Books, many books are mentioned throughout Victoria Ocampo's texts. If autobiographies are wont to highlight the privileged encounter with the written word as a symbolic beginning for their life stories, an acknowledgment of the very tools for self-definition, this highlighting usually occurs, emblematically, close to the beginning of their narrative. In the case of Victoria Ocampo, however, there is no such clearcut inception of the readerly into the life story; not one, not two, but many encounters with books are described in her text. The significant gesture is tirelessly repeated: one scene of reading brings on another, book follows upon book and discovery upon discovery, so that we are left with many beginnings; so many, in fact, that they blur into a dizzying continuum in which the bare gesture – reading – perpetuates itself as the self-sustaining motion of one, consistent autobiographical act.

I have already referred to Ocampo's initial version of the scene of reading, recorded amongst her earliest childhood recollections.