RMST 495/520: Long Books

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Reading the third part of Quiet Chaos has been an intense and immersive experience. So much has happened in such a short span! It’s starting to feel as if everything in Pietro’s life is beginning to unravel, leading towards the long-awaited grief. Things are taking a turn!

Commentary

In the third reading, Pietro continues his usual routine of sitting on a park bench, waiting for his daughter Claudia to finish school. His stillness has become a ritual, a quiet attempt to hold onto what remains while processing what is lost and what is grief. Samuele, a coworker, finds him there and goes over a report on the company merger, revealing the psychological trauma it imposes on employees versus the financial gain for shareholders. The report identifies only 3 groups of employees who can endure such upheaval: the faithful, the traitors, and the collaborationists. Metaphorically, I believe the corporate turmoil mirrors Pietro’s personal grief, whereby both require endurance (with faith), moral navigation (to betray or to stay loyal), and confrontation with loss (grief and change don’t have to be coped with alone but shared and empathized together).

Interestingly, Pietro leaves the bench to have lunch with Thierry at a nearby cafe, who pressures him to take over Jean-Claude’s position. Pietro refuses, suspecting Thierry’s manipulation in Jean-Claude’s departure. However, Thierry accuses Jean-Claude of betrayal, company theft, and falsifying financial accounts, blurring the lines between loyalty to the company and their friendship. Later, Pietro brings Claudia to Jean-Claude’s home to confront him, only to intervene in a heated marital argument. I think the couple’s argument illustrates how the process of grief can intersect with unexpected social intrusion in life.

In the novel, it switches to a dinner scene, focusing on Pietro’s brother without Pietro. The brother learns that Pietro has become locally famous as “the father who sits outside his daughter’s school after an event of both trauma and heroism” from his dinner guests. He discovers that Eleonora, one of the dinner guests, is the woman Pietro rescued at the beach. The next day, he goes to the park and tells Pietro about this. Interestingly, Pietro learns that Eleonora owns Brick Chocolate, a company connected to the company merger. Here, I believe Eleonora represents someone who links Pietro’s past heroism and trauma to his present corporate chaos and struggles to outwardly grieve.

Near the end of the third reading, Pietro found himself at a meeting teaching parents to discuss death and separation with children. Here, Pietro epithanizes that Claudia’s lack of grief over her mother’s death may reflect his own incomplete mourning (or not grieving enough), as shown to hear. That is, Claudia is learning from him, seeing how he doesn’t grieve, so she copies that. Overwhelmed by this realization, he faints at the meeting. Later, while driving home, the floodgates open! Pietro cries profusely in his car, finally confronting the depth of his loss, his wife, his sense of normality, his past world of love and family, his past self. Honestly, I believe it is all about to begin unravelling: Pietro’s identity, once suspended in limbo, is beginning to reorganize around what is present, what is absent, and what is the truth.

Discussion Question

You can answer the question in any way you like, whether related to literary works or personal experiences.

Can keeping grief, betrayal, or disappointment hidden actually teach something to children (or others) intentionally or unintentionally? When we withhold, remove ourselves from, or control difficult emotions, are we protecting others from these emotions, or are we failing to help them learn and go through these necessary emotions healthily?

I have been reading about 90 pages in this book every other week and so since we haven’t made a post on our Selected Reading in a while, this post will be on the last 180 pages that I’ve read. Oddly enough, every time I stop before writing in this blog, Daniel is about to meet with Nuria Monfort.

I finally got to read about his first encounter with Nuria but he goes to see her again because everything she told him the first time was a lie. Everything she said about Carax wasn’t true, her husband Miquel isn’t actually in prison, and she’s the one who’s been picking up mail from Carax’s father’s old apartment. I am starting to wonder if Carax is still alive and if Nuria and Miquel are helping Carax in some way, since we also found out that Miquel and Carax were childhood friends. Surprisingly enough, Carax also used to be friends with the evil Inspector Fumero, so I’m also starting to wonder if Coubert (the guy with the burned face) is also a childhood friend, perhaps Jorge Aldaya (Penelope’s brother)? We find out that Penelope and Carax were in love but they couldn’t make their relationship public so their plan was to escape Barcelona and run off to Paris together but Penelope never met him at the train station so he went alone. We know that Carax comes back to Barcelona and apparently dies shortly after arriving but nothing feels certain anymore. There are many holes in many stories and Daniel and his friend Fermin are trying to get to the bottom of it all. 

