“I prefer novels,” she adds, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing what things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most common place things that in real life seem indifferent to me.” “The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape…” “The novels I prefer,” she says, “are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.” “I like books,” she says, “where all the mysteries and anguish pass through a precise and a cold mind, without shadows, like the mind of a chess player.” “The novels that attract me most,” Ludmilla said, “are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.” “The quality of perennial dissatisfaction seems to me characteristic of Ludmilla: it seems to me that her preferences change overnight and today reflect only her restless.” “Do you mean to deny you have a sister?” “I have a sister, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” “A sister who loves novels with characters whose psychology is upsetting and complicated?” “My sister always says she loves novels where you feel an elemental strength, primordial, telluric. That’s exactly what she says: telluric.” “The book I’m looking for,” says the blurred figure who holds out a volume similar to yours, “is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.” ReadingBooksLudmillaThe Novels I Prefer Book:If on a winter's night a traveler Source: If on a winter's night a traveler