A list of 81 (or more) similes from Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666

1. a horrible and notably unhygienic bathroom that was more like a latrine or cesspit
2. A rather ordinary picture of a student in the capital, but it worked on him like a drug, a drug that brought him to tears, a drug that (as one sentimental Dutch poet of the nineteenth century had it) opened the floodgates of emotion, as well as the floodgates of something that at first blush resembled self-pity but wasn’t (what was it, then? rage? very likely)
3. the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness
4. their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings
5. went on the attack like Napoleon at Jena
6. demolished the counterattack like a Desaix, like a Lannes
7. old Hanseatic buildings, some of which looked like abandoned Nazi offices
8. like people endlessly analyzing a favorite movie
9. the parade of immigrants like ants loading the flesh of thousands of dead cattle into the ships’ holds
10. the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the moon,
    like a slow storm
11. his eyes shining with a strange intensity, like the eyes of a clumsy young butcher
12. the lady would begin to howl like a Fury
13. like an ice queen
14. news spreading like wildfire, like a nuclear conflagration
15. a rock jutting from the pool, like a dark and iridescent reef
16. like a painting by Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon
17. I suffered like a dog
18. now the fucking mugs are like samurais armed with those fucking samurai swords
19. the appearance of the park, which looked to him like a film of the jungle, the colors wrong, terribly sad, exalted
20. The words old man and German he waved like magic wands to uncover a secret
21. like drudge work, like the lowest of menial tasks
22. that abyss like hour
23. Like the machine celibataire.
24. Like the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or like the bachelor who, when he returns from a trip at light speed, finds the other bachelors grown old or turned into pillars of salt.
25. like a howling Indian witch doctor
26. like talking to a stranger
27. like a whisper that he later understood was a kind of laugh
28. like a hula-hooping motion
29. you’re behaving like stupid children
30. they attended like sleepwalkers or drugged detectives
31. like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil
32. they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths
33. drifted through Bologna like two ghosts
34. who once said London was like a labyrinth
35. he could soar over the beach like a seagull
36. which circled in their guilty consciences like a ghost or an electric charge
37. they were so happy they began to sing like children in the pouring rain
38. Their remorse vanished like laughter on a spring night.
39. smiling like squirrels
40. like a fifteenth-century fortress
41. circles that faded like mute explosions
42. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet.
43. a voice that didn’t sound like his but rather like the voice of a sorcerer, or more specifically, a sorceress, a soothsayer from the times of the Roman Empire
44. like the dripping of a basalt fountain
45. he and the room were mirrored like ghostly figures in a performance that prudence and fear would keep anyone from staging
46. Aztec ruins springing like lilacs from wasteland
47. like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it’s burning
48. the city looked to them like an enormous camp of gypsies or refugees ready to pick up and move at the slightest prompting
49. the missing piece suddenly leaped into sight, almost like a bark
50. It’s like hearing a child cry
51. a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched the painting from losing his mind
52. brief moans shooting like meteorites over the desert
53. The words tunneled through the rarefied air of the room like virulent roots through dead flesh
54. The word freedom sounded to Espinoza like the crack of a whip in an empty classroom.
55. The light in the room was dim and uncertain, like the light of an English dusk.
56. Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club
57. the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain
58. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there’s an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine
59. like a bad joke on the part of the mayor or city planner
60. like pure crystal
61. like the legs of an adolescent near death
62. his eyes were just like the eyes of the blind
63. clung to the Chilean professor like a limpet
64. grimaced like a madman
65. like a reflection of what happened in the west but jumbled up
66. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
67. For the first time, the three of them felt like siblings or like the veterans of some shock troop who’ve lost their interest in most things of this world
68. a smell of meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder
69. long roots like snakes or the locks of a Gorgon
70. like a shirt left out to dry
71. reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery
72. lectures that were more like massacres
73. feeling less like butchers than like gutters or disembowellers
74. the boy on top of the heap of rugs like a bird, scanning the horizon
75. She was like a princess or an ambassadress
76. cry like a fool
77. I felt like a derelict dazzled by the sudden lights of a theater.
78. drew me like a magnet
79. a cement box with two tiny windows like the portholes of a sunken ship
80. a very soft voice, like the breeze that was blowing just then, suffusing everything with the scent of flowers
81. The cement box where the sauna was looked like a bunker holding a corpse.

These similes are from “The Part About the Critics,” the first part of 2666, a novel by Roberto Bolaño, in English translation by Natasha Wimmer. I was originally going to try to record 666 similes, but then I didn’t. I’ll record similes from the other four parts of the novel though.