In the library of Juan José Millás: "I have read with more passion than I have lived with"

"Sometimes I look for a book and it takes me less time to buy it than to find it here."

The library of Juan José Millás (Valencia, 1946) is the best reflection of his personality.

Hundreds of books are scattered chaotically around his attic.

Like stalagmites of different heights that rise from the ground and from the tables that sometimes make it impossible to walk.

“It is a library that welcomes me but also causes me a certain discomfort.

I have always been a messy reader because I have always read based on my mood.

When there is a lot of media pressure on a book, I resist reading it because I feel that I am doing it out of obligation”, the novelist acknowledges in the video of the interview.

Millás believes that you cannot have “a non-sick relationship” with literature.

He has lived inside a lot of books.

And he has spent endless hours in the room where Gregorio Samsa, the character in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, turns into a beetle.

“In this transit between reality and fiction, the border is not very clear because reading is lived with such intensity that, on occasions, it is more real than life itself”, acknowledges the author of La mujer loca.

“I also feel that I have lived on the streets of Prague that that family travels on the tram.

And, look, I have never been to Prague for fear of being disappointed because in my head I have the image of the city that is given in the novel.

I have read with more passion than I have lived with.”

In this new episode of En la biblioteca de, Millás explains his theory on literature.

The one that divides it into mammals, the great novels that have mutated —such as Joyce's Ulysses, Crime and Punishment or Madame Bovary —which need footnotes, and insects —La metamorphosis, El Lazarillo or La Celestina—, whose meaning It has remained unchanged over time.

“I would like to be able to do something that is simultaneously simple and enormously complex... Like The Metamorphosis, which is so simple that a fifteen-year-old can read it and at the same time is so complex that it is the best novel ever told. twentieth century.

It is also on the way to being the one that best tells the XXI”.

What did you feel when you first read Crime and Punishment at your school desk as a child?

What are the essential books by Juan José Millás?

What does his library mean to him?

We discover the library of Juan José Millás in this video format from EL PAÍS, in which we have also seen the personal library of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, novelists such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Lorenzo Silva or Rosa Montero, politicians such as José Manuel García-Margallo or cultural personalities such as Peridis or Juan Diego Botto.