I’m forever reading about people who get so incensed at a book that they fling it across the room. This always seemed to me journalistic boilerplate, like those ten-minute standing ovations you read about at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, for the first time in my life, I fling a book across the room. The six-hundred-page bulk of The Truculáta leaves a dent in the wall, which I attempt to conceal by moving the lamp.