Kim Thúy’s Ru (2009) is a lyrical evocation of growing up amid displacement, exile, and migration. It proceeds via a series of very short sections or vignettes, many of which are no more than a dozen lines long, and few of which are more than a page. As each section starts a new page (and so there is abundant white space beneath many of them) and as, in this English translation at least, the text is only left-justified and so the lines are ragged on the right, at first glance upon opening the book it could seem to be a book of poetry.
Moreover, though it is presented as “a novel” on the front cover, it is as much as anything else memoir or meditation, even to some extent a collection of short stories–some humorous, some tragic–that collectively constitute the story of Vietnamese migration and adaptation to Canada.
The narrator’s name is Nguyen An Tinh. On my keyboard, I cannot reproduce the diacritics, which differ only by a single (under the i) from her mother’s name, Nguyen An Tinh. This already suggests how translation (and these are names twice translated: from Vietnamese to French, and now to English) flattens out difference and creates composite subjects. Similarly, there is also an uncertain difference and distance between narrator and author (whose name is, of course, Kim Thúy), whose stories overlap but presumably also differ in ways that can never be fully clear to the reader, least of all to a reader in English.
This is, moreover, a book that is continually in translation, in the various sense of that term. As well as the linguistic translation (usually implicit, but sometimes explicit, between Vietnamese and French; and characteristically invisible between French and English), there are the geographical translations between East Asia and North America, the cultural translations involved in that displacement (and its attendant memories), as well as the drastic change in status between a relatively privileged life in South Vietnam, the trauma of the refugee experience on a flimsy boat or in a Malaysian refugee camp, and the struggles of resettlement in Canada.
As such the book both questions and depends upon the notion that something survives translation. (And each page’s visual resemblance to poetry perhaps reminds us of the quip that it is poetry that is lost in translation.) At one point, the narrator directly addresses this issue:
Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: “Thuang Bà dê dâu?” I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry. Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight-year-old turned into a raging tiger when his Quebecois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.
If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to classify, to quantify the meaning of love through specific words: to love by taste (thích); to love without being in love (thuong); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); to love gratefully (tình nghia). It’s impossible quite simply to love, to love without one’s head. (96)
It’s worth repeating that my keyboard cannot do the Vietnamese orthography justice. But this passage again also suggests that the problem here is not just with (verbal) language, but also with bodily gestures that may seem to be innate or even natural. A well-meaning pat on the head on a Canadian sports field turns a Vietnamese kid into a “raging tiger.” Even love requires translation, or is perhaps untranslatable. Perhaps the narrator’s Vietnamese love, the love withing and surrounding her Vietnamese family, does not translate, and instead has to be invented anew, for her Canadian family and relations.
There is much that is left out of the narrator’s story–surely there is much left out of anyone’s story, but here the structure of brief vignettes, stopping and starting, and the white space surrounding them, makes those narrative absences all the clearer, such that we are not even sure if we are really dealing with narrative at all. One figure, for instance, who is almost entirely omitted is the narrator’s “‘white’ husband” (79), with the quotation marks around “white” adding a further layer of uncertainty, though we can assume he is not Vietnamese. After all, the only other time he is mentioned, it is for a sartorial faux pas when he wears a “red T-shirt with a yellow star,” in other words mimicking the national flag of (Socialist, postwar) Vietnam “in the streets of Montreal.” What is presumably intended as a gesture of affiliation is (again) taken as an insult, such that the narrator’s “parents had him take it off and replaced it with an ill-fitting shirt of my father’s” (95). Taking off the national flag and replacing it with the Vietnamese father’s shirt, does the husband now become more Vietnamese or more (inconspicuously) white? This cross-cultural relationship, between husband and wife, husband and in-laws, remains unexplored, off limits.
As for the love between mothers and children, that also takes on new aspects via displacement. Whereas the narrator has been given a name that is virtually indistinguishable from that of her mother’s, such that she is her “extension,” her “sequel,” whose task is to “continue her story” (2), she has given her own children names that are resolutely French: Pascal and Henri, names of French philosophers and kings. Moreover, Henri, at least, is probably never going to continue his mother’s (the narrator’s) story:
He is one of those children who don’t hear us, don’t speak to us, even though they’re neither deaf nor mute. [. . .] Probably he’ll never call me maman lovingly [. . .]. He won’t know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it’s invincible. (7)
This is a book about the obstacles to expression and translation, whether they be the untranslatability of emotion or language, or autism, or the vengeance and re-education camps of the Communist victors in the aftermath of war. But it is also a book about the struggles against those obstacles, and about the “moment[s] of complicity, of communion” (132) that can emerge through the glimpse of a scar, at a family reunion, or in the ritual whereby Henri “curl[s] up in Pascal’s arms, hiding behind him in front of strangers” (50). We “recognize our old selves,” but presumably also others, “only through fragments, through scars, through glimmers of light” (139). In this fragmented prose, it is perhaps the gaps between the vignettes as much as the stories they contain that allow such glimmers to shine through, sparks of joy amid suffering.
