How are novels read today? A debate at the Federal Education Commission with María Sonia Cristoff and Edgardo Scott

The second day of the 2025 Editors' Fair (FED) opened with the talk "How are novels read? The features of period, style, and writing?" The talk, held at the C Complejo Art Media, brought together fans of the genre and featured writers María Sonia Cristoff and Edgardo Scott. Alejandra Laera served as moderator.

“Novels are read. It's something incredibly important that, at the turn of the 20th century, we thought would be the end of reading. That moment of 'renewed' boom, that of narrative or non-fiction. There are many novels we're no longer ashamed to call them that. But what do they read in their novels when they're written, and also in the others, when they're translated?” Alejandra Laera opened the discussion, while visitors gathered on the ground floor of the building, as is now tradition.

“ I’m not a big novel reader. The genres I always read end up being poetry and essays. I wish those two genres would come together when I write novels, that they would meet when I have to put together a plot,” acknowledged Scott, author of Walkers (2017), Why We Listen to Stevie Wonder (2020), Excess (2012), Mourning (2017), and I Am Like the King of a Rainy Country (2025).

"For me, the novel is still an alias for fiction . To say we read novels is to say we're also entering into fiction," he added.

“After the 20th century, we know that a fiction we find in a novel can be crossed in multiple ways, but reading fiction is always reading the imagination of a postulation of the imagination and an imagination of experience ,” argued the author of I Am Like the King of a Rainy Country, published in July of this year.

"When I'm introduced to a novel and the reading agreement is that I'm going to read it , I know I have to delve into fiction . Therefore, I know I have to delve into the imaginary," the writer said.

According to Edgardo Scott, Cesar Aira is one of the great authors who later become a narrator and, at the same time, a character . "In any case, we know that we are going to enter the imaginary and a postulation of the imaginary. Then we have to see in what sense that imaginary touches or reaches some experience."

"When I write a novel, I have to feel how that force of experience I want to transform into a considerable language will take time. The relationship between language, time, and the novel ," the writer said.

“ There's still a lot of escapist reading, for entertainment. Novels have always been read for entertainment, to escape, to avoid changing the subject and to keep the status quo as it is,” Scott analyzed.

“ Nowadays, people read in a very literal and very ideological way. Regarding the first point, fiction has always had a great capacity for metaphor: when we read Moby-Dick, we weren't going to read about whaling; we were going to read about good versus evil. And when we read Madame Bovary, we weren't going to read the story of an unfaithful woman; we were going to read a whole host of other things, a portrait of a provincial woman and her customs,” he exemplified.

But that capacity for metaphor is being somewhat lost, and now, imagination often ends up serving to reproduce reality, to militarize, and it results in a reality that is generally covered by the media and social networks.

"It's a very ideologically polarized era, as if it were one side or the other, aligning and 'novelizing' some real event, a term very typical of this era," he analyzed.

Then came María Sonia Cristoff 's words: "The story is what interests me the least in the novel. I don't care what happened, I don't care at all about any of that. In fact, it bothers me," said the author of Derroche , her latest novel published in 2022.

However, he clarified that what draws him to a novel is the tone . "Why does one song appeal to you and another not? There's something in the way it's said, in the phrasing, mixed with the speaker's disposition."

Like Scott, Cristoff named César Aira : “I read him with my eyes slanted and I enter there in the same way I enter into a super-fervent prose.”

“I feel the desire in that voice very much. It captivates me enormously . That combination of willingness as desire, even if it's the desire to kill you, plus the language I use. I find that combination extraordinary. In that sense, I can also engage with a well-written essay,” he acknowledged.

“I expect a narrative, not a plot. By this I mean I don't listen to stories,” added Cristoff, who is the author of False Calm (2005) and Out of Place (2006). Her novels include Include Me Out (2014) and Waste (2022), among others.

