Status Updates From Los detectives salvajes

He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn’t ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of Latin Americans I know. I’m not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians.

"veía los esfuerzos y los sueños, todos confundidos en un mismo fracaso, y que ese fracaso se llamaba alegría"

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake

The story he told me wasn’t much different from what my friend had told me. The fight had been about Neruda and Parra, about the validity of their respective poetic visions, and yet there was a new element to the story that the director told (and I knew that he was telling me the truth): when he fought with my friend and my friend couldn’t come up with anything else to say in his desperate defence of Neruda