The other day he told his daughter that when she dies, she can give away and sell whatever she wants: shoes, lamps, paintings, everything. But, she added, “the books have to be together.” The filmmaker Isabel Coixet was surprised to say it because posterity doesn’t care. Her funeral plaques and ceremonies have always seemed silly to her, they are evidence that we are here for a little while. However, she has caught this mania with books. She has them all over the house, in an apartment in Grà cia that is larger on the inside than on the outside and from which she rules out any temptation to move, given the size that transporting them would imply. The biggest ones are on the entrance table. Next to the distributor that she gives to the office she puts: Rue du Bonheur. A bookcase lines the walls up to the ceiling. It has two layers. Every three months or so, she swaps the front books for the back ones to give them fresh air; He dusts them off with a feather duster.
French literature was in front of English, and those of Anagrama and Tusquets had exclusive shelves. But they have been invading each other, relocating and disordering. Coixet reads three or four books at the same time, many in the original version. Before traveling, he thinks about which ones he will take with him, he is worried about not being able to read. On the night tables (without diminutive), those with slopes accumulate, mountains on each side of the bed. He takes advantage of the window opening that overlooks the stairs. More books under the TV.
As a child, she devoured everything that ran around the house, fine paper collections ranging from Sinclair Lewis to John Dos Passos. She read Manhattan Transfer at the age of twelve and understood nothing; she did it at fifteen, and yes. She has come back to him often. She was struck by Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Henry James’s novels and her story The Death of the Lion, “one of the most sublime things ever written.” At the place de l’étoile she discovered Patrick Modiano by chance while studying at the Sorbonne at the age of twenty, and she was amazed. She has read all of his books multiple times. She is fascinated by her world view, and a novelistic self that she also likes in Virginie Despentes or Michel Houellebecq (her latest novel seems to her the best), but not in Annie Ernaux or Christine Angot. She bore him. Better said: she is annoyed by that impression that they live things because they will write them; it seems to her that they have not lived fully.
He does not seek to identify himself with what he reads, “you will find that”. Maybe they do open the door to what he doesn’t know. She knew right away that she wanted to make the film The Bookstore, by Penelope Fitzgerald, and One Love, by Sara Mesa (whose filming ended in March). The protagonists of him touched him in a very direct way. The women of Mesa never want to be liked, they have no redemption; she likes that he is not complacent. He also likes Marta Sanz, Laura Ferrero –she has followed the “very beautiful†writing process of Los astronautas– and Eva Baltasar (although the word Permafrost makes him think of permanent). In addition to Modiano and Murakami (whom he knows and is particularly fond of), he has books signed by Philip Roth. He greatly admires him: “If someone has written the great American novel, it is him; in American Pastoral you can find that strange sense of innocence of the Americans, a perception of things that is not Europeanâ€.
If you didn’t read, life would be so much less interesting, you’d feel like you’re missing something. That’s why he does it every night. His partner, Reed, is also an avid reader. They live themed days, like that summer when they passed around a book about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and in the car they played podcasts with their voices. He recently had a Nico period, when he was sent the biography You ’re beautiful and you ’re alone, by Jennifer Bickerdike, and he saw that she had been at her last concert. He read essays on the music of the ’60s and ’70s, poems by Lou Reed, books on the formation of the Soft Machine. That led her to Nick Drake, Françoise Hardy. She would like to make a documentary about Kevin Ayers, his passing through Deià and his death in Montolieu, where she has a house, and where there are eighteen bookstores. She gives away a lot of books, but she only lends them to two people that she knows will return them. Walking into a bookstore, she feels anxious. For this reason, more than a passion, she believes that it is a disease: “The word lletraferit is perfect, it is exact.”
