Footnotes

1.
"Zadie Smith is already famous for being in the world, for knowing and loving its diversity. Her characters are down to earth: they are coarse, fat, bald, myopic, have uneven teeth, they talk their own talk, and are, in short, human, living all they can since that's all they have; but she is nevertheless with Forster because she cares about religion, prophecy, philosophy. The main resemblance between the two books goes beyond the plot allusions everybody talks about. What lies behind both is an idea of the novel as what Lawrence called the one bright book of life—a source of truth and otherworldliness and prophecy."

(Frank Kermode, "Here she is," London Review of Books, 6 October 2005)


2.
"Y Nadja Yurenieva vio a Ansky y se levantó discretamente y salió del paraninfo en donde el mal poeta soviético (tan inconsciente y necio y remilgado y timorato y melindroso como un poeta lírico mexicano, en realidad como un poeta lírico latinoamericano, esos pobres fenómenos raquítico e hinchados) desgranaba sus rimas sobre la producción de acero (con la misma supina ignorancia arrogante con que los poetas latinoamericanos hablan de su yo, de su edad, de su otredad), y salió a las calles de Moscú, seguida por Ansky, que no se acercaba a ella sino que permanecía a la zaga, a unos cinco metros, una distancia que se fue acortando a medida que el tiempo pasaba y el paseo se prolongaba. Nunca como entonces Ansky entendió mejor—y con mayor alegría—el suprematismo, creado por Kasimir Malévich, ni el primer punto de aquella declaración de independencia firmada en Vitebsk el 15 de noviembre de 1920, y que dice así: <<Queda establecida la quinta dimensión.>>"

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, pp. 908-909)


3.
"In this 'time' of repetition there circulates a contingent tension within modernity: a tension between the pedagogy of the symbols of progress, historicism, modernization, homogeneous empty time, the narcissism of organic culture, the onanistic search for the origins of race, and what I shall call the 'sign of the present': the performativity of discursive practice, the récits of the everyday, the repetitions of the empirical, the ethics of self-enactment, the iterative signs that mark the non-synchronic passages of time in the archives of the 'new.' This is the space in which the question of modernity emerges as a form of interrogation: what do I belong to in this present? In what terms do I identify with the 'we', the intersubjective realm of society? This process cannot be represented in the binary relation of archaism/modernity, inside/outside, past/present, because these questions block off the forward drive or teleology of modernity. They suggest that what is read as the 'futurity' of the modern, its ineluctable progress, its cultural hierarchies, may be an 'excess', a disturbing alterity, a process of the marginalization of the symbols of modernity."

(Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 351)