Critical Mass

Scott Esposito on What to Read this Summer

By NBCC

The month of June kicks off Reading the World. As part of this project, the NBCC has asked writers from around the globe to recommend a book from beyond these shores. We asked newly minted member Scott Esposito, host of the blog Conversational Reading, and editor of the online review The Quarterly Conversation, what book (or which writer) he had to recommend. He leapt for The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis, Edith Grossman (Translator)

“This book is possibly best described as Don Quixote meets Proust. Maqroll is a wanderer, a man who spends his days getting mired in impossible ventures and then extricating himself from them. During these adventures, he remains obsessed with nostalgia and endlessly rakes over the memories of women he has known and other lives he has lead. This is a large, dense book, one that I needed to spend a while with, but I feel like it's one I'll be coming back to time and again.”

–Scott Esposito