Beschreibung

»Andrei Platonov wrote a story about a young railwayman who read books ‘in all kinds of interesting ways, taking pleasure in the lofty thoughts of others and his own supplementary imagination… He preferred to choose pages at random — now page 50, now page 214. And although every book is interesting, reading this way makes it even better, and still more interesting, because you have to imagine for yourself everything you have skipped, and you have to compose anew passages that don’t make sense or are badly written, just as if you too are an author, a member of the Soviet Union’s Union of Writers’.

The text of Jose Domingo Martínez follows a method akin to the young railwayman’s. He did this because Domingo wanted to try a manner of writing similar to the way he has used to do his recent paintings, and the way the young railwayman reads could be a good description of the way he paints. Platonov’s character has devised a system of reading that becomes a kind of mind-writing, creating an original story happening ‘there’, in his head. You could say that those stories are like the temporary archives of a computer — they will be gone the next reading-mind-writing session.«

Extract from the preface by Domingo Martínez (the book is entirely in english)