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This report is taken from PN Review 201, Volume 38 Number 1, September - October 2011.

The Libraries of our Dreams (translated by Nick Caistor)
(Fragments)
Matías Serra Bradford
On my bicycle, a cold film over my eyes prevents me from seeing the sign where I should head off. The sky a grey circus tent for a Sunday performance. Few people, reticent. One in a suit and tie walking through the drunken trees, stroking their squashed fruit like silky cotton buds between finger and thumb. For a second, the idea of not coming back - witness or fake naturalist - for no other reason than having become stuck in a room, like someone 'behind enemy lines'. Everything will happen twice, so that no-one has a shadow of doubt.

The second someone falls asleep, the woman or man in bed beside them softly puts their hand on the sleeping person's chest, and the shock is nothing more than the implosion of a snowflake.

On another floor, a person sitting on the bed of the person asleep waits for the other one to wake as if they were waiting for him/her to finish reading something.

Auditory hypnosis of a bus, like that of a shuttle going from one terminal to another in an airport. So many technical difficulties arising from the fact of not being in the moment you are travelling through.

The bookseller tells me who the book had belonged to, the reader (still alive, still living in the city) whom it still belonged to, in reality, because that reader had 'left it on deposit' in the bookshop. He would not have wanted, ...


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