I write prologues and back covers quite often and, however, I almost never notice the fact that these texts are usually a reader’s first approach to literary criticism. Writers are always asked how they get to literature, but rarely how do they get to criticism, and criticism (besides the fact that it is also literature) taught practically all the authors I’m interested in how to read, write and think. Some will have arrived at the university, others at school or in their parents’ library. I went to a good secondary school, but for some reason that I don’t know, at school they almost never give you a critique to read (not even when they give you quite complex books, the type of books that are easier to read with a secondary bibliography than without it), so those texts appeared in my life thanks to the prologues of the expensive editions. The prologues of Cátedra, Alianza and Losada, of some other stamps that I remember less.
I also think about the interviews with Borges, his prologues and his books of essays that appeared from time to time, almost by mistake, in my grandfather’s library. I remember when I began to realize that all these texts were part of a common conversation, they made references to authors that one was supposed to know. Over time I also began to understand that almost no one had read those critics’ libraries. Most of Borges’ readers had not read Hawthorne, although he mentioned him very often as if we all knew them. The prologues of Madame Bovary (before knowing that criticism books existed, I bought several editions of the same book to have many prologues) they used to mention Lord Byron and Chateaubriand, but the educated people I knew did not read them much. Two concepts were imprinted on my mind from these discoveries: the writers who were only read by other writers, on the one hand, and the question about the writers who managed to be read in times very different from their own (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy or Emily Brontë) and those who for some reason or another, even having belonged to the canon, fell by the wayside.
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