“What mainly remains of him is the testimony of a defiance. The example of an individuality that resisted every externally imposed rule. The wonderful faith of an apostle who fleetingly witnessed salvation through the spirit and turned the book into his beloved tool.”

As a career diplomat, he traveled around the world. As a devoted lover of world literature, he read, translated, and wrote masterpieces: Sergio Pitol, a giant of Latin American letters, managed, like few others, to merge lived experience with the life of reading, turning one into a perfect echo of the other.

In this book, the first volume of his swan song, the Trilogy of Memory, the readings and the places, the books and the paintings, are as much heroes of the narrative as the narrator himself. The pleasurable wandering in the world of books, the eternal journey through space, time, and ideas, is captured in The Art of Escape as tesserae of an ideal spiritual autobiography.