Daniel falls in love with his childhood best friend’s sister, Bea, but since she is engaged to be married, we find ourselves with another example of a forbidden love. Their love is very short-lived and after a creepy encounter that the two of them have in an abandoned house, where Daniel sees Coubert and urges Bea to run (they both make it out unharmed), he doesn’t hear from Bea again. Right after he shares that a week has gone by without hearing from her, he says,

“En siete días, estaría muerto¨(In seven days time, I would be dead).

This shocked me. Bea’s father certainly wants to kill Daniel, maybe her brother does too, and while Coubert seems creepy and dangerous, he hasn’t done anything to Daniel yet and honestly just seems to want Carax’s book more than anything else. It also seemed strange that Ruiz Zafón would kill off his main character (and narrator) of the book so did he mean this in a metaphorical sense? Or does he experience some kind of Near-Death Experience? As I mentioned, nothing seems certain anymore but all the questions are keeping me very engaged in the story. It’s always a struggle for me to put the book down and wait for another week, before I can continue with the story. 

Discussion question: How many of you are interested in murder mysteries? Do you like guessing what happens in the end and if so, are you often surprised or are your guesses usually correct?

I took the reading break to finish Book 3 of Conversation in the Cathedral, and I feel completely drawn into the world. Somehow, the fragmented narrative which disregards chronology did not take away from the immersion — though occasionally, I had a smug feeling about being able to piece together the puzzle, as if I was a detective, or an investigating journalist, to stick to the theme of the novel.

Does your book respect the chronological order of events? Why might an author choose to break up chronological order, and what are the effects?

Vargas Llosa presents the insides of a political power struggle between senators under Odría’s rule of Peru. As if pulling out a weed in the ground, he unearths its roots — stories hidden from the public eye — which includes a Bildungsroman (Santiago), a 9pm soap opera (Amalia and Ambrosio), a murder mystery (Hortensia)…(Digression: the mix of genres reminds me of Star Wars — the first six movies.) Truth is revealed a little at a time, and the reader has to actively work on piecing it together, which makes it such a satisfying read.

Don Cayo is the Minister of Public Order, known for being cold and cruel, oppressing Odría’s opposition forces with an iron hand. He is portrayed a pathetic and distrustful. Don Fermín (Santiago’s father) is a senator, patron of Odría’s rise from the very beginning, but merely for business reasons, portrayed as a gentleman, a loving father. They were once friends, but Cayo refuses to accept stocks from Fermín, and refuses to use Public Order funds for Fermín’s building projects. Fermín nearly goes bankrupt, but his Coalition succeeds in expelling Cayo. He escapes Peru, leaving his mistress Hortensia “the Muse” broke. She was also Fermín’s previous mistress, and she blackmails Fermín to “get back on her feet”. She was later killed in her apartment. Santiago’s boss is an experienced journalist with many underground connections, and together they investigate the story, to find Fermín behind the murder. Santiago has a nervous breakdown. Losing faith in everything, he makes up with his family. However, the author later reveals that Fermín’s driver Ambrosio committed the murder on his own accord, out of loyalty. Ambrosio is the person with whom Santiago is having a conversation in the Cathedral bar, trying to figure out at what point in his life he fucked himself up.

Santiago was an idealist boy, leftist, lover of literature. When his dad fishes him out of prison, something in him extinguishes. He feels incoherent: he can’t fight for communism while taking advantage of his government-sourced privilege. This is the reason Santiago explicitly gives us, but I believe otherwise. He’s disillusioned because he realizes his revolution, his ideal, is only a children’s game in the eyes of politicians like Fermín and Cayo. “Let them play the revolution game,” Don Cayo says. They never saw Santiago’s group as worthy of their attention, never thought their voice worthy of hearing. They just throw them sloppily into jail. Only the revolt of their fellow senators mattered to them.

He breaks with his family and becomes a journalist, drinking to his own sorrows with Carlitos, on a road towards a mediocre life as revealed in the beginning of the book, a life which I could not put into words better than Trainspotting. This life pains him, but only discretely, suppressed most of the time until too many beers washes away the invisible painkiller, and leaves him throbbing in the Cathedral.

