Il vizio dei libri

Afonso Cruz guides the reader through the pages of ancient writers - such as Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, and Philoxenus - and contemporary ones, including Amos Oz, Elias Canetti, and Héctor Abad Faciolince. Moving through the works of Montaigne, Rilke, and Kafka, he invites the reader to realize they are part of a community as ancient as it is modern: one united by a “vice” for pages and stories.

The author possesses the extraordinary ability to combine the lightness of a short story collection - the chapters are very brief - with the reflective tone typical of an essay, supported by a framework of footnotes. Cruz’s writing is lean, intimate, and immediate. He speaks directly to the reader, for instance, when recounting his own experiences as a writer in the chapter “The Books That Marry Us” where he confides that one of his readers met his partner thanks to O Pintor Debaixo do Lava-Loiças, one of Cruz’s own books.

The Vice of Books brings to mind the reflections of Alberto Manguel, but Cruz goes further: he uses reading as a starting point to discuss our existential condition as humans—as “human-readers” - such as when he states: “The characters in the books we read are the vehicle for what we are not, or rather, for what we are without being. I believe this notion is fundamental: to be deeply what we are not.”

In The Vice of Books, we find themes previously explored in his children’s story The Books That Devoured My Father, such as the salvific yet nefarious role of books. He cites the cases of the writer Al-Jahiz and the pianist Charles-Valentin Alkan, both of whom died after being crushed by the literal - not metaphorical - weight of their own books. He also touches upon attacks carried out against books, such as the 2007 suicide bombing on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, a street famous for its bookshops.

Reading is conceived here as a process capable of changing every reader through the power of transformation. By the end of the book, one feels the urge (as is always the case with Afonso Cruz) to read every author mentioned in the bibliographic appendix. Furthermore, the volume is enriched by artworks depicting books and reading from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Author: Afonso Cruz

He is one of the leading contemporary Portuguese authors. An illustrator, animated film director, and musician, he received the European Union Prize for Literature for his novel A Boneca de Kokoschka (Quetzal, Lisbon 2010), along with numerous other awards in Portugal for both his children’s and adult books. He lives with his family in the countryside, where he brews beer. The Books That Devoured My Father is his first children’s book to be translated into Italian.