There’s a cat and mouse game of disclosures and secrets going on. We know especially little about Liz, and in fact we’re told at one point that we’ll find out more about her thoughts later. In the absence of that disclosure, she runs the risk of being a kind of lamia or melusine or, well, think the cover of Roxy Music’s “Siren”. She’s the woman at the bottom of the pool (in the dream, for starters), drawing men to their doom. The Blue Angel, who turns civilized men into beasts. The polite version of this story would be “Jules and Jim”, another triangular love story. Pelletier and Espinoza also flicker in and out of being full-bodied, I mean in the way that Clarissa Dalloway or Leopold Bloom or, why not, Little Nell, seem full-bodied. Bolano can make them live and breathe, but then he mystifies them again. They’re in geometrical relationship to each other, and that sometimes seems to be their character.

So back to the Belle Dame Sans Merci aspect of this, the two scholars who one suspects haven’t been in a donnybrook since childhood, suddenly turn into hooligans needlessly maiming (lost teeth) a Pakistani cab driver. Have they been driven to this by the woman who will be their doom? It’s a preposterous, old-fashioned reading; on the other hand, there aren’t many women characters in the book so far. Liz is pretty much it, and she’s the somewhat bored nexus of desire and violence, which sound familiar. This makes it especially disturbing and yes funny that Pelletier and Espinoza invoke Valerie Solanas while kicking the cabby. Are they acting on behalf of the Society for Cutting Up Men?

None of this adds up to a point, oh well.

The scene is an exemplar of Bolaño’s writing at its best: brutal realism, tinted with absurdity. The absurdity coming with the comments that accompany the kicking. The brutality being just the beat down and Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s.

One other comment would be about their ultimate reaction to the entire incident, they forget it. In reading these two sections, I’ve notice numerous reference to the characters “forgetting.” The primary instance I have in mind is Morini’s reaction when he reads about the murders in Northern Mexico in the first section. He forgets about the article.

However, whatever empathy I had evaporated with the Rushdie reference. I already had a dim view of those two, and it felt like the cry of a poseur to justify the violence as supposedly defending (or vindicating) the freedoms of a writer. It was pathetic and embarrassing.

I don’t want to belabor my own interpretations, but I feel this is part of the “oasis of horror” indicated by the epigraph. The critics lives are marked by lassitude and vaccilation, and finally they feel enlivened by doing something horrible.

And miette, yes, many instances of “losing it,” every variety thereof, in IJ, aren’t there.