ADDICTION I love authors, the tragic lives that inspire their work and the rarefied air they breathe. I love everything about them; the daily details, raw material for exquisite stories and towering novels, fascinate me. I am a literary paparazzi, a groupie fan of the worst order who will spend hours researching where ancient Mario Vargas Llosa went to eat last with his Spanish girlfriend who is almost his age but looks much younger, or how often and where Papa Hemingway used to cut his beard. So when I found out that the Breaker Prize-winning writer Juan Verba was coming to speak at our small community college, I used every ounce of influence I had in the dean’s office where I work to get a front row seat. Juan was much shorter and heavier than I had imagined him. He was also growing bald, and the dark beard that had looked so sexy in his book photo was streaked with white and yellowish hairs. However, when he rose to speak, the room went silent, with the reverence reserved for great spiritual leaders. Juan Verba is famous for creating characters that nobody likes, and then having awful things happen to them, which nobody cares about. Part of his mystique in books like Bloody Dawn and The Armchair Elephant Hunter lies in his ability to make readers like me hate how much we identify with these despicable characters. I for one have never been able to stop reading his books even though I can find no redeeming qualities that give me hope. He has made his readers into a select club of pessimists who enjoy wallowing in the worst. So I was surprised to hear his voice, light and soft, whispering into the microphone as we all hung on his words. We weren’t disappointed.
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