The Savage Detectives: A Novel

I think I’ve never met a stranger who was so generous to me and yet whom I disliked so much.

Stultorum plena sunt omnia,

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

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,

Invidia ceu fulmine summa vaporant.

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

Lumpenism: the childhood syndrome of intellectuals.

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

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,