[Trainspotting end monologue]

HOWEVER. This lucky privileged young man still has a family that loves him. His brother and sister go through troubles to find where he lives, and they have some friendly siblings’ nights out, catching up on family matters, which warms my heart. Not to mention Fermín who dropped all work within 30 minutes of Santiago’s call to meet him and make up with him. Vargas Llosa could have depicted a mean, unloving family that forces Santiago to be religious and conservative and “good”, but no one really did that. He instead brought out the side of conservativism that values family. I can’t help being touched by the complex love and hate within this family (digression: the same way I love the Skywalkers).

There are other compelling characters in the book. I’ll talk about them next time.

583. That’s the number of pages I’ve read so far of Bolaño’s books, which were assigned for this course. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve finally become accustomed to his style. As I’m reading, I find myself often thinking to myself “What do you expect? That’s Bolaño for you”. Bolaño’s style is, well, there are a few words that come to mind: “unconventional”, “experimental”, “poetic”, “creative”, “weird”. I’ve appreciated his writing style since early on in The Savage Detectives. However, at times, I found certain passages to feel a bit tedious. He seems to enjoy listing things. For example, when he writes “[…] about the poetry of Liu Hsiang, Tung Chung-shu, Wang Pi, Tao Chien (Tao Yuan-ming, 365-427), the Tang dynasty, Han Yu (768-824), Meng Hoa-Jan (689-740), Wang Wei (699-759), Li Po (701-762), Tu Fu (712-770) […]” (p. 209). This list goes on for a little longer, but I don’t have much of a desire to continue typing it up, for that is far more tedious than reading a list in a novel. This is one of the shortest lists that he’s included in The Savage Detectives. But I’m not citing this part of the novel because I want to criticize Bolaño’s writing style. I’m bringing it up because it’s a passage that demonstrates how I’ve had to modify my expectations, as well as stretch my imagination, in regards to what should be included in a novel. This also brings to mind our discussion in class about why long books are long and why short books are short. If Bolaño hadn’t included these lists, or the many tangents that he likes to go on, would a shorter version of this novel have as strong an impact on its readers? Are these parts considered to be what people often refer to as “filler”? And if this is the case, is “filler” inherently bad? These are questions that I’ve been pondering over as I continue to read Bolaño’s writings, which have lead me to sometimes feel a bit perplexed, yet my usual reaction is that of satisfaction. I wanted Amulet to be longer than 184 pages. And now I’m wondering if I will feel the same way after finishing The Savage Detectives. The “tangents” I refer to are parts of the novel that diverge from what was being discussed right before. The section of the novel that we read for class this week contains three tangents that I greatly enjoyed. One of them was when Michel Bulteau and Ulises Lima were discussing the band The Question Marks (p. 247), another one was when Norman Bolzman was describing how Ulises Lima was questioning the accuracy of a biblical translation (p. 305-306), and the last one was when Hugo Montero was expressing the superiority of strong tobacco (p. 357-358). I realize that the reason that these tangents made a strong impression on me is because they pertained to topics that greatly interest me (rock bands, translations of the Bible and tobacco), while the list of the Chinese dynasties, although it was a much shorter section, was one that didn’t resonate with me on the same level. However, I still appreciate every list that Bolaño chose to include, as well as every instance in which he diverged from the main plot. Why is that? Well, as someone who prefers watching independent films over Hollywood movies, I have a very strong appreciation for parts of a narrative that don’t advance the plot, but which provide us with more depth, even if others might argue that the depth is useless because it’s irrelevant to the story. These moments allow us to spend more time with a character. We get a glimpse at their inner workings. We learn about what matters to them, what experiences they’ve had and what their thoughts focus on. They make the characters appear as if they are real people; individuals with their own interests and ideas, which exist outside of what we typically refer to as “the plot”. These parts demonstrate the notion of a “slice of life”, which Bolaño captures and presents to us through his writing. As human beings going through life, there are many instances in which we will have thoughts and experiences that don’t advance the “main plot” of our life story. And yet, these tangents, these moments of contemplation, are part of what makes us who we are. Bolaño is writing about the human experience. And he captures it so well.

