Contributions by Carlos Freytes
Carlos Freytes says: My relationship with literature is purely playful, that of an avid reader—with the exception of a few false starts while I was in college. My career is in the social sciences, which I suppose you might consider a minor genre of literature. I spent the past six years between Buenos Aires and Chicago, where I went to do a Ph.D. in Political Science. My personal canon of American authors is both long and predictable: William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, some of Tom Wolfe, John Kennedy Toole, Raymond Carver, Paul Auster. And Vladimir Nabokov, who isn’t American, but whose novels often are. In terms of newer releases, I really liked Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom. I have also read David Leavitt’s novels and short stories and enjoyed tremendously his capacity to portray the subtle horrors that make up every family tale.
The Reversal Spell
Published on
April
19th
of
2013
by
David Leavitt and Carlos Freytes
in Fiction.
David Leavitt
The day that Paris was declared an Open City, I went to say goodbye to the Baron. He was one of my oldest friends. I’d known him since 1931, the year I’d come to Paris, a boy of nineteen living by his wits in a prostitution hotel on Rue Lepic. The Baron himself still lived, as he had his entire life, in a vast gloomy apartment on Avenue Mozart. Portraits of bustled women and narrow-snouted dogs hung on the walls. The piano wore a silk shawl of the sort that grandmothers draw around their shoulders in winter. For a long time the Baron had been rich, but he had lost most of his capital, including the Baroness, in the crash of ’29.
I could not remember a time when the elevator in the Baron’s building had … Read More »
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