She had an incredible ability to stay focused. Hours and hours on end, with stacks of printed pages, unearthing every typo, every awkward phrase, the fourth read-through no different from the first. We editors at the big publishing houses don’t devote enough time to the text: we read agents’ proposals, put offers together, hold meetings, concern ourselves with prizes—and neglect the book itself, that mass of sentences, paragraphs, each new start, each new page, what the reader’s mind turns to a coherent whole. Eleonora practically stunted her career by prioritizing the prose over the book’s public life. To her, a novel had to be prepared like a dessert. “The reader, discovering the book in a bookstore, has to feel like he’s in a nice pastry shop: the cream, rich, the pastry, perfectly baked, each taste distinctive, perfect harmony overall.” The rules she’d learned in editing classes at college—even now, when she was past thirty—she still treated like dogma: the proper number of letters per line to keep it from seeming too tight or loose, or the problem of orphans or widows, those lines at the start or the end of a paragraph that dangle onto a separate page.

She’d grown up with the young experimentalists who idolized the postmodernists, their stylistic bravura, yet she denounced every annoying metaphor she encountered both to the author and to me, her supervisor back then. Sometimes, on a late winter afternoon in the office together, or evenings at her place, she’d interrupt my work to read me a tortured phrase, and ask: “But do you know what this means?” It didn’t matter if the author was a well-respected stalwart or some young hipster, already known for his grammatical acrobatics. Eleonora would take the offending page and start reading some long-winded digression about a certain kind of light that was compared, through four complicated relative clauses, to a laser beam and then to mercury; she’d look up at me, laughing, and say: “I’ll tell you what—it doesn’t mean a fucking thing!” And then she’d make a note. She was never aggressive—all she did was scrawl a question mark (a delicately shaped question mark) beside the passage, so that in the end, the author would find himself saying—as if it were his idea—that the metaphor in question had to go.