A giant plume of dust, like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote, and ninety-nine other similes from Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666

1. The knife sharpener’s eyes narrowed until they looked like two lines drawn with charcoal.
2. music like water tumbling over smooth stones
3. like a child trying not to vomit
4. he looked like a madman
5. Like a child on the verge of tears.
6. children scattering through the countryside like defeated soldiers
7. a giant plume of dust, like the tail of a hallucinogenic coyote
8. The sidewalk was gray but the sun coming through the branches of the trees made it look bluish, like a river.
9. like a pig staring into the sun
10. the tops of trees were visible like a green-black carpet
11. he drifted like a ghost
12. eyes were a brown so light they looked yellow like the desert
13. letting the buckle dangle like a bell
14. La Vaca stood motionless, waiting, like someone who walks down a random street and suddenly hears her favorite song, the saddest song in the world, coming from a window
15. She fucks like someone on the brink of death
16. like a hummingbird
17. mazelike mountains
18. like a gold nugget in a trash heap
19. like a doll lost and found in a heap of somebody else’s trash
20. like a procession of penitents with their purple or fabulous vermilion or checkered hoods
21. Reinaldo felt a shiver descend his spine like an elevator, or maybe rise, or both at once
22. A goddamn gash, like the crack in the earth’s crust they’ve got in California, the San Bernardino fault
23. like a melon-colored pyramid, its sacrificial altar hidden behind smokestacks and two enormous hangar doors though which workers and trucks entered
24. the world was like a creaky coffin
25. like the stars
26. corpselike pallor
27. like dogs
28. like extraterrestrials
29. On the rare occasions when he laughed he sounded like a donkey and only then did his face seem bearable.
30. Lying there with his ass in the air, Farfan looked like a sow, but Gomez fucked him regardless and they resumed their friendship.
31. his eyes like a hawk’s as he strode that labyrinth of snores and nightmares
32. For me, being in prison was exactly like being dumped on a Saturday at noon in a neighborhood like Colonia Kino, San Damian, Colonia Las Flores. A lynching. Being torn to pieces. Do you understand? The mob spitting on me and kicking me and tearing me to pieces. With no time for explanations.
33. It’s like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious.
34. like a mosquito around a campfire
35. paths off the highway that melted away like dreams, without rhyme or reason
36. like a skull
37. There were Cessna planes flying low over the desert like the spirits of Catholic Indians ready to slit everyone’s throats.
38. like a madman
39. He carried the amphetamines everywhere, like a tiny talisman that would protect him from evil.
40. like commandos lost on a toxic island on another planet
41. Gomez scooped the balls off the floor and remarked that they looked like turtle eggs. Nice and tender, he said.
42. what it was like to be in purgatory
43. like a flock of vultures
44. the policemen, moving wearily, like soldiers trapped in a time warp who march over and over again to the same defeat, got to work
45. like a free man
46. she would go everywhere wrapped in bandages, like a mummy, not an Egyptian mummy but a Mexican mummy
47. like an archaeologist who has just discovered an incredible bone
48. like a girl who carefully unwraps, bit by bit, a present that she wants to make last, forever
49. all the bandages slither like snakes, or all the bandages open their sleepy eyes like snakes, although she knows they aren’t snakes but rather the guardian angels of snakes
50. they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari
51. like a troupe of gypsies heading into the unknown
52. like a worm or an insomniac mole
53. like a baby bird
54. the steam was tinted green, an intense green, like a tropical forest, and when Garibay saw it he invariably said: fuck, that’s pretty
55. they slunk out like vultures
56. a long coffee shop like a coffin, with few windows
57. like a squash ball
58. women are like laws
59. the slope of a hill that looked like a dinosaur or a Gila monster
60. witchlike language and manner
61. Living in this desert, thought Lalo Cura as the car, with Epifanio at the wheel, left the field behind, is like living at sea.
62. like a fast-acting tranquilizer
63. Sometimes he felt like a shepherd misunderstood by the very stones.
64. like children hearing the same story for the thousandth time
65. like somebody talking about medieval history or politics
66. the night like a glove over the hotel
67. that toadlike creature, that dumb, helpless greasy illegal, that lump of coal who in some other reincarnation could have been a diamond
68. like someone talking in his sleep
69. He could feel the Sonora night brushing his back like a ghost.
70. And most surprising of all: tied around her head, like a strange but not entirely implausible hat, was an expensive black bra.
71. like looking for a phantom
72. Being a criminologist in this country is like being a cryptographer at the North Pole.
73. It’s like being a child in a cell block of pedophiles.
74. It’s like being a beggar in the country of the deaf.
75. It’s like being a condom in the realm of the Amazons
76. his neck long like a turkey’s
77. we got out of there like a bomb was about to go off
78. sinking like crocodiles in the swamp
79. they spend money like water
80. like a queen
81. night crept like a cripple toward the east
82. like a giant chapel
83. like two whores allowed for the first time to dress their pimp
84. like boiled fruit
85. like a plaster cast
86. like a statue
87. ranches empty like shoe boxes
88. like a puzzle repeatedly assembled and disassembled
89. like a gift
90. like a double spinal cord
91. The truth is like a strung-out pimp.
92. The truth is like a strung-out pimp in the middle of a storm, said the congresswoman.
93. smiling and sniveling like a lap dog
94. like an eternity
95. trading puns like a couple of zombies
96. like someone in a trance
97. like a rat
98. like Satan’s helpers
99. like a mirror image
100. like black holes

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