At the Lucky Hand

Book excerpt: At The Lucky Hand is an account of the different love stories that revolve around a very peculiar book: My Legacy, by Anastas Branica. At first glance, this is a book where there is no plot or characters, only descriptions. However, that is what makes it a self-sufficient space, a world that can only be inhabited by its readers, which Anastas has written in order to live, within the book, with his beloved. Through what Petrovic called “simultaneous reading”, it is possible to coincide with other people in the same book, and not only that, but also to live beyond what is simply written. Within this experience of reading-while-reading, participants are able to access a meeting place that is outside of reality. How else can we describe what happens to us when we read with true conviction, when books become life, palpable, manifested, when books become part of our physiology, when love is incarnated in the reading that two strangers perform at the same time, hoping that time will be abolished by the mere fact of fixing their gaze on a page? In short, what the reader of this book will surely experience, along with all the other readers who coincide in the experience, will be a state of joyous stupefaction. Above all else, the book is a love letter to the power of literature.