Week 12: Fireworks

by Maria Bustillos

I don’t know about you guys, but I crawled across the finish line of The Part About the Crimes in a state of nervous exhaustion. Even though I found it to be the strongest section of the four, so far, in terms of articulating a different and true way to look at the world (something a novel has achieved only a few times, in my own reading life,) and to think about our own part in it (about which, more anon.)  So emerged into The Part About Archimboldi to find it bursting all around us like a shower of fireworks, as if we’d been dropped suddenly into into the middle of a Russian novel like The Master and Margarita, so full of incident, of sensation–the imagination in this is torrential, suddenly so rich, powerful and poetic.

I don’t know how I will be feeling at the end, but right now my earlier impression that we begin at a great remove from reality and move slowly closer in has only intensified. What I didn’t realize, though, was this: we would go closer and closer to the truth, and finally enter deep inside a human mind to touch the realest reality that there is.

We begin with the critics, and the sort of intellectual miasma they are in is like a veil between themselves and the world; it hampers their ability to experience anything or even observe it clearly. They’re still human, but they’re lost.

Then we move to Amalfitano, whose grasp of affairs though closer than that of the critics is also very much hampered by convention, by the blindness brought on by being a book of logic or poetical mathematics strung out on a clothesline, the plaything of the elements.

Then Fate, a man who is drawn, too, to learn about what things are really like, far more so than Amalfitano; yet his fleshliness and creatureliness circumscribe his chances of reaching the awareness he seeks. His desire for Rosa at least is real, and creates a real desire to deliver her, and he manages this, or appears to have managed it so far. This is a sort of “pragmatic” level of awareness that many of us live at; to survive, to flee danger, to know something about the world but when it should threaten something we love, our curiosity is at an end and our desire to get on a plane overtakes it at once.

The crimes plunge us headlong into ‘the oasis of horror.’ That is to say, whatever we may feel about what is going on in Santa Teresa, it’s the result of human struggle, desire, real passions. It’s not “false” or “wrong.” It’s the most inconvenient truth there is. These are true things being described to us, things that have been poeticized and repeated over and over like a rosary of pain and death, to freak you out, to bore you and make you crazy, to make you look in the mirror of what it is to be human. We can’t deny that this is our legacy, this bloody mess we have always either been in, or hiding ourselves away from. Those who are caught up in the tangle of influence, corruption and evil that surrounds the crimes are face to face with it, unhindered by the “rules” of law or propriety, conscience or religious scruple; this is the raw face of human nature, and you’ve been forced to regard it.

Now we reach the tale of Hans Reiter, a man who has gone completely his own way from the first instant of his life, practically.  He is the lone diver, separate from all others; he is completely detached and his inner life is the opposite of the critics’; it’s the real life of the mind that is like a compositional tool for reality, that is poetic also, and wild and unconstrained, that takes life as found, alone … that dives to the bottom of the sea.

Week 12: The Part About Archimboldi

And so we’re out of Mexico, back to Europe—into another era, another world. Even the first sixty pages of The Part About Archimboldi are difficult to summarize because it feels like the narrator is giving us a summary of Archimboldi’s life (with a few diversions) so far.

Right away we learn that Benno von Archimboldi is Hans Reiter. We learn that his father lost a leg in the war and that his mother was blind in one eye. From this pair of misfits (both short) is born the giant Hans. When he is six years old he begins to dive in the waters off the German coast. He becomes a lover of seaweed, and studies the plants in his book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, and draws different species of seaweed in his notebook.

Reiter, as a young boy, is rescued from drowning by a tourist named Heinz Vogel. The next time Reiter nearly drowns, local fishermen, who are amazed at the boy’s ability to hold his breath for over two minutes, rescue him. When Reiter is ten (1930), his sister Lotte is born. Reiter leaves school at age 13—the same year Hitler comes to power. That year, a committee of National Socialists makes a stop in the Town of Chattering Girls and discovers that Reiter’s father is a wounded veteran. They are not impressed with the one-legged man’s stories, but when they see young Hans, one of them calls him a “giraffe fish” (how does that work translation-wise? something seems lost).

