More short passages from The Savage Detectives (don't ask me why these):


And at a certain moment the atmosphere became so fraught, every thing on pins and needles, that I thought to myself these assholes must know something I don’t, something strange is going on here, it isn’t normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn’t normal that no one’s getting on it, it isn’t normal for me to start hallucinating for no reason. But I got a hold on myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened.


And then I said: how can you call yourself a Marxist, Jacinto, how can you call yourself a poet, when you can say things like that? Do you plan to make a revolution with clichés? And Jacinto answered that frankly there was no way he was planning to make revolutions anymore, but that if some night he happened to be in the mood, then making it with clichés and the lyrics of sappy love songs . . . .

And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read.

The fourth cup brings madness, said Apuleius . . . .

And then Norman said: it has nothing to do with visceral realists, asshole, you haven’t understood a thing. And I said: well, what does it have to do with, then? And Norman, to my relief, stopped looking at me and concentrated on the road for a few minutes, and then he said: it has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it, and what we can regain. So what can we regain? I said. What we’ve lost, said Norman, we can get it back intact. It would have been easy to argue, but instead I opened the window and let the warm air ruffle my hair. The trees were passing by at an incredible speed.