2666

by Roberto Bolaño

If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it’s therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.

In every other respect, too, the conference was a failure. In Pelletier’s opinion, perhaps the only thing of interest was a lecture given by an old professor from Berlin on the work of Arno Schmidt (here we have a German proper name ending in a vowel), a judgment shared by Espinoza and, to a lesser extent, by Morini.

there was something eellike about Schnell, something of the fish that swims in dark, muddy waters.

With the innocence of the dead, who no longer mind being observed, the people in the photographs gazed out on the professors’ barely contained enthusiasm.

A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down.

Grosz makes me laugh, Grosz depresses him, but who can say they really know Grosz?

partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers.

a bastard who believed in television and had the shrunken and shriveled soul of a religious fundamentalist.

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier.

My friend said the world isn’t a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life.

“Coincidence isn’t a luxury, it’s the flip side of fate, and something else besides,” said Johns.

Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.”

Then he began to reflect. But his thoughts only returned to what had just happened, the strict past, the past that seems deceptively like the present.

“I must have given her my A card. The B card only has my office number. And it’s just my secretary’s number on the C card.”

“There’s nothing on the D card, it’s blank, just my name, that’s all,” said El Cerdo, laughing.

a chaos that would surely lead nowhere, only to further chaos,

Everything becomes a habit,

the future is a mystery and we never know when we may come to a bend in the road or what unexpected places our steps may lead us.

Not believing your ears, though, thought Espinoza, is a form of exaggeration.

Exaggeration is a form of polite admiration … You set it up so the person you’re talking to can say: it’s true … And then you say: incredible.

But a person can speak a language badly or not at all and still be able to read it.

Her silence wasn’t unpleasant, nor did it imply resentment or sadness. It was transparent, not dense. It took up almost no space.

“Archimboldi is here,” said Pelletier, “and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.”

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive.

They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano’s shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter’s underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.

Calm is the one thing that will never let us down.

Yes,

Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

“All right, then,” said the white-haired man. “I’ll tell you three things I’m sure of: (a) everyone living in that city is outside of society, and everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus; (b) the crimes have different signatures; (c) the city seems to be booming, it seems to be moving ahead in some ineffable way, but the best thing would be for every last one of the people there to head out into the desert some night and cross the border.”

At some point in between childhood and adolescence, he thought, he had dreamed of this landscape or one like it, less dark, less desertlike.

He knew without being told that for a black man to sleep in a rental car parked on the shoulder wasn’t the best idea in Arizona.

three blond kids, almost albinos,

The Holy War is the language of the mute, of those who’ve lost the power of speech, of those who never knew how to speak.

“A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world,” said Fate, “a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake.”

You might even say I’m here undercover, as an undercover reporter, if there is such a thing.

But we age quickly here. We’re built to age quickly.

“Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven’t happened yet,”

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

The trees fell one by one. I’m a giant lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me.

On the horizon the mountains seemed to be burning or crumbling, but he kept driving toward them.

If it were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out and one is alone in the vastness, and life’s truths (night truths) begin to march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood unnoticed.

Man is born into pain, and being born itself means risking death, said the poem. And also: But why bring to light, why educate someone we’ll console for living later? And also: If life is misery, why do we endure it? And also: This, unblemished moon, is the mortal condition. But you’re not mortal, and what I say may matter little to you.

You, eternal solitary wanderer, you who are so pensive, it may be you understand this life on earth, what our suffering and sighing is, what this death is, this last paling of the face, and leaving Earth behind, abandoning all familiar, loving company.

What does the endless air do, and that deep eternal blue? What does this enormous solitu...

This is what I know and feel: that from the eternal motions, from my fragile being, others may de...