Hans briefly works on a fishing boat and is hired to work at the country house of a Prussian baron (“house in the middle of a forest”). There he meets and befriends the baron’s nephew, Hugo Halder (when I first read that name, I thought of Saki, whose real name was Hector Hugo Munro). When the baron closes the country house, in 1936, Reiter follows Halder to Berlin. Here, Reiter’s roommate (Fachler) dies and Reiter practically assumes his identity: he takes the dead man’s possessions and his job. In Berlin, Reiter blossoms with the social interaction of Halder and Halder’s Japanese friend Nisa.

The three friends spend time with an orchestra conductor who is interested in the Fourth Dimension. Hans tells the conductor that “everything is a burned book” and the conductor calls Reiter a “time bomb” an untrained powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected. The narrator tells us this is untrue. In 1939, Hans Reiter is drafted. He sets off to war alone and his regiment moves into Poland. At one point, Reiter thinks he sees the daughter of the baron, Halder’s cousin, in a car with some general staff officers who are surveying a squadron of planes (btw, I love the description of the officer reading and smoking in the wind on page 671).

Reiter is sent into a battle where his height is an almost certain disadvantage—and yet he emerges unscathed. His superior officer says that what happened was that he’d gone into combat as if he wasn’t going into combat, as if he wasn’t there or the quarrel wasn’t with him.

Eventually Reiter’s battalion is moved to Romania, in the Carpathian mountains, where he ends up working in Dracula’s castle. Several dignitaries arrive at the castle, including General Entrescu and the baroness Reiter knew from his days at the country manor. The guests have a dinner part and, on page 681, discuss the meaning of death and murder in ways that I’d say reflect upon Juárez/Santa Teresa. The guests discuss art, culture, and Dracula (Vlad Tepes).

The next morning, Reiter, Kruse, Wilkie, and Neitzke find a passageway behind a mirror. They walk through the labyrinthine passageways and discover peepholes into other rooms in the castle. Of course they end up watching the baroness and General Entrescu have crazy sex.

They leave the castle and Reiter gets leave to return to his home village and can’t help but visiting the baron’s old estate and asking about the baroness. He returns to Berlin looking for Halder, but finds a teenage girl instead—Ingeborg Bauer. Ingeborg kisses Hans and tells him she only swears by two things: big storms and The Aztecs. In great detail, she describes an Aztec ceremony for sacrificing a human being. Reiter swears on the Aztecs that he will never forget her and she tells him that Halder lives in Paris.

A few tidbits below:

On page 639 we get this fascinating sentence: Canetti, and Borges, too I think—two very different men—said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. And so right there we have the first direct mention of Borges, but also a marker of a clear narrator, likely unreliable (I think).

This whole Part is filled with odd sentences. Here’s one: Young Hans Reiter also liked to walk, like a diver, but he didn’t like to sing, for divers never sing. Is this some allusion to Greek myth (or another famous work) or is it just one of the quirks of the narrator? Here’s another odd phrase (page 654): A “redemption that smelled of mirror” what? And another about mirrors: “Are they the mirror of our fate or the hammer that will shatter mirror and fate together?”

On pages 658-659 we learn that Reiter reads Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, a medieval epic poem that tells the story of an Arthurian hero’s quest for the Holy Grail.

On page 663 there is a mention of “a machine that would make artificial clouds.” As pure coincidence, this made me think of a similar detail in Michael Chabon’s novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Pages 669-670 seemed to recall parts of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. Anyone care to make that connection more explicit?

On page 670, Reiter imagines that under his uniform he is wearing the “suit or garb of a madman.” There is much in the ensuing pages about going mad, and we have seen asylums featured in almost every part of the book. What is Bolaño trying to say about the relationship between madness and death?

Jules Verne wrote a novel called Carpathian Castle that seems right up Bolaño’s alley.

Page 682: “Halder, who was a painter”. You know who else was an Austrian-born German painter….

A paragraph at the top of page 694 seems reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye. Reiter is amused by his younger sister’s interest in him (Phoebe) and is “swamped by grim thoughts in which everything was meaningless.”

