To call these short stories is perhaps to indulge in a genteel euphemism: these violent little narratives more closely resemble rants, confessions or boasts. A married man likes to run over pedestrians in his powerful car. Another man gives money to a beggar and then kills him. They each narrate their own perverse behaviour but never try to justify or explain. “I’m going to cut off somebody’s head with a single blow with the machete,” one man tells us, and a little later: “I felt like strangling someone.” This story is called “The Taker” and it is wholly right that this should also be the title of the collection, for all Fonseca’s narrators are takers, hungry and desperate.

Perhaps the best story in this collection is “Account of the Incident”. A passenger bus drives into a cow and kills it. As the dead animal lies on the roadside, local men and their wives run to it, bringing knives to cut away the meat. Everything becomes ordinary in the world of these stories, even hunger, violence and shock.

As described in the

Mr Houellebecq is a novelist who – in the words of the American writer John Updike – has a “thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity”. Mr Lévy is the bare-chested “new philosopher” and human rights champion whose modesty is as hard to locate as his shirt buttons.

The publishers say the book, which takes the form of an exchange of letters, allows the writers to express their views on a variety of subjects – including each other. Both authors are intellectual bruisers who revel in provocation.

This could be a lot of fun to read . . . And as John Thornhill speculates, could lead to a new genre:

The publishers’ concept is certainly intriguing, though, and could evolve into a whole genre of hate letters. Love letters, written by people revelling in how much they have in common, can be soppy and exclusive. Hate, on the other hand, is a far more democratic emotion: anyone can participate.

Hate letters could highlight the ways we differ from each other and tell us far more about the human condition. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Earlier this month Poison, Shadow and Farewell, a final, third volume of Your Face Tomorrow was published, as yet only in Spanish . I arrive at Marías’ flat in Madrid a couple of minutes after the author’s copies have been delivered. We stand in the entrance hall surveying the pile of books. I pick one up. My wrist buckles.

“Seven hundred and seven pages ,” says Marías. “Shorter in English.”

“Goodness,” I say, hefting the wodge of pages. “You’ve outdone Tolstoy.”

“Never mind Tolstoy. Don Quixote is 1,200 pages. Mine is over 1,600 pages. I have beaten Cervantes.” He smiles. “Not in quality, of course, only in extension.” He smiles more. “It’s a terrible boldness on my part.”

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