Status Updates From Faces in the Crowd

“However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs of a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it.”

“I told him that I’d turned into a ghost; or maybe that I was the only living girl in a city of ghosts; that, in any case, I didn’t like dying all the time.”

“She was like a lobster; and I, like the filth that accumulated on the seabed.”

“At the same time, I harboured the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty that I would one day finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I’d been elaborating for years.“

“I think when I was young I was weighed down by a constant sense of social inadequacy—I was never the most popular nor the most eloquent at a table; never the best read nor the best writer; not the most successful nor the most talented; definitely not the most handsome nor the one who had the most luck with women.”

“All novels lack something or someone. In this novel, there’s no one. No one except a ghost I used to see sometimes in the subway.”

“Not a fragmented novel. A horizontal novel, narrated vertically.”

“I suppose that’s what illness is like: you stand down and are replaced by the ghost of yourself.”

“A horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within.”

“In that apartment, there was nothing. There weren’t even ghosts. There were heaps of half-alive plants and a dead tree. • In this house, we often run out of water. The boy says that it’s a ghost who died of thirst and that’s why it drinks all the water in the house.”

“There’s nothing special I’ll advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate things. If you think the condition Of a plant in a pot is a reflection of the condition of your soul, or worse, that of a loved one, you’ll be condemned to disillusion or perpetual paranoia.”

“Novels need a sustained breath that’s what novelists want. No one knows exactly what it means but they all say: a sustained breath. I have a baby and a boy. They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is—has to be—in short bursts. I’m short of breath.”

“Now my T. Rex really has gone extinct, sobbed the boy. Sometimes we feel like two paranoid Gullivers, permanently walking on tiptoe so as not to wake anyone up, not to step on anything important and fragile.”