The references to Lake Geneva and Montreux on page 697 recall the asylum that housed Edwin Johns in The Part About the Critics and, of course, Vladimir Nabokov’s home.

Week 12: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

641: Hans Reiter often dreams of Leathesia difformis, a seaweed plant that grows on rocks and other seaweed and that he has never seen in person.

652: Hans Reiter’s father, speaking with a member of the visiting National Socialist party committee who has come to Reiter’s house to visit, becomes somewhat confrontational but eventually cowers and wonders if he ought not to throw himself at the feet of the man, whom he describes as a dreamer. Afterward, he “shook his head at each word the other uttered, as if he wasn’t convinced (in fact he was terrified), as if it were difficult for him to understand the full scope of the other mans’ dreams.”

675: A soldier who has gotten lost in the tunnels of the Maginot line on the western front dreams of God in human form. In the dream, he’s sleeping under an apple tree and is awakened by a country squire. The squire turns out to be god, and he offers to get the soldier out of the tunnels in exchange for the purchase of the soldier’s soul. The soldier asks to go back to sleep, and God says that he already owns the soldier’s soul, so the soldier ought not to be a fool and ought to take the deal. The soldier agrees and signs in blood a contract written in some other language (not German or English or French). Then God leaves and the soldier decides to say a prayer. He notices that the apples on the tree have dried up like raisins or prunes, and he hears a metallic noise. He sees long plumes of smoke in the valley, and suddenly a hand grabs him by the shoulder; it turns out to be a real rescuing hand in real life waking him up.

680: Reiter is stationed at Castle Dracula in Romania and dreams about the inside of the crypt. The dignitaries and artsy folk who are visiting the castle (outside the dream) are (inside the dream) in an amphitheater and are laughing, except for one officer, who weeps and looks for a place to hide. One of the men reads a poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach (author of the Parzifal poem that Reiter earlier reads and delights in) and then spits blood. The men have agreed to eat the Baroness Von Zumpe, who was one of the visitors and also happened to be the niece of the owner of the estate Reiter worked on when younger.

684: General Entrescu pontificates about art and compares cubism (to its detriment) to “the dream of a single illiterate Romanian peasant.” Baroness Von Zumpe asks what he figures the peasants of Romania dream and how he knows.

692: Reiter and companions, having navigated the secret passages in the walls of Castle Dracula to witness Baroness Von Zump and General Entrescu having what seems to be porn-quality sex (complete with porn-quality penis), begin to masturbate. Comrade Wilke “seemed to be dreaming, or, more accurately, momentarily breaking through the massive black walls that separate waking from sleep.”

694: Reiter returns to his home and to the baroness’s uncle’s estate while on leave. He asks the gamekeeper at the estate about the baroness, and he shrugs. The shrugs, we’re told, “could mean he didn’t know or that reality was increasingly vague, more like a dream.”

Week 12: Deaths

by Nicole Perrin

p.638 — unidentified German soldier — age unknown — World War I –“the mummy,” a patient next to Hans Reiter’s father, dies in the hospital at Düren

p.661 — Füchler — around 40 — 1936 — Hans Reiter’s roommate; dies of a vague disease

p.670 — unidentified Polish soldier — age unknown — 1939 — the
Polish soldier punched one of Hans Reiter’s comrades, then was shot
running away

p.674 — Gustav — 20 yrs — 1940 — one of Hans Reiter’s fellow soldiers; went mad, escaped from the field hospital, and hanged himself from a tree

p.676 — unidentified German soldier — unknown — 1940 — according the the story Hans Reiter heard, the soldier was lost in the tunnels of the Maginot line and sold his soul to God in a dream; four days later he was hit by a German car

p.688 — a Romanian mathematician — 71 yrs — 1936 — at the Romanian castle, Popescu tells the story of a mathematician he once knew who “saw something [he] shouldn’t” and ended up in a madhouse; cause of death unknown

Of course, there are also the numberless unmentioned dead of the war Reiter is fighting.

Week 11: The Part About the Crimes concludes

I know that many people are glad to see this part end.

