Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (translator) · 2003 (El gaucho insufrible); Eng. 2010 · EPUB · Calibre ID 14390
Resurfaced in Something Brushed His Forehead (2026-10-02).
Role in the triad
The declared descendant: ‘The South’ rewritten in the 2001 crisis as farce and entropy; rabbits for horses and cattle; the knife fight moved back to Buenos Aires.
Why this book
Cites Borges and ‘The South’ by name inside the story; every element of Borges’s plot returns transformed. Bolaño also wrote the preface to the Aira volume in the set, so he links both edges.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “Inevitably, he remembered Borges’s story ‘The South’, and when he thought of the store mentioned in the final paragraphs, tears brimmed in his eyes.” (≈26%)
- “There are no horses left here, he said, only rabbits.” (≈34%)
- “European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there’s nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.” (≈39%)
- “For a moment he thought that his destiny, his screwed-up American destiny, would be to meet his death like Dahlman in ‘The South’, and it seemed wrong, partly because he now had debts to repay, and partly because he wasn’t ready to die,” (≈41%)
- “Argentina’s like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best.” (≈55%)
- “Ah, but the cemetery I’m talking about, said Pereda, is an exact copy of eternity.” (≈56%)
- “I believe we are losing our memory, he said. And just as well too.” (≈89%)
- “For a moment their gazes locked, as if, for each of them, the presence of the other were a gash in the ambient reality.” (≈96%)
Themes
2001 corralito · Buenos Aires · entropy · farce · gaucho · knife · literary world · memory · pampa · rabbits · rewriting Borges