Annie Ernaux’s The Possession (2002) is the briefest of tales, at a mere sixty-two pages barely a novella, if a little more than a short story. It explores, and ultimately exorcises (temporarily at least) what Ernaux describes as possession “in both sense of the word”: property and madness.
The narrator is a woman who feels herself usurped. There is nothing particularly rational about this feeling, not least because it is she who ended the relationship that now so thoroughly disturbs her: “I was the one who had left W., several months earlier, after six years together.” Their parting had been, it seems, relatively amicable: “We continued to talk on the phone; we saw each other from time to time” (8). Yet when he takes up with a new lover, moving in with her, the narrator is seized with a jealousy that practically drives her out of her mind.
One frustration is that W. (with whom she remains in touch) is reticent to give her too many details about the new woman. “He had not,” for instance, “wanted to tell me her name. / This absent name was a hole, a void around which I turned in circles” (21). The narrator therefore turns detective, picking up on such hints as the man does let slip–for instance, that she teaches history at such and such a university–to try to track him down, at times convincing herself that she has indeed identified her putative rival.
But her obsession leads her less to pin down or focus in on a particular spot (though there are now swathes of Paris that she avoids, fearing that she may run into the new woman with her old flame), than to project her fears on her entire environment. Almost any woman could be her: on the metro, on the street, in a seminar room. “This transubstantiation of the bodies of women I encountered into the body of the other woman was in continual operation: I saw her everywhere” (13). Everything becomes a sign, a symbol of the other’s presence, or of the narrator’s own absence, her ejection from her former partner’s life.
She can no longer watch a movie or listen to a song without projecting herself into it: “Whatever the script, if the heroine was in pain, it was my pain that was being portrayed” (20). If the lover is now to be found everywhere the narrator looks, then the narrator also finds herself dispersed and fragmented, ubiquitous except where she actually wants to be.
None of this is exactly rational–“this is too fucked up” (57), the narrator admits. But it has its logic, and even this admittedly self-imposed pain has its appeal: she recognizes a desire “to hold on to its suffering which, after all, gave meaning to the world” (49). There is something creative, even productive, about the self-abasing and otherwise even paralyzing obsession that has taken over her.
As the narrator puts it, “One could find in this hunt and this frantic assembling of signs an exercise in the abandonment of intelligence. But I see its having a poetic function–the same one that is at work in literature, religion, and paranoia” (34). Finding significance in the smallest details, imbuing the world with meaning, literature, religion, and madness alike all provide purpose and motivation, if sometimes at the expense of self-flagellation and the risk of embarrassment at best, self-abnegation or even self-erasure at worst. There is something in the workings of jealousy that shines a light on representation itself: “Writing, that is, as a jealousy of the real” (34).
Writing, indeed, is the narrator’s way in, way through, and way out of her possession. At one stage she imagines writing as a weapon in her armoury aimed at the unknown (and unknowable) but real woman: told of the idea of “making dolls out of bread dough and pricking them with pins,” she thinks that “The act of writing, here, is perhaps not so different from that of sticking in needles” (29). It is a kind of witchcraft, pursued in the hope that art can be invoked to manage and even influence life: a wound to the imagined image of the other can translate into a real injury to the hated rival.
But writing can also be a kind of cure. After all, the narrator writes instead ofpricking dolls with pins (or worse). More to the point, perhaps, “the image of the Other–the desire that this Other had for him” is not only “equipped with a force great enough to sweep away the boredom and everything that had compelled me to break things off.” It also, no, “makes me write” (44). And writing, in turn, as the fictionalization of what is no doubt a real experience (at least someone’s real experience), allows the expression of jealousy without shame or embarrassment, giving it a form, a beginning as well, most crucially, as an end: “Writing has been a way to save that which is no longer my reality–a sensation seizing me from head to foot, in the street–but has become ‘the possession,’ a period of time, circumscribed and completed” (60–61).
It has also of course become The Possession, a novel or novella, similarly circumscribed and completed, and perhaps admirably (thankfully) brief: a short excursion into madness at the end of which we can turn the page, close the book, put it down, and return to a world in which not everything has meaning, and that is OK.
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s That Hair (2015) is hardly a conventional novel. It has no obvious plot, for instance, and consists instead of memories (presumably, mostly autobiographical; the narrator’s history seems on the whole to mirror Pereira de Almeida’s biography) and reflections braided around the persistent topic of the narrator’s hair. The hair itself is both the book’s subject and its excuse, its content and in many ways also its form in so far as the narrator’s thought processes curl and crimp, get matted and entangled, despite periodic efforts to brush them straight or give them more recognizable shape.
Strangely, perhaps, the hair itself is not in fact described at great length. We are merely told that after it was first cut, when the narrator, Mila, was till basically a baby, only six months old, it grew back or was “reborn coiled and dry” (1). Presumably it is dark, curly and, well . . . stereotypically “African.” It is characterized as a “rebellious mane [. . .] a lion’s mane” (5), further reinforcing the notion that her hair is what ties the narrator to the land of her birth, Angola, as well perhaps as indicating a dash of the primitive and the exotic.