When I first read this part of the novel, I felt like it needed to be cataloged in some way. We’re doing that here with tracking all of the deaths and all of the dreams and whatnot, but I have been more detached from this part this time around and I am way behind on even posting a weekly summary of what happened in the novel. Apologies. Part of what confounds me is that there is just so much data to process I find it hard to dig in without either seeming like some grand, bird’s-eye-view of the world or transitioning quickly back and forth between topics and ideas (see tidbits previously and below).

As I’ve mentioned several times, there is a correlation between the femicides and the Holocaust. I believe that Bolaño’s motivation in writing this Part and this novel is not to exploit these murders for their shock value or because he loves describing horrific violence against women. I see no pleasure here. By describing over a hundred cases in some detail, I believe he is trying to honor them in some way. A belief that each life is important motivates many Holocaust works (fiction and nonfiction). Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust is called Yad Vashem—which comes from the Bible verse “And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem) that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5). The name, I believe, is important. [A little tangent: Yad Vashem bestows the title Righteous Among the Nations to non-Jews who helped Jews escape the Holocaust. Only three Americans have received this honor: the Sharp couple and Varian Fry. Fry helped thousands of artists, writers, and filmmakers escape Europe, among them: Hannah Arendt, Max Ophuls, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst. How is this guy not better known?] What do you think? Is Bolaño’s portrayal of the murders insincere or exploitative or does he end up honoring the lives of the women?

Looking back over my notes for this whole Part (volume 2 of the 3 volume set), I have a few tidbits I’d like to put out there for conversation. Apologies if some of these have been covered in the forums or on other blogs.

On page 579, Hass says the name of the killer of women in Juarez is Antonio Uribe. We see a lot about the slipperiness of the Uribe family. In fact, one of the men arrested for the murders in Juarez is named Uribe. “Juarez bus driver Victor Garcí­a Uribe was given a 50 year sentence on October 13 by a Chihuahua judge for the rape and murder of eight women whose bodies were found in a cotton field in November 2001.”

I mentioned how parts of The Part About Fate reminded me of Tarantino and Pulp Fiction, well I was surprised to feel that parts of The Part About the Crimes reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson and Magnolia. I am particularly thinking of the behind-the-scenes TV show sections and this part about Reinaldo: “there was the famous host, Televisa’s star of the moment, sitting at the foot of the bed, with a drink in his hand…” which brought to mind a scene from Magnolia of Philip Baker Hall’s character, a famous TV show host sitting at the foot of his bed with a drink, feeling miserable, contemplating a confession to his wife. A tenuous connection, but just thought I’d mention it.

In that same scene (page 566), Reinaldo realizes the famous TV host wants to kill himself and Reinaldo says “Anything I might say, I realized then, would be useless.” I think this is metaphor for the femicides. How can they be stopped? Should you intervene? What can you even say that will be useful?

Way back on page 433, I saw this passage which reminded me of the themes of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King: “And at this point, after sighing deeply, Florita Almada would say that several conclusions could be drawn: 1) that the thoughts that seize a shepherd can easily gallop away with him because it’s human nature; 2) that facing boredom head on was an act of bravery and Benito Juarez had done it and she had done it too and both had seen terrible things in the face of boredom, things she would rather not recall.”

In our first bolano-l group read of 2666, Andrew Haley wrote: “The Part  About the Crimes is particularly tricky, as it obviously is based on real events, and apparently was inspired by a book length cataloging of the victims (Huesos en el Desierto; Anagrama, 2002) put together by the Mexican reporter Sergio Gonzalez on whom the character of the Mexican reporter named Sergio Gonzalez is based. Are we meant to read The Part About the Crimes as a kind of New Journalism? Is Bolaño using the vessel of his fiction to perform a political or social function that is essentially journalistic rather than literary? Is he in essence using 2666 as a vehicle to deliver Huesos en el Desierto to a broader audience?” Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez’s book does not appear to be translated into English yet (publishers: get on it!), although there is a French edition. Somewhat related is Diana Washington Valdez’s book The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women.

If you are interested in seeing how some of the characters from this Part might look on stage, I’ll link to a post from last year about a theatrical adaptation of 2666. (Warning: Possible Spoilers)

The affair between Juan de Dios Martinez and Elvira Campos seems awfully reminiscent of a relationship in a Manuel Puig novel, but I’m forgetting which one. Anyone remember if it’s in Blood of Requited Love or Pubis Angelical? There is a lot about being in dark bedrooms at dusk, looking out across the city.

