Every single thing you said above is so fascinating and true. I especially loved your remarks about the sprawling, Dickensian messiness of this created world. I also remember thinking, ha!, this Chilean is a cheeky devil, letting us know what kind of magnum opus we are reading just now.

On the other hand, this book is like Infinite Jest in the manner of charming you with its characters. I feel this tenderness toward everyone in the book that proceeds, as think I’ve mentioned before, from the voice of the author. The way he lets us into their minds is gentle and knowing, full of humility and forgivingness, but also implacable. I have the sense of being with a sly but also great-hearted docent in this strange-but-familiar world.

The farther into it I get the more I feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange: head in the straps and eyes held open. You’re gonna look at this, the author seems to be saying. Only in Spanish.

Meanwhile there’s the missing Archimboldi, who like Johns and the Mondragon poet, can drive people to undertake quests (Morini to the asylum in Switzerland for Johns, Lola to the asylum in Spain for the Mondragon poet, the critics to Santa Teresa for Archimboldi). We know from scanning the table of contents that there’s a part about Archimboldi at the end of the book, but what that might entail there’s no way of knowing. He could be the murderer haunting Santa Teresa, he could be Godot, he could be none of those things.

I love that Amalfitani thinks the B in one of the diagrams could stand for God. Clearly a god whose name is Bolano.

I also loved the bit about the pharmacist and his love of second tier masterpieces: Bartleby, not Moby Dick. I thought: Ah yes. This is “Moby Dick” we’re reading here, not “Bartleby”. “A Christmas Carol” is a perfect gem, but “The Pickwick Papers” is barely a novel, it’s so splintered and jammed with work in different genres, a handful of repeating characters and a seething world of fascinating passersby, including ghost and goblins. “Moby Dick”, if I remember correctly (don’t have access to a copy right now) ends with another kind of mysterious geometric proof, the carefully described physical relation of the components of the final scene. “The Trial” is a miracle of obfuscation and inconclusiveness. So this passage also gave me confidence in what I was experiencing with the book, and a good tip about how to read it: Just take it on faith, he’s giving you a world. It could get messy, but all the real poets leave messes.

I really loved this part of the book. Having never read this book before, and never read Bolano before, I wasn’t certain whether the critics would appear again. When they didn’t appear in this section, and it started with Lola’s strange and beautiful fugue, I began to relax in the strangeness.

The geometry book seems key, as do the diagrams. The book seems organized according to a series of geometrical relations, or repeating patterns. The critics aren’t quite characters. A writing seeking for us to feel we know them as we know people in our life (the way we feel to know Dorothea Brooke, for example) would make different choices then Bolano does. He veers into mystery, he obfuscates, he keeps secrets, he omits. At one point in this section, Amalfitano is invited to dinner by Professor Perez, and agrees to go, but then is picked up by Guerra and ends of drinking mescal with him. But when he gets home he cooks dinner for his daughter anyway, though there is no sign of his daughter. It doesn’t actually make sense, it’s not supposed to make sense. In a novel full of dreams, the surface of the novel shimmers dreamlike as well.

I’m being kicked of this machine. More shortly.

The riots, yes. I was five months pregnant and living pretty much spang in the middle of that thing in a loft on Pico near 4th Street, if you can believe. A building two doors down from ours burned down, a liquor store across the street–several buildings in each block, by the time it was over. We were all like hmm, should we leave? The view from the window was absolutely insane, cars full of screaming guys with their fists out the windows, looting in every shop. This woman who brought two little kids along to plunder a mini-mart, sauntering along laden with bags but still managing to munch placidly on stolen potato chips. Another who had dressed up for the occasion, wobbling but still weirdly regal in a turban and matching dashiki-ish dress, just freighted with malt liquor. You literally couldn’t believe what you were seeing. So we went to my sister-in-law’s place in Pasadena and watched television for the next 24 hours or so. But when we got back there were so many people outside, cleaning up, everybody had black plastic bags and brooms and we all kind of patched it up, in this very otherworldly state we were in. The phones kept ringing, you still needed to go buy milk and bread, and do your work, which in most cases was pretty much unaffected unless you owned a shop in our nabe. Most of the little shops on that street were cleaned out and had to close, antiques shops and places like that.

About the LA riots (I assume you’re talking about the riots that happened after the Rodney-King-beating-cops got acquitted): I was 15 and living in an LA suburb and the riots were definitely a big deal to me at the time–my friends and I certainly felt like the world is coming to an end. But maybe that was because we were young and had never really experienced anything like that before. I do agree though, that after they ended, people tended to forget, or at least act like they forgot.

As Daryl pointed out over in Infinite Zombies, the wind noodles around with the ideas in the book on the clothesline, and then the wind tries on Rosa’s underpants. All this professor of philosophy’s learning, this man from a highly cultured Barcelona, is useless in the face of the primal stuff that is going on here in Santa Teresa. He cannot even see any coherence in his own learning anymore. See below.

And I like him.

Notice he doodles those diagrams without thinking and then goes back later and tries to make sense of them. They are like automatic writing. Is that what it is called? I must say that I was gratified to see that blow-hard Harold Bloom down at the bottom of Diagram 6 with the other nobodies. [p. 194] Amalfitano cannot see anything funny about it when he looks back at it, but I’ll bet Bolaño saw something funny in it. I surely did.

marc nash