Question for the class: If you were Bolaño’s editor for The Savage Detectives, would you have shortened the length of the book? If so, which parts would you have chosen to exclude?

I personally liked the beginning of the novel better than where we currently are for a number of reasons. I had enjoyed Garcia Madero’s journal entry style of writing as it felt like we were almost in his head and it felt intimate and easier to follow along. Even though there were still aspects that made it hard to read or understand things, his journal entries made it easier as it felt like the book had a backbone or something holding it together. I feel like it kind of gets confusing as to who is talking sometimes. Additionally, I feel like there are a lot of names whether of people or cities and it gets hard to remember all of it. I also feel like there are a lot of small interactions that become hard to keep up with as well. It also feels different because considering we think of Belano and Lima as one of the main characters or protagonists of the book we would assume we get more access to their thoughts. However, it feels like we are starting to hear about them more so from other people’s perspectives or memories. 

What stood out to me the most was how the importance of characters has changed throughout the book. For example, in the beginning it seemed as if Garcia Madero was the main character and he would always be there and also narrating for the entire book but that was not the case. Similarly, the perspective on Belano feels almost the same as I can see his significance shift over time. Earlier in the book, he felt more important as if he was a central character however, as the book goes he slowly becomes more and more insignificant. The part that I found really interesting about this was that he was called a night watchman. At first, I did not understand who even was being called that but the way I saw it was that Belano was just a night watchman in someone’s perspective which felt kind of weird. I feel like him losing his name was one of the factors that show he was slowly becoming insignificant. I think the difference in perspective is interesting because if I had to describe Baleno I would say visceral realist or something to do with Latin literature but to see he is just a night man in someone’s eyes was different. 

Discussion Question: How do you view identity in this book?

Back at it again with The Savage Detectives! Hopefully everyone had an enjoyable and productive reading break, I would say mine was only so-so because unfortunately I was feeling sick for part of it, but luckily I was able to get some actual reading done during this reading break. This week’s (or I guess last two week’s) reading was just under 200 pages in the Picador edition which is quite a bit, but strangely enough after finishing reading the selected pages today, I felt that both a lot of stuff happened yet not really much at all. I think as I was reading over these past two weeks, the professor’s mention of this period of sort of “waiting” during part II of The Savage Detectives became very apparent. We’ve already discussed in class and in our blog posts about these stories within stories and what’s really “important”, and this section of The Savage Detectives still begs those very same discussion questions so I won’t keep beating that dead horse. Instead, I’ll just point out some portions that stood out to me (let’s just say parts that I found either interesting, important, or both)!

First and foremost, we get the very slightest of mentions of what happened to Belano, Lima, Garcia Madero, and Lupe (though still no actual, explicit mentions of the latter two). It happens in one of Luis’ accounts where Luscious Skin basically sort of theorizes about Lima’s disappearance in Managua. Not much is said that we don’t already know though, the group heads up north allegedly in search of Cesarea Tinajero (who by the way is still kind of an enigma), Belano and Lima flee Mexico City to Europe, and years later Lima returns to Mexico City but “the killers” show up and are still looking for him which is why he decides to stay in Managua and not come back. Who are those “killers”? Well it would have to be Alberto if I had to guess, assuming these “killers” even exist. Remember, this is just Luscious Skin’s theory which I don’t really believe in the first place, and a couple years later Lima does in fact return to Mexico, so maybe this whole Nicaragua story was just a big nothingburger. Though that’s probably a poor way to put it, I just wanted to use the word nothingburger to be honest. I really think that the whole point of Lima’s disappearance in Nicaragua was to show us the other people’s reactions to his disappearance and current views on visceral realism in the following accounts. Although, visceral realism is essentially dead and frowned upon by most apart from a couple of the realists and that one young poet, Efren Hernandez.

I would like to take a moment to give a shoutout to one of the characters that I admire the most, Xochitl. You know, a lot of the times I feel like the visceral realists don’t really have their own sense of purpose and just kind of go with the flow of their daily lives. Xochitl on the other hand works two jobs (at the expense of losing many hours of sleep), works on her poetry whenever she gets a chance, takes care of her son, Franz, and gets both her poems as well as Jacinto and others’ poems published (which seems like more work than Belano or Lima ever put in when visceral realism was a thing). She definitely seems like one of the more “grounded” or “normal” characters (not sure if that’s the best way to put it) and I definitely at least admire her work ethic.

