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128 pages, Paperback
First published October 24, 2000
You mentioned that Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires where you were brought up, had been a violent place full of bohemians and bandits. There they had two names for the knife, "the blade" and "the slicer". The two names described the same object, but "the blade" was the thing itself, and "the slicer" its function. "The blade" could fit in the hand even of a sickly child shut up in his father's library, "the blade" could be any of the superannuated daggers and swords belonging to his warrior grandfather or great-grandfather and displayed on the walls of his house, but "the slicer", the knife in the hand slicing back and forth, in and out, existed only in his imagination, in a fascinating world of rapid settlings of accounts and duels over honour, an insult or a woman, in dark streets where you never went, where no writer went, except in the literature he wrote.
鈥淲ho knows, Volgestein, I might turn out to be John Dee鈥檚 Eternal Orangutan. I will live for ever and write everything that was ever written in the world. After all, I鈥檝e already written a good part of it.鈥