The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
Roberto BolañoAround this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone. The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word 'fate' used ten times and the word 'friendship' twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word 'Paris' was said seven times, 'Madrid', eight. The word 'love' was spoken twice, once by each man. The word 'horror' was spoken six times and the word 'happiness' once (by Espinoza). The word 'solution' was said twelve times. The word 'solipsism' once (Pelletier). The word 'euphemism' ten times. The word 'category', in the singular and plural, nine times. The word 'structuralism' once (Pelletier). The term 'American literature' three times. The word 'dinner' or 'eating' or 'breakfast' or 'sandwich' nineteen times. The word 'eyes' or 'hands' or 'hair' fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves of whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the windows and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.
Roberto BolañoReading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.
Roberto BolañoPoetry and prison have always been neighbors.
Roberto BolañoOne night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.
Roberto BolañoTags: writing
Every hundred feet the world changes
Roberto Bolaño...posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats...
Roberto BolañoTags: 2666
Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path 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.
Roberto BolañoMetaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto BolañoOn the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geometrico was really three books, 'each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said 'this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections and research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry.
Roberto BolañoTags: 186
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