Status Updates From The Mad Patagonian

loving this so far. what an incredible linguistic fest. there is a sprawling story here which is such a refreshing surprise . i have rediscovered the joys of being swept up in a narrative. "does the ordered, successive use of language exaggerate the importance of what we're saying?"

The second volume is a remarkable improvement over the first.

Moving on to Part Two.

I’m fearing I’ve been scammed.

Certainly underwhelmed after the promise of the Introduction.

"... A bread and circuses display to blunt the edges of our squalor / And debase our discontent."

"... have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. One must live in the question."

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

-Jorge Luis Borges

"But some days I feel as old as the crumbling bones that fill the catacombs of my lonely heart."

"... objective reality was beyond our grasp and that we needed to live our lives with our eyes closed or we would end up stark raving mad."

"... love, that rooster that feeds on graveyard weeds..."

🥵

"One knows a great deal if one knows how to savor things."

"We had created a sprawling, rotting, festering urban ecosystem of video outlets and airfare price wars and happy, smiley-faced concrete clowns handing out burgers at drive-through windows, and everything was so tangled up in everything else that if you attacked one thing, you attacked everything."

"... the fate of all books, with no exceptions, is that sooner or later they are used for kindling."

First impressions are quite bad. Feels like im reading something that’s been written 100 times before by as many people. Extremely middling.

Finished the translators introduction.

Book six was amazing. Isadora’s narration was immaculate, beautiful passages packed throughout, the way the book ties-in with the previous books; awesome stuff.

Book five was great. Action sequences, magical realism, and philosophical pondering betwixt conspiracy and fuxing.