Translation of "La desesperación de las letras" by Ginés Cutillas

The desperation of letters

I was watching television when I heard a loud crash behind me, just in the library. I got up, surprised, and went to check on what it was. An inconsistent mass of paper was dying at the foot of the bookshelf. I took it in my hands and dismembering its parts I could tell that it had been a book, Crime and Punishment, to be exact. I didn’t know how to find a logical explanation for such a strange incident.

The next night, in front of the television, the disturbing noise. This time, ironically, it was Ana Karenina who had become a heap of deformed paper lying at her colleagues’ feet.

A few nights later I realized what was happening: the books were committing suicide. At first it was the classics. The more classic, the more probable it would crash to the floor. Afterwards, the philosophy books started, one day Plato died and the next day Socrates. They were later followed by contemporary authors such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Nabokov…

My library was disappearing in leaps and bounds. There were nights of mass suicides and I, as much as I tried, couldn’t find a common characteristic between the kamikaze books that would allow me to figure out which one was going to be the next. One night I decided not to turn on the television in order to closely watch the books. That night none of them committed suicide.