Sueños reales

Reading, like dreaming, is an act of hypnosis. Captivated by a great book, we feel that while the reading lasts, its fictions are true. Just as in a dream, a great literary work takes elements of reality for its imaginary constructions. Only when we awaken or stop reading, do we realize that the world that appeared so close and intense, was a creation.

In this book, Alonso Cueto writes about the lives and works of some the writers we all cherish. The sublime lasciviousness of Vladimir Nabokov, the influence of the tragic daughter of James Joyce, the hopeful frustration of Italo Svevo, the glorious failures of Joseph Conrad, the jeaolously of Gustave Flaubert for Madame Bovary, the secret epistolary lover of Juan Ramón Jiménez, are among many other the subject of these essays.

For the author, reading is not only discovering who each author was, but rather what it meant or means in the life of each one of us.