“In the 21st century, with the emergence of the digital world we live in, we have posts, interviews, and commentaries. These are paratexts . All this textual production that revolves around the novel itself,” he said of the present.

“That speaks volumes about the 21st century. The issue is reading only that. I think today we read paratextual texts in a brutal way . The question is what we, those of us who write in that paratextual world, do: is it a strategy of constant self-figuration or do we use that paratextual world as a way of making conjectures about life experience,” Cristoff analyzed.

Leara drew the distinction between reading and the narrative form of telling a story . “On the reader's side, there would be the affect, that mediation between predisposition and reading is constructed by a text. No matter how much one might want to escape, there is no escape, but something that touches you, affects you when you close the book, no matter how precarious it may be, and that is provided by the language, the composition, and the procedures.”

Scott chimed in: “ What happens to us as readers is that literature affects us in some way . The same thing with fiction. That's the trick, something that isn't there in reality, in the documentary, and yet ends up being added to your world, ends up being something as real as the elevator in your apartment.”

“That's the question today: how literature can still affect , and how fiction can still affect, reality and, I insist, not just reproduce it,” Scott commented.

About I Am Like the King of a Rainy Country , his latest novel, he said: “ I would like it to be read and heard like a Cure album . I wrote it with that music, to talk about what Sonia (Cristoff) said about that musical dimension of language.”

"I like to compensate for the condition as the antithesis of addiction ," Cristoff stated. He continued: "I like to think of novels as a whole conspiracy of the evils of the times."

“ To be affected, you have to be open, predisposed to something , but it seems to me we live in a kind of delirious speed, a constant demand to express ourselves on topics we know nothing about and aren't interested in. These are topics that have been taken off-kilter, and it's very difficult to be affected in the way I find myself affected in a novel.”

“We're in a moment of terrible addiction to saying anything, to not listening to anyone, to not opening up. It's a very repulsive addiction ,” Critoff said.

“How do you expect your novels to be read?” Laera asked them.

“First, we hope they're read,” Scott joked, continuing. “I love that it's different from how I read it. In a novel or in fiction, writing, for those of us who live, includes our own reading. That is to say: we write, and we're the ones who read it first. Ultimately, we have some reading of it, but I like it when it's read differently than I read it , and to be surprised by others' readings.”

“That's why I was referring to paratexts,” Cristoff insisted, and continued: “ I would love not to be a producer of my own paratexts . I would love to do that anachronistic thing that the book brings out, me not saying anything and letting others say it.”

"However, I would like you to read me carefully, since my texts are scattered and interrupted by a multitude of things. I forgive you for reading me with hatred, with a thirst for revenge, for being critical and uncontrollable, but hate me with attention. Hate me with substance!" he exclaimed.

On this point, Laera explored how authors manage to "get out of that self" in their texts. "I'm always motivated by politics in the communal sense: that I feel that what matters more or less to me can matter to others. There's already a first imagination there," Scott argued.

“But I also fall into that illusion: maybe something I care deeply about could also be something that others care about . So, that's where I do my first filter: when the themes and situations come up, I say, 'Oh, this could be a short story, it could be for an essay, or a verse for a poem comes to me,'” he said.

“One of the things that makes me stop, jot down notes, and then decide whether I'm going to write it or move forward with that novel, with that idea, is that there's a political element, an element where I think I can resonate with some social issue, something I can share. Ultimately, it should be an experience I can share and communicate with others. It can also be useful even if it's an intimate experience,” Scott said.

"Thinking like that confirms to me that I want to write the novel. It's feeling that, to some extent, there are others out there , those readers who aren't going to read it like I am, who can shed some light on something and can use something I wrote, not in a utilitarian, pragmatic sense, but in a sensitive sense," he concluded.

Instead, Cristoff referred to differentiating "the political from the militant." "Sometimes when a novel is political, the political is quickly associated with the militant, and that has always been detrimental to the modern novel. I think it's a serious problem," concluded the author of False Calm.