Let us see through to the center of this maze and focus on what is still beautiful and good. And if we are smart and determined, let us find our path out of this trap.

I swear I can reach up and touch your laughter.

Most importantly, he felt the need to make music. “Without music,” he said, “I’m sure I’d go crazy.”

I watched for a long time and thought what my life would have been like if I really were an orphan, if Ethel had raised me on the Lower East Side. I usually felt like her guest—she was so considerate of me. At times I felt like her husband, coming home after my workday to eat food she’d prepared. I didn’t know why it was hard to feel like her daughter.

It was a firstness that I thought I’d never find again—the firstness of it, which in the dream comes just before the firstness of death.

Was I like the calf, I wondered? Had I made a two-headed life, where I went along with my husband’s wishes and kept mine separate, instead of mixing what we wanted together like normal couples?

In Nunez’s vision of the world, writers are like ballerinas: willing to torture themselves for the beauty of truth. The difficulty of communicating our feelings to others is a source of much suffering. The best we can do, Nunez’s novels argue, is to pay tender attention.

If indeed we shall never return to our birthplace; if indeed we have been abandoned by the gods; we are still answerable to the names of our beloveds.

The end is unconscious the moment it arrives. Every decade,

the apocalypse comes. It goes. Some are changed, or feel

changed, some cast out, weary as meat, and a lioness appears.

In a better dream, my body sees its end in every other.

The Americans, for their part, are simply called to serve because there’s nowhere else for them. Because, once you’ve been out there in the field, “Home is a trap.” The vagueness of this arena as I’ve just described it is no coincidence: in Klay’s novel, US involvement in Colombia is part and parcel of its long, ill-defined wars.