TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Rodrigo Fresán

and the bathrooms. Once he’d dreamed of a possible system of classification for his always-nightmarish bookshelves, scaling to the tops and ends of the walls and filling up all the jolly corners . Wanting a criterion that would bring them closer, at least for a while, tohis sister’s bestandmostmaniacal crowds, stretchingout and encompassing entire buildings. To wit: alphabetical order by author, nationality, century, subject and genre, publisher, date of publicationor, even, thecolorof their spines, until theycomposed one of those horizontal and panoramic bookshelves like the most vivid of tableaux vivants , just the opposite of dead nature. But then he’d failed. And, so, ever since, that incomprehensible secret classification where the books change places when you’re not looking and provoke that terrible joy of—just as in life outside of books—finding this when you were looking for that .

Magic.

Presto!

Now you see it, now you don’t just see it but so much more than it.

Everything here and everything there.

Miracle.

And on more than one occasion he wondered if, maybe, the most perfect—and, of course, impossible—classification system for personal and domestic yet wild libraries would not be to have a lifetime of books, from first to last, arranged in the order that they were read. Thus—like those concentric circles that tell the 212