Jim’s Reviews > The Savage Detectives > Status Update

I realized that Norman seemed to be in Mexican heaven, not Jewish heaven, let alone philosophy heaven or Marxist heaven. But what was goddamned Mexican heaven? A pretense of happiness? or what lay behind it? empty gestures? or what was hidden (for reasons of survival) behind them?

Belano, I said, the heart of the matter is knowing whether evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance. 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.

He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn't ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion.

Then I thought it might be some other Logiacomo, but that would've been too much of a coincidence: another Argentinian Logiacomo, another twenty-four-year-old Logiacomo, another Logiacomo who'd written a book of poetry with the same title as mine. Well. In Latin America these things happen and there's no point trying to come up with a logical a nswer when sometimes there is none.

All the sadness in the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala's window. It's firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the Fonts' house, the thugs' Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of the city.