I don’t believe it myself: arriving at the ninth International Book Fair, overcoming many obstacles and, above all, prejudices that there are no reading and cultural interests in Guayaquil, is a great pleasure. The fluctuations caused by the change of municipal authorities did not inspire the mere thought that the city would miss the fair. Expoplaza had enough vision to work in any situation: in the end, everything came together.

Someone criticized that fairs are repeated and he is right. Writers are invited to acts of oral expression: the experience of knowing and listening to them, before or after reading, is irreplaceable. The search for autographs of authors is a fixed fetish. Buying copies with some economic advantage encourages the public. The novelty is in the recreational dimension of this mass gathering, therefore children and adolescents need mediators to access books: this year, chess games, a giant cube on a base around Jules Verne’s globe, a house with Harry Potter symbols, drawing competitions around Superman’s anniversary. A mea culpa: the little ones, those who need someone to read and charm them, were not addressed.

Since my team and I designed the content, we proposed that most Ecuadorian writers must parade through FIL, fulfilling it to the extent that this medium can be known in our broken country. Receiving writers from Cuenza, Portoviejo or Loja gives us extra joy, despite the difficulties (or impossibility) of offering their books. And when I propose an offer, I put the point at the core of the concept of the fair: it is a meeting where a book product can be shown and sold; It is not about altruism or charity, but about the complete meeting of sellers and clients, within a long chain that has been moving around the world since Gutenberg. You have to carry some money. Food and sweets (which were consumed in abundance) are secondary.

(…) grateful at heart: 30,000 attendees confirm our work.

Listening to Laura Restrepo, Claudia Piñeiro (who made us stand out with glowing words at the opening ceremony), Andrés Neuman, were moments of inner radiation. I am not a fan of the work of Jaime Bayly, and even less a follower of the thought of Agustín Laje, but I have the ability to see that many people who do not think like me enthusiastically welcomed those voices and until they attended the fair invited only for those two, so opposite, mass communicators. Let everyone act with his own receptivity and conscience. It is up to culture to encourage discussion between different people and allow those who confirm or deny their own intuitions to be heard, otherwise society will always have egomaniacs and dictators of ideas who speak for the majority.

Without many opportunities for previous contact, I was delighted to listen to writers with whom I had not dealt for a long time and others I had just met: Leonardo Valencia always has something to learn; Adolfo Macías is a clear invitation to deep thinking, Sara Montaño writes delicate poetry. I have no words, but I am grateful in my heart: 30,000 visitors confirm our work. (OR)