The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

It was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment.

but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

I can’t spend my whole life jerking off.

“Everyone said that he was in love with Laura. But I don’t think they ever slept together. I think Laura died a virgin.”

Cue twin peaks theme

that I admired Alfonso Reyes because in addition to Greek and Latin he knew French, English, and German,

Ocnos, by Cernuda, and urged me to study it, because Cernuda was also a poet with a difficult disposition.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

Everything about the past was better, said Quim. We’re getting old, said Laura Damián’s father.

Sic transit gloria mundi,

Well you tell that Mick he just made my list of things to do today

the shame of it all, to be reduced to this.

Literature isn’t innocent.

Not for long, really, which goes to show how relative memory is, like a language we think we know but we don’t, that can stretch things or shrink them at will.

I’d say, what kind of work will you do? and he would answer that he had no idea and didn’t care.

My man

suddenly I realized that my horizons were expanding imperceptibly and my life was being gradually enriched.

Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

What kind of threat is a shadow on the floor?

No one wants to walk alongside a man who already bears the stink of carrion.

You have to live your life, that’s all there is to it.

At last, without realizing it, I ended up right back where I’d come from, next to the yellow stone.

speaking with a Spanish-from-Spain accent too,

my man

were salesmen, and that was all. We respected

But I didn’t have the balls to call the police. Sandinista or Somocista, the police is always the police, and whether it was the alcohol or the night outside the windows, I didn’t have the guts to rat Ulises out like that.

We talked for a long time and his conclusion was that everyone was slowly but surely going insane.

There’s no such thing as purity, boys, don’t fool yourselves, life is shit,

And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read.

I love this author and I love this book!

In fact, no one was driving my ghost Impala!

There’s nothing like traveling to expand your horizons.

When I was done traveling I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.

If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that’s what it all comes down to.

the surface of the sea that for sharks is the enormous mouth of hell,

elbowing my way through

The fourth cup brings madness, said Apuleius, and that was what I needed.

back to my parents’ house, where I was staying until I started to get things straightened out.

Youth is a scam.

I remember her laugh, boys, I said, night was falling over Mexico City and Cesárea laughed like a ghost, like the invisible woman she was about to become, a laugh that made my heart shrink, a laugh that made me want to run away from her and at the same time made me understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was no place I could run to.