The passing mention of Sherlock Holmes on page 610 reminded me that Borges wrote a poem called Sherlock Holmes. His short story Death and the Compass also bears a strong resemblance to a Sherlock-type detective. There is even a novel wherein a character named Jorge Luis Borges is a crime-solving detective.

Some quotes:
“If life is misery, why do we endure it?”
“Every hundred feet the world changes.”
“Trust in God, He wont’ let anything disappear.”
“When you make mistakes from the inside, the mistakes stop mattering. Mistakes stop being mistakes.”

Once again, there is a fantastic summary of this week’s reading, with commentary, over at ijustreadaboutthat:

Since most of us in the online readalong also read IJ, we have a tendency to use it as a point of comparison (even though it really isn’t comparable at all). But I will get in the comparison game as well, just to say that like IJ, each Part of this book ends with something way up floating in the air.  And while the IJ ending was initially discomfiting, upon later reflection, it works quite well. I only hope that 2666 offers the same satisfaction.

Week 11: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

571: This isn’t a dream, but as Florita tells Sergio about her visions of the killings, she explains that an ordinary murder (in her visions) ends with an image of liquid, as of a lake or a well being disturbed, while the serial killings have a heavy image, metallic, mineral, or smoldering. These images resonate with some of the critics’ dreams. The killers in her visions speak a mixed-up (made-up) language, another thread that ran through the critics’ dreams.

581: We learn that Kessler almost never dreams about killers and seldom remembers his dreams. He’s described as lucky for forgetting them. His wife dreams frequently, usually about dead relatives or friends they haven’t seen in a long time.

594: Kessler dreams of a man pacing around a crater and figures the man is probably himself before deciding it’s not important and losing the image.

605: Congresswoman Azucena Esquivel Plata, telling the story of her friend Kelly Parker, states a belief that when her friend began going by Kelly Parker rather than by Luz Maria Rivera, “she somehow took the first step into invisibility, into a nightmare.”

621: While in Santa Teresa investigating the case of her missing friend, the congresswoman finds herself pacing her hotel room, and she notices two mirrors — one at the end of the room and the other by the door — that didn’t reflect one another unless you stood in a certain place. Yet she couldn’t see herself in the mirrors from that place. She experimented wit positions as she tried to go to sleep. While this is not put forward as a dream, it bears an eerie resemblance to Norton’s dream about the mirrors in her hotel room. It’s almost as if Norton was dreaming the congresswoman’s experience somehow. I wonder if their hotel room was the same one, and I wonder how the timing of the two occurrences works out.

624: Reporter Mary Sue Bravo dreams that a woman was sitting at the foot of her bed. She could feel the weight of the body on her mattress but could feel nothing when she stretched her legs out to touch the body.

626: The following passage from the point of view of the congresswoman isn’t really described as a dream or a vision, but it must be one or the other, or something like it: “Those voices I heard (voices, never faces or shapes) came from the desert. In the desert, I roamed with a knife in my hand. My face was reflected in the blade. I had white hair and sunken cheeks covered with tiny scars. Each scar was a little story that I tried and failed to recall.”

