Kazbek

BY LEONARDO VALENCIA

Translated from the Spanish by Hillary Gulley

Kazbek is a book about books. It will entertain readers with a sense of wonder at how books can entrance even when they appear to lay bare their devices. This book (namely Kazbek) thereby performs its own role as what a character in this book (Kazbek), the artist Mr. Peer terms a Small Format Book. Kazbek, the book’s main character, is a writer who has been hired by Mr. Peer to provide short textual captions to a series of drawings he has created. These sixteen drawings are included in the second part of the novel, with Kazbek’s short meditations on each. These, like the book itself (namely, Kazbek), do not put an end to anything, thereby demonstrating one of the key “approximations” (defining traits would be too definitive) of the Small Format Book, which is

• a short book that never seems to end
• a book readers never expected to find
• a book no one knows how to categorize, nor what the critics have said about it, nor who published it
• a book that creates a silence so readers can hear the fountain flow