Fifty similes, really more than fifty similes, from Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666

1. She looks like a nun, thought Quincy, or like she belongs to a dangerous cult.
2. the movie in the dream was like a negative of the real movie
3. clouds that looked like cathedrals or maybe just little toy churches abandoned in a labyrinthine marble quarry one hundred times bigger than the Grand Canyon
4. like the work of a lunatic
5. like a miniature Russian Orthodox church
6. what it was most like was an enchanted island
7. like the lilies that bloom and die in a single day
8. a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water
9. a metaphor is like a life jacket
10. there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead
11. I went through books like they were barbecue.
12. friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking about it now, might actually have been obscene
13. Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
14. gestured and bobbed like a rapper
15. Hollows in the ground, like World War I bomb craters
16. Fate headed down the stairs, taking them in threes as if he were dashing for the street, like a boy heading out for a free afternoon with his friends.
17. smiling a catlike smile
18. everyone, I mean everyone, is like the ancient Christians in the Roman circus
19. Sunsets in the desert seem like they’ll never end, until suddenly, before you know it, they’re done. It’s like someone just turned out the lights
20. She had a hoarse, nasal voice and she didn’t talk like a New York secretary but like a
    country person who has just come from the cemetery.
21. like butterflies summoned by his prayers
22. something like happiness
23. stood to attention like a soldier
24. the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work
25. The fucking killings are like a strike, amigo, a brutal fucking strike.
26. “It’s like a dream,” said Guadalupe Roncal. “It looks like something alive.”
27. it looks like a woman who’s been hacked to pieces. Who’s been hacked to pieces but is still alive. And the prisoners are living inside this woman.”
28. two Mexican reporters who stared at him like dying men
29. the knowledge slipped like water through his fingers
30. she smiled like a goddess
31. This place is like hell
32. A black sky like the bottom of the sea.
33. like fucking a man who isn’t exactly a man
34. like becoming a little girl again
35. like being fucked by a rock. A mountain.
36. it’s like you’re fucking a mountain but you’re fucking inside a cave
37. In other words it’s like being fucked by a mountain in a cave inside the mountain itself
38. Well, it feels like being fucked by the air. That’s exactly how it feels.
39. So fucking a policeman is like being fucked by a mountain and fucking a narco is like being fucked by the air.
40. like a tour guide with an eye for local color
41. he treated her like his slave
42. like a joke
43. like the title of a David Lynch film
44. narrow room like a monk’s cell
45. the shadows dispersed by the flashes of car lights like comet tails in the dark
46. It’s odd that someone would hang a book out like a shirt
47. like a huge hearse
48. She looked like an athlete from the 1940s.
49. All of this is like somebody else’s dream
50. the highway was like a river

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