"The Grub"
17 year old Arturo Belano spends his days in Mexico City browsing bookstores and watching movies. He strikes up an odd friendship with a man, whom he calls "the grub" ("El Gusano") who sits on the same bench every day, doing nothing. The character of the grub, "with his straw hat and a Bali cigarette hanging from his bottom lip" is also the subject of Bolaño's poem of the same name ("El Gusano" in Spanish, though translated as "the Worm" rather than "the Grub" in Laura Healy's translation of The Romantic Dogs)
Read more about this topic: Last Evenings On Earth, The Stories
Famous quotes containing the word grub:
“The Anglo-American can indeed cut down, and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech, and vote for Buchanan on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have tasted but little bread in my life. It has been mere grub and provender for the most part. Of bread that nourished the brain and the heart, scarcely any. There is absolutely none on the tables even of the rich.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)