Severina by Rodrigo Rey Rosa
My rating: 3/5 cats
She seemed to be genuinely afraid of people who cleaned the houses of others. One day I asked her if she could tell me why.
“They can know all about you, but you don’t know anything about them.”
I was thinking: that’s what our relationship is like.
this is an unusual and jagged little love story about a bookstore owner who becomes obsessed with a beautiful and enigmatic shoplifter. he watches her steal from him on several different visits, dutifully cataloging a list of the titles missing from his shelves after she leaves, but putting off a confrontation, building up this whole romantic story about her in his head. He learns that his is not the only bookstore in town that she frequents and pilfers, and this only increases his interest, until eventually he does confront her. they begin an uneasy relationship; he is infatuated with her, while she is secretive and mysterious with him, doling out half-truths and uttering world-weary declarations such as “life is shit.”
How many nights did I spend fantasizing about our next encounter? I imagined her traveling from country to country, visiting bookstore after bookstore.
More than once I thought about talking to Ahmed. I wanted to know which books she had stolen from him, apart from the Berber stories. But I was too embarrassed to call.
I kept going over the books that she had taken from me and trying to imagine the complete list of every title she had ever stolen. It was as if I thought this would help solve the mystery of a life that seemed bizarre and fantastic to me.
Ahmed had spoken of an illness. But I felt that there must have been another explanation, which I associated with an uncompromising approach to life: absolute freedom, a radical realization of the ideal that I too had adopted one fine day – the ideal of living by and for books.
There were black days when those fantasies faded away, leaving me prey to despondency and remorse for a life half-lived. I would think: “You’re kidding yourself; she’s just a common thief, or, at best, a sad case, a kleptomaniac.”
and yet, they do manage, within this brief novella, to love and lose and love again. to betray and to redeem and to accept and to live by and for books, uncompromisingly. and also…murrrrderrrrr….
it’s just a little slip of a book, most of which hinges on the relationship, so—for me—not super-riveting, but there is one really lovely moment towards the end that kind of made the whole book worth it for me. hint: borges.
and PSA-time!! shoplifting is bad, and shoplifting books is very, very bad. you don’t want to turn into some carefully jaded “life is shit”-spouting caricature of a human, do you?? because that attitude is only cool in smiths songs.
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