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51d476f
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Dios y la gente se solidarizan con las victimas. Pero no con cualquier victima, sino con las victimas que se victimizan con exito. Mi ex mujer, por ejemplo. Cuando nos divorciamos, la criolla se volvio poeta y victima; la profeta de las victimas divorciadas. Ella acaba de publicar un librito de poemas en prosa muy rencorosos, autogestionados y trilingues, en la editorial imaginaria de su mentora, una poeta gringa que dirige un taller de poe..
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novela
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Valeria Luiselli |
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da6e28e
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I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it'll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and tran..
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words
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Valeria Luiselli |
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398fe1c
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New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time.
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story
narrative
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Valeria Luiselli |
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0213f6b
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Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don't know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it's just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And witho..
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time
the-world
modernity
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Valeria Luiselli |
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98fb78a
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But we weren't going to risk it. I said, focus on your picture, and so you drew a girl figure and wrote Sir Fus In Love, and then said it said Sara Falls In Love. I didn't want to correct your spelling because it really didn't matter that much, because who was going to see the drawing except us anyway?
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Valeria Luiselli |
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5afc8da
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I... stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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974f063
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Our mother teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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fdf2ece
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and as beautiful and real as life feels when you're not thinking about its consequences.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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11319e9
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I suddenly realized he probably didn't know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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ca1ed64
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as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?
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Valeria Luiselli |
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70ddec4
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Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person's absence.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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d5cd3db
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My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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4802de3
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I also knew you wouldn't remember this trip, because you're only five years old, and our pediatrician had told us that children don't starting building memories of things until after they turn six. When I realized that, that I was ten and you were only five, I thought, fuck. But of course I didn't say so out loud. I just thought, fuck, silently, to myself. I realized that I'd remember everything and you maybe wouldn't remember anything. I n..
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documentary
memory
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Valeria Luiselli |
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8294dc8
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Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside of What would happen then? I wonder what my sister, who understand books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She's so good at explaining books and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she'd say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children - books like that short story by Garcia Marquez, "Light is L..
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reality
imagination
children
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Valeria Luiselli |
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a7e26b3
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Everyone says they're empty. Everyone says - vast and flat. Everyone - mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere - indomitable. But no one had ever told use about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes.
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storms
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Valeria Luiselli |
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fe4fc2c
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Euphemisms hide, erase, coat. Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget. Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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e219d87
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suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic and military powers.
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Valeria Luiselli |
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47be145
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But I suppose it's always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic ..
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Valeria Luiselli |
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5c72765
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He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they'd been the last Apache leaders--moral, political, military--of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender.
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Valeria Luiselli |