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“... neither the Inca nor the Aztecs had the use of iron.With Enrigue’s encouragement his translator, Natasha Wimmer, keeps certain words in the original. In a sense the cihuacoatl of Tenochtitlan is the mayor of the city, but mayors are not usually military commanders, and he is also supreme general of the Mexica army. Yes, you could translate calmecac as ...”

“... But in The Savage Detectives he doesn’t overdo the local colour, which his superb translator Natasha Wimmer in any case wisely ignores. The narrators are individuated above all through our sense of the helpless particularity of their fates; and to the extent that they sound alike, this is explained and excused by their common situation (testifying ...”

“... In 1959​ , television screens across the United States became portals to other worlds. The Twilight Zone, an anthology series with no narrative links between episodes, showed characters going beyond the limits of normal human experience, encountering extraterrestrials, time travel, evil spirits and magical objects. The world we take for granted, the show suggested, might not be the one in which we live ...”

“... Roberto Bolaño likes to prolong his jokes well past the moment when even the slowest reader has got the point. Nazi Literature in the Americas, for example, looks like a single gag – the brief deadpan biography of an imaginary Fascist or near Fascist writer – multiplied by 30-odd cases over 200 pages. But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes ...”