Week 11: Deaths

by Michael Cooler

93 — p.569 — Aurora Cruz Barrientos — 18 yrs — May 1997 — killed in her own home, multiple stab wounds, raped, a neighborhood prowler is suspected
94 — p.573 — Sabrina Gómez Demetrio — 15 yrs — June 1997 — stabbed and shot by men in a Suburban, she walks to a hospital before she dies
95 — p.573 — Aurora Ibánez Medel — 34 yrs — June 1997 — worker, found by the highway, strangled and probably raped, her husband Jaime Pacheco Pacheco confesses after harsh interrogation
96 — p.575 — unidentified — 20-25 yrs — July 1997 — found in a sewage ditch, dead for at least three months, wearing an expensive velvet glove
97 — p.576 — Ana Muñoz Sanjuán — 18 yrs — September 1997 — waitress, found behind some trash cans, raped and strangled
98 — p.577 — María Estela Ramos — 23 yrs — September 1997 — worker, found in an empty lot, tortured, raped, blunt trauma to the head
99 — p.579 — unidentified — 14-16 yrs — October 1997 — found near railroad tracks, tortured, strangled
100 — p.583 — Leticia Borrego García — 18 — October 1997 — found near the Pemex soccer fields, half buried, strangled, Lalo Cura is confused by the crime scene
101 — p.586 — Lucía Domínguez Roa — 33 yrs — October 1997 — waitress, shot in the abdomen supposedly by chance while walking in Colonia Hidalgo
102 — p.591 — Rosa Gutiérrez Centeno — 38 yrs — October 1997 — worker and waitress, found by the side of a dirt road, strangled
103 — p.595 — unidentified — November 1997 — female bones discovered by a group of hikers on the steepest side of Cerro La Asunción
104 — p.599 — Angélica Ochoa — November 1997 — looked more like a settling of scores than a sex crime, shot five times by her husband the pimp La Venada
105 — p.603 — Rosario Marquina — 19 yrs — November 1997 — worker, found on the back lot of a maquiladora, strangled, raped
106 — p.607 — María Elena Torres — 32 yrs — November 1997 — found in her house, she had marched in the WSDP protest two days prior, stabbed in the neck, probably by her boyfriend
107 — p.611 — Úrsula González Rojo — 20-21 yrs — December 1997 — worker, found in a dry streambed by a rancher who was hunting, stabbed
108 — p.616 — Juana Marín Lozada — December 1997 — worked at a computer store, dumped in an open field by the highway, neck broken, probably not raped or tortured
109 — p.620 — unidentified — December 1997 — bones discovered on the edge of a ranch
110 — p.625 — Esther Perea Peña — 24 yrs — December 1997 — shot to death at the dance hall Los Lobos, perhaps by accident
111 — p.630 — unidentified — 15-16 yrs — December 1997 — remains found in a plastic bag on some land a few miles from a farming cooperative
112 — p.632 — unidentified — about 18 yrs — December 1997 — remains found in a plastic bag on the eastern edge of the city, close to the border

Other deaths or disappearances:

p.615 — Josué Hernández Mercado — 32 years old, the reporter for La Raza de Green Valley, disappears. We can guess that he has been killed for covering the murders of women in Santa Teresa.

p.616 — Kelly Rivera Parker — Friend of politician Azucena Esquivel Plata, disappears in Santa Teresa. We learn that she organized sex parties for narcos, and is probably dead, or more or less dead.

p.626 — Francisco López Ríos — The supposed killer of Esther Perea Peña in the dance hall Los Lobos, but possibly a scapegoat killed to conceal the identity of the real murderer, a judicial on the narcotics squad.

