorship. My parents have moved house dozens of times in the last decade, so I can never leave my books in the basement or attic of a family home, with the promise of returning to collect them.

What I have is a phantom library: the memory of the books that would now belong to me if I’d kept them. Writing about my library is, therefore, an archaeological exercise based on traces and memories, like assembling a model of a razed city. A genealogy.

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