What to say about Roberto Bolaño's wild, wild, 1100-page journey of a novel? Did I find the plot gripping, its unending pages flying by? No. But did I find the characters emotionally resonant, such that aspects of the human experience were revealed or made clear to me? Also no. But did I delight in the prose, marveling at the ingenuity of the mind to have fashioned words together in such an evocative way? Once more, no.
But I did really enjoy this book for the unique way it developed its themes. The book is structured as five very different (almost) standalone novels. No single story makes a strong statement about a particular topic, but by touching on a given idea from a variety of angles, the theme comes into focus.
One such example is the idea of how easy it is to escape the horrors of the world and remain in one’s comfortable intellectual community. The first of the five volumes revolves around a tight-knit community of scholars who have devoted their lives to the study and translation of the novels by a mysterious German writer, Archimboldi. As these characters unravel their love triangles and academic tensions, we hear the briefest murmurings of some tragic story in a small town in Mexico. In a few scenes, there are moments of shocking racism and violence, but ultimately these conflicts barely matter. Questions of the heart and intellectual musings occupy the characters. In the second volume, we see more of the unrest and violence in Latin America, and we are introduced to a troubled, drifting woman, but through the eyes of a busy academic. Matters of violence and sexism and racism affect him insofar as they affect the people he loves. When it comes to broad issues affecting humanity, Professor Amalfatino’s more memorable reflections revolve around literature and intellectual culture. The third volume brings us closer still: through the eyes of a reporter, we learn about the startlingly frequent and brutal murders of women in the town of Santa Teresa. But Oscar Fate’s beat is African American affairs and his editor won’t allow him to expense an investigation into issues that affect Latinas. Three different explorations of how sites of knowledge production avoid systemic issues of violence and sexism. The fourth volume hits us over the head with the events in Santa Teresa, striking a format somewhere between a police blotter and a novel. The discovery of each woman’s body is described in detail, as is the largely fruitless investigation into their murder. The author shows us how poverty, misogyny, and American imperialism contribute to these deaths, and hinder their investigation. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them,” a character reflects.
Most of these mysteries go unsolved; the author seems to be cautioning us that mysteries in life do not typically have a climactic, satisfying conclusion. Despite Volume 4 resembling a police intrigue more than any other genre, we never find out who murdered all the women in Santa Teresa. Most likely it was many killers. Many killers, and broader socioeconomic problems. Volume 1 sets up the mystery of who Archimboldi really is, but ends without providing any answers — neither to the reader, nor to the scholars desperate to meet him. In Volume 5, the reader learns just about all there is to know about the life of Archimboldi. He is ultimately not a particularly interesting man (notwithstanding his quiet assassination of a bureaucratic Nazi). Nor is he a particularly compelling character, remaining always a little emotionally distant from the reader. Would the scholars that devoted their lives to dissecting his every written word find satisfaction in finally getting to meet him?
It is a pessimistic novel. Or perhaps that diagnosis goes too far? The author shows us that real peace and happiness can be found in love. But the novel is broadly sorrowful about the state of society and we see few glints of hope for transcending it. Vulgarity and violence (particularly against women) — permeate the novel: the pummeling of the taxi driver in the first volume; the woman pushed into the ravine to her death by her own husband in the fifth volume; the spectator sport of fighting that drives the plot of the third volume; the systematic slaughter of Jews recounted by the unrepentant bureaucrat in Volume 5; and of course the litany of murders of the fourth volume. The refrain "she had been anally and vaginally raped" is repeated so often that I found myself anticipating the blow of hearing it every time another body is found.
It is a very self-conscious and self-referential work. Bolaño’s characters discuss literature and art, and much of the commentary applies to the novel they appear in ("The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn’t lead anywhere."). Bolaño wrote this novel seeing his own death approaching on the horizon, and there are moments where he appears to reflect on his own place in the literary canon:
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
What is that "something that terrifies us all" that Bolaño saw himself as struggling with, in this imperfect, torrential work? It’s a question the book rewards with many answers. Contemplating what these might be, long after you’ve put down the book, is what makes this novel enjoyable.
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