Some of the other accounts that I enjoyed reading were Joaquin’s accounts where it appears he’s slowly getting better (less crazy) at the psychiatric hospital, Mary Watson’s mini-hitchhiking adventure, as well as Norman Bolzman’s and Heimito Kunst’s experiences with Lima. The most confusing and perhaps my least enjoyable accounts were Amadeo Salvatierra’s. I mean, it doesn’t help that it’s like the only account that’s scattered throughout the rest, but you can also really feel that these are recollections from a drunk man (on top of that his accounts are set further in the past than the others)! I guess I’ll pivot from there to my discussion question for this week: “Whose accounts did you find the most confusing? What did you find significant from them and why?” Speaking of Amadeo’s accounts though, in the final one of this week’s reading, we get to see a glimpse of the enigmatic Tinajero’s “poem” (if you can even call it that). I’ll be completely honest, I’m not really sure what to make of it right now (Amadeo has been looking at it for more than forty years and neither does he). I guess I fall into the same boat as Amadeo where I’m left wondering what it really means. Maybe it ties into what we’ve discussed on what’s really “important”, maybe the point of it is that it’s not supposed to be important or have any meaning. I definitely thought of the square that we saw on the last page in class, but that just raises more questions than answering any of them. This also isn’t the first time I’ve seen Bolano use “drawings” in his books because in my last blog post for 2666, there are also strange geometric figures with names of philosophers. Strange, strange indeed…till next time, folks!

P.S. You probably didn’t notice but unfortunately I posted this blog post past midnight on Thursday. More unfortunately, the reason was because I was too caught up studying for a midterm tomorrow (technically later today), so please wish me luck! The good news is that after tomorrow I’ll only have one more midterm in March and I believe that one is on a Monday!

Has there ever been an attempt to bring Los Detectives Salvajes to the screen?

I would really like to see how they would do all the bits and pieces of the second part. As you can notice, every section, what I previously called interviews, has a name, two locations, and a year. Would they chronologically organize them as we did when making up the timeline? Would it look like the scenes of the US detective shows, when the “detective” goes around interrogating people to solve a crime?

Are those interviews or interrogations?

Lima and Belano around the world.

It has been harder to get immersed in this part of the book in comparison to when we were listening to Madero’s life. Except for the story of Mary Watson. At this point of the book I do not know how to keep track of the names/places/stories and possibly the numerous hidden and not so hidden connections that Bolaño is probably weaving though each story.

It took me by surprise to understand that the night watchman was Belano. It is interesting to see the character through the eyes of someone who is a complete outsider from the culture and tribe of the book (not Mexican, not a visceral-realist, not knowledgeable about Latin American poetry or Literature). Belano becomes completely insignificant, to a point that he loses his name for a moment. I guess because Mary has no connection to any of what I mentioned above she has no interest in concealing any action/behaviour of this strange character, she is just not that invested. I guess we see this too with other women in the book.

Is Belano a dangerous person? What is Belaño trying to tell us when he is transforming himself into a night watchman. A really suitable profession-job. Similar to what Belano was doing in Mexico city, don’t you think? But in this story the city is exchanged with the forest, the beach, and nature.

Do you think Belano tried to strangle Hugh? For me that is one of the weirdest scenes of the book. I have a feeling Bolaño is trying to tell us something else. After both Belano and Hugh start crying, the Spaniards join them and ask why they were crying. There is no answer, they “understood everything without having to be told and passed them the joint” (Bolaño 269). What do you mean they understood? What did they understand? For me I think the strangling did not happen. I have a gut feeling it is a representation of intense, hidden feelings, maybe an attraction that you are rejecting, a violent desire. In other words, I think they kissed.

There is a lot more to unpack in the novel regarding the complex and often hidden emotions and desires within men’s fraternal relationships, particularly in relation to homosexuality and bisexuality. A similar tension appears during Lima’s visit to Claudia, as Norman experiences a range of complicated and conflicting emotions reading this new visitor. However, that story belongs to a more layered narrative, one that raises other more pressing questions worth asking.