Weeks 8-10 Vocabulary

by Meaghan Doyle

alkaloid any of numerous usually colorless, complex, and bitter organic bases
Anthropomtric measurement of the human individual for the purposes of understanding human physical variation
auricle an atrium of a heart
autodidact a self-taught person
bolus a rounded mass: as a : a large pill b : a soft mass of chewed food
bracken a large coarse fern
calamitous being, causing, or accompanied by a state of deep distress or misery caused by major misfortune or loss
calumny a misrepresentation intended to harm another’s reputation
capillaries any of the smallest blood vessels connecting arterioles with venules and forming networks throughout the body
coquettish a woman who endeavors without sincere affection to gain the attention and admiration of men
corolla the part of a flower that consists of the separate or fused petals and constitutes the inner whorl of the perianth
cyclopean huge, massive
diuretic tending to increase the excretion of urine
divination the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers
ecchymosis the escape of blood into the tissues from ruptured blood vessels
epithelium a membranous cellular tissue that covers a free surface or lines a tube or cavity of an animal body and serves especially to enclose and protect the other parts of the body, to produce secretions and excretions, and to function in assimilation
esplanade a level open stretch of paved or grassy ground; especially : one designed for walking or driving along a shore
excrescences a projection or outgrowth especially when abnormal
festering to undergo or exist in a state of progressive deterioration
harangued to speak pompously or bombastically
hematomas a mass of usually clotted blood that forms in a tissue, organ, or body space as a result of a broken blood vessel
hypovolemia a state of decreased blood volume
impervious not capable of being affected or disturbed
louche not reputable or decent
neuropathies an abnormal and usually degenerative state of the nervous system or nerves
odontology study of dental applications in legal proceedings
pachucos a young Mexican-American having a taste for flashy clothes and a special jargon and usually belonging to a neighborhood gang
palatine of, relating to, or lying near the palate
pestilential giving rise to vexation or annoyance
portend indicate, signify
posole a thick soup chiefly of Mexico and the United States Southwest made with pork, hominy, garlic, and chili
presentiment a feeling that something will or is about to happen
proliferation to increase in number
putrefaction the decomposition of organic matter
resoundingly producing or characterized by resonant sound
rudimentary very imperfectly developed or represented only by a vestige
stoic not affected by or showing passion or feeling
surreptitious acting or doing something clandestinely
unequivocal leaving no doubt
vehemently marked by forceful energy : powerful
ventriloquist one who provides entertainment by using ventriloquism to carry on an apparent conversation with a hand-manipulated dummy
verisimilitude depicting realism
vermillion a bright red pigment consisting of mercuric sulfide
virulent objectionably harsh or strong

Week 10: The Infernal Comedy

by Maria Bustillos

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering.

Here is a fact that recontextualizes the crimes for us. The weight of the crimes, not only the crimes against the murdered women but against the guys in the Santa Teresa prison, the guys who are stuck in the corrupt police force, and the crimes of the mass society, crimes of enforced poverty and ignorance, begin to assume new and different proportions in this week’s section.  As word of the crimes begins to spread, the whole world’s complicity begins to make itself felt.

The “snuff film” section speaks very clearly to this alteration.  There is a real film called Snuff that was filmed in Argentina in 1971, that depicted a “Mansonesque murder cult.”  The film was originally called Slaughter. The directors of the real film are Michael and Roberta Findlay. According to Wikipedia:

Independent low-budget distributor and sometime producer Allan Shackleton later re-released another version of the film, unbeknownst to the original filmmakers. Having just read a newspaper article on the rumor of snuff films being importer from South America, he decided to cash on the urban legend and added a new ending to the film in which a woman is brutally murdered by a film crew, supposedly the crew of Slaughter[2]. Filmed in a verite style by Simon Nuchtern, the new ending purported to show an actual murder. This new footage was spliced onto the end of Slaughter with an abrupt cut suggesting that the footage was unplanned and the murder authentic. This new version of the film was released under the title Snuff, with the tagline The film that could only be made in South America… where life is CHEAP

By this means and others that I’ll be getting to in the next few days, Bolaño demonstrates the involvement of pretty much everyone in the kind of mindset that would find the torture and murder of a woman entertaining.

Week 10: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

521: Thinking of the Caciques, Haas considers them lost in a dream.

534: Elvira Campos dreams of selling her properties and belongings to get enough money to fly to Paris and having plastic surgery to turn back the clock to her early 40s. When the bandages are removed, they fall to the floor and slither not like snakes “but rather like the guardian angels of snakes.” She approves of the surgery’s results, and with a nod, “she rediscovers the sovereignty of childhood, the love of her father and mother” and steps back out into Paris.

542: The cameraman for the original snuff film thinks he’s lost in a nightmare as they make their way to the ranch at which they’ll film.

554: It’s not presented as a dream, but as Lalo Cura thinks about his lineage, he’s “half asleep, drifting between sleep and wakefulness,” and he hears or remembers voices telling him the stories of his family tree.

561: Sergio Gonzales visits Michele Sanchez’s mother, and she tells him of a dream in which her dead daughter — not her youngest in fact — was the youngest of her daughters, a baby of two or three years who was there and then suddenly not there.

562: Haas contemplates, “as if in a dream,” some of the Bisontes moving around in the prison yard as if grazing. Some of the inmates seemed, he thought, to move in slow motion. This resonates with some other mentions in past dreams about time being somehow slowed down or sped up.




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