The Savage Detectives: A Novel

Lumpenism: the childhood syndrome of intellectuals.

Invidia ceu fulmine summa vaporant.

see everything as if he were Dante and he’d just returned from hell, or not Dante, I mean, but Virgil himself, such a sensitive boy,

as if in Paris, or so I thought, everything happened around some street or place and never on a specific street or in a specific place, and this was because, as I later discovered, Manuel had never been to the City of Light, and neither had mi general,

Mentally, I thanked him for it, because if there’s anything I hate it’s a hysterical Frenchman.

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, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it’s random, on the other hand, we’re fucked, and we’ll just have to hop

Freedom is like a prime number.

Have you ever tried such a thing? I have, and it’s impossible, something only a few natural writers or journalists can do, be talking about politics, for example, and at the same time writing a little article on gardening or spondaic hexameters (which I can tell you, boys, are a rare phenomenon).

when the glass is, shall we say, glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat.