2666 - pg. 879

That night Lotte dreamed for the first time in a long time about her brother. She saw Archimboldi walking in the desert, dressed in shorts and a little straw hat, and everything around him was sand, one dune after another all the way to the horizon. She shouted something to him, she said stop, there's nowhere to go, but Archimboldi kept moving farther away, as if he wanted to lose himself forever in that unfathomable and hostile land.

"It's unfathomable and hostile," she told him, and only then did she realize that she was a girl again,, a girl who lived in a Prussian village  between the forest and the sea.

"No," said Archimboldi, and he seemed to whisper in her ear, "it's just boring, boring, boring ..."