2666

by Roberto Bolaño

For an instant, Morini felt a wild desire to travel with the reporter. I’d love her until the end of time, he thought. An hour later he’d already forgotten the matter completely.

afterward he said in a low voice, as if telling a secret, that Italians were brave individually. In large numbers, he admitted, they were hopeless. And this, he explained, was precisely what gave a person hope.

in dreams, as in the Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues).

At work everybody called him Oscar Fate.

wtf

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.

all seas were ultimately the same sea,

neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

One day the girl disappears and the boy, after searching for her in vain, decides to hire a Mexican detective who was a soldier under Pancho Villa.

As you do

How can someone who’s lost a son care about the war?

There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty.