2666: Picador Classic

“The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.

Even before Norton first went to bed with Pelletier, Morini had felt it coming. Not because of the way Pelletier behaved around Norton but because of her own detachment, a generalized detachment, Baudelaire would have called it spleen, Nerval melancholy, which left Norton liable to embark on an intimate relationship with anyone who came along.

Calm is the one thing that will never let us down. And Amalfitano said: everything else lets us down? And the voice: yes, that’s right, it’s hard to admit, I mean it’s hard to have to admit it to you, but that’s the honest-to-God truth. Ethics lets us down? The sense of duty lets us down? Honesty lets us down? Curiosity lets us down? Love lets us d

“Not because of the size of his cock,” the baroness explained, to clear up any misunderstandings that Archimboldi, next to her in bed, might entertain, “but because of a kind of shape-shifting quality: he was cleverer than a crow when he talked and in bed he turned into a devil ray.”

Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they’d been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us. •

According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth, Archimboldi ended his letter.

And as far as coincidence is concerned, it’s never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence.

a sum, he thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one’s fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums.

sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people’s souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the sa