2666

by Roberto Bolaño

And yet he had chosen Germany, cheerless to every beholder and cultivator. Why? Certainly not out of any loyalty to his homeland, because although Mr. Bubis felt himself to be German, he despised national pride, which to his mind was one of the causes of the death of more than fifty million people, but because Germany was home to his publishing house or to the idea he had of a publishing house, a German publishing house, a publishing house with its headquarters in Hamburg, and its networks, in the form of book orders, linking old bookshops all over Germany, some of whose owners he knew personally and with whom, when he traveled for business, he drank tea or coffee, sitting in a corner of the bookshop, always complaining about hard times, bemoaning the public’s indifference, sighing over the middlemen and paper salesmen, grieving for the future of a country that didn’t read, in a word, utterly enjoying himself as they nibbled biscuits or little slices of kuchen until at last Mr. Bubis rose and shook hands with the elderly owner of, say, Iserlohn, and then went off to Bochum, to visit the elderly owner of Bochum, who kept certain books with the Bubis logo like relics (relics for sale, of course), books published in 1930 or 1927, that by law, Schwarzwald law, naturally, he should have burned in 1935 at the latest, but that the old bookseller had chosen to hide, out of pure love, which was something Bubis understood (and few others could understand, not excluding the book’s au...