47 or so similes from Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666

These similes are from “The Part About Amalfitano,” the second part of 2666, a novel by Roberto Bolaño, in English translation by Natasha Wimmer.

1. It’s like a fetus
2. he held the letter in his two hands like a life raft of reeds and grasses
3. a doglike fervor
4. a Turkish carpet like the threadbare carpet from the Thousand and One Nights, a battered carpet that sometimes functioned as a mirror, reflecting all of us from below
5. standing there like a tiny and infinitely patient Amazon
6. like pilgrims
7. like mendicants or child prophets
8. like someone who’s burned himself
9. like sucking a small to medium dick
10. like shooting a Zen arrow with a Zen bow into a Zen pavilion
11. The lunatic, who was sitting down again, took it in the chest and dropped like a little bird.
12. those days were like a prolonged parachute landing after a long space flight
13. back and forth like a sleepwalker
14. marched from the west like a ragtag army whose only strength was its numbers
15. dropped down from the Pyrenees like the ghosts of dead beasts
16. the floor waxer like a cross between a mastiff and a pig sitting next to a plant
17. like a trick photograph that isn’t a trick, floating, floating pensively in the skies of Paris, weary
18. like a memory rising up from glacial seas
19. The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain.
20. It also was like an empty dance club.
21. like a feudal lord riding out on horseback to survey his lands
22. like provincial intellectuals
23. like deeply self-sufficient men
24. like a zombie
25. like a medieval squire
26. like a medieval princess
27. Her hand was like a blind woman’s hand.
28. like a cloud cemetery
29. like a thick chili whose last simmer was fading in the west
30. the coffinlike shadow
31. purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death
32. laughing in a whisper, like a fly
33. like an endoscopy, but painless
34. slept like a baby
35. I feel like a nightingale, he thought happily.
36. like a lover whose embrace maddened the horse as well as the rider, both of them dying of fright or ending up at the bottom of a ravine, or the colocolo, or the chonchones, or the candelillas, or so many other little creatures, lost souls, incubi and succubi, lesser demons that roamed between the Cordillera de la Costa and the Andes
37. very tan, like a singer or a Puerto Rican playboy
38. A confident, mocking smile, like the smile of a cocksure sniper.
39. like a joke
40. something like laughter but also something like sorrow
41. like the Greek state
42. like an arrowhead
43. burst out from a corner like someone playing a bad joke or about to attack him
44. the slight shadow, like a hastily dug pit that gives off an alarming stench
45. Something like the smoke signals
46. military men behaved like writers, and writers, so as not to be outdone,
    behaved like military men, and politicians (of every stripe) behaved like writers and like military men, and diplomats behaved like cretinous cherubim, and doctors and lawyers behaved like thieves
47. You’re like me and I’m like you. We aren’t happy.