Jacek Macha Machowski Macha Machowski itibaren Texas
All those stars go to Captain Wentworth and that darn letter he wrote Anne. It killed me.
I was initially reticent about reading this book because I struggled through The Savage Detectives, which was maddeningly abstruse. Not being familiar with esoteric Spanish/Mexican literati, much of its sly wit escaped me. But I was willing to engage myself in Bolano's final masterpiece because he is so probing and original. I was warmly astonished. These are five books in one with a common thread through all of them--the murder of over 400 women in the past 15 years in the fictional town of Santa Teresa (based on true accounts of these murders in Ciudad Juarez). The first story is a search for the elusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi, and a love triangle (or quadrangle) of Archimboldi scholars. The second story concerns a Professor who hears voices telling him to hang a geometry book on the clothesline, and is very fetching with bittersweet humor. In the third section, a reporter named Fate goes to the Mexican border to cover a boxing match. All these stories lead us to Santa Teresa, where the fourth and most staggering story takes place. It is a penetrating account of the deaths of these forgotten women and the sociopolitical and socioeconomic forces that shape the investigation. The last section does a full circle to illuminate Archimboldi's life. Bolano could describe trousers drying and leave you haunted and awash in the beauty of his prose. While reading his words, the way sentences are stitched together like soft resplendent fabric, I felt like I was walking in it, or it was walking in me. This was liquid, fluid, creamy prose. It was very accessible because it was so natural. Never synthetic, never dry, never pretentious. In fact, it felt effortless and gliding. It was stark in its landscape but lush and sinewy in its tone, not one word wasted and yet it draped a world with a hypnotizing glow. It often was surreal; at times I felt I was entering a fifth dimension, but not in a David Lynch/David Foster Wallace/Nabokovian manner (but interesting that Bolano paid homage to Lynch). That is what dazzled me so deeply--that Bolano could rupture all the boundaries while maintaining them, that he could make you feel like you are in a postmodern world but easily so-- by writing with clarity and simplicity and alacrity. (Sometimes it was like being on LSD even though the writing was so pure, which was a feat in itself. You don't need to struggle to understand his novel). Finally, what made this book so transcendent, so unutterably beautiful, was this massive, monumental heart at its center. There is so much love in it and so much humble wisdom and naked truth, that it cried. It cried for the women and it cried for humanity, and it did this without grandstanding, without asking it from us or telling us with trumpets. It just spoke for itself with mortality and through its mortality, its immortality.