26.09.24

The librerio off the Alameda, perhaps the one where Bolaño 

stole many books:

"The first book to fall into my hands was a small volume by [the nineteenth

century erotic poet] Pierre Louÿs, with pages as thin as Bible paper, I can’t

remember now whether it was Aphrodite or Songs of Bilitis. I know that I

was sixteen and that for a while Louÿs became my guide. Then I stole books by

Max Beerbohm (The Happy Hypocrite), Champfleury, Samuel Pepys, the

Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet, and Rulfo and Areola, Mexican writers

who at the time were still more or less practicing, and whom I might therefore

meet some morning on Avenida Niño Perdido, a teeming street that my maps

of Mexico City hide from me today, as if Niño Perdido could only have existed

in my imagination, or as if the street, with its underground stores and street

performers had really been lost, just as I got lost at the age of sixteen."

-     from Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches (1998-2003)