But Mila is not exactly what, in Africa at least, would be called Black. She is, rather, a “mulata das pedras, as they say in Angola, not the idealized beauty that mulata conjures for them but a second-rate one, and with bad hair to boot” (6). Her father was “a blond-haired, prematurely bald young man who in past lives had been the blondest kid in the neighborhood, the child-elect to play Baby Jesus for a Beira nativity scene” (60) and she grows up with her paternal grandparents, Grandma Lúcia and Grandpa Manuel, in Portugal, in a town very close to Lisbon, to which she has moved when she was still a young child. She is, in other words, at least as much Portuguese as she is Angolan. Not that it is always so easy to disentangle the two.
After all, her Portuguese relatives have a long-lasting relationship with southern Africa. Grandma Lúcia was born to a Portuguese travelling salesman and his wife in the Congo. Grandpa Manuel was an engineer who moved to Mozambique to help to construct dams for a hydroelectric company. Their family history is evidence of flows and fluxes across Europe (the narrator’s great-grandmother is described as an “unmistakeable Jew” [62] and some distant aunts as “Viennese girls lost in Mozambique” [63]) as well as between colonial center and far-flung periphery. Another great-great- grandmother had been “the spouse of a celebrated colonel in Macau” (64). They are all, in various ways, servants, handmaidens, or children of an Empire that lasted surprisingly
In Africa, the Portuguese colonies (Angola and Mozambique, but also for instance Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, all first colonized in the sixteenth century) only gained their independence in the 1970s, after years of bloody guerilla warfare (of which, however, Pereira de Almeida makes very little mention). The Portuguese withdrew after a peaceful coup (the “Carnation Revolution”) that in 1974 overthrew the authoritarian regime originally established by António de Oliveira Salazar in the 1930s. It is as though Mila, and her hair, were a displaced remnant of that long colonial enterprise. Or as the narrator puts it: “The truth is that the story of my curly hair intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics” (2).
Yet Pereira de Almeida’s narrator is unwilling to see her hair as simply a symbol or metaphor. It is too stubbornly material to be reduced to mere signifier. This is indeed a history of her hair–or rather “that hair,” which is not entirely part of her, and not entirely not. Over the course of the book “that hair” emerges almost as an entity in its own right, “its own persona, an alter ego there in the room” (38), not so much a part of the narrator as a prefigurement of what she herself might yet become, or could once have become. That hair has a life of its own, a life to which the narrator herself sometimes aspires.
At the start of the book, the narrator worries that this is too frivolous a topic; it seems such “a trivial matter” (51). And of course, we can easily live without our hair: it is surely more ornament than essence. “Are you still talking about your hair, Mila?” someone unknown person (perhaps, Mila herself) is imagined as asking (86). At times it is as though it is an unworthy subject, when so much is going on in the world. At times she “cut [her] hair to forget it even further,” and yet she discovers that “What I can’t do, I would later admit to myself, is forget this hair without also forgetting myself and plowing forward while leaving myself behind, like two people who lose sight of one another at a street market” (83). She has to come to terms with this quasi-alien excrescence, precariously attached to her, and to which she is only precariously attached.
There is a lot in this book about photography and photographs. The narrator leafs through her own, or her family’s, photo albums, real or imaginary, as well as an album given to her by a hairdresser: a catalogue of ideal types of haircuts, “featuring women who’d just had their hair done, their look of pride [. . .]. The album is the antithesis of my own disheveled albums, and, at the same time, it describes the arc of my hair’s drama, showing day one, the best day of each woman’s hair” (115). There is also a discussion of a photograph taken in 1957, amid the civil rights struggles in the USA, of a Black student attending Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by a baying mob of white protesters. The narrator sees herself in all the people pictured, Black and white: “little rock, the mulata das pedras. I see now that I am the persecuted and the persecutor, the disfigured, disfiguring myself” (97). Her hair, here, is a gateway to history, allowing (or perhaps forcing) her to take both sides in a visceral clash that is also, of course, based on an appearance mistaken to be essence.
There is something intolerable in the feeling of being split in this way, in being compelled to identify with such discordant positionings, but the narrator’s hair is also an entryway into language and writing, which similarly revolves around what she calls (in the context of a school party in which she “dress[es] up as an African”) “distancing and duplicating” herself. “This was perhaps the only mask that could reveal me, exposing the distance that separates me from what I am as an auspicious and not irretrievable idea” (112). It is by performing or recording (writing) the caricature that she can never quite become that she may also be able to come to terms with who she is. “The hair and the writing would one day need to come together like a couple after a long separation” (124). Yet this resolution never quite arrives in the novel: its last words are (still) “who then is Mila?” (148).
After all, if this “whole hairy drama” (146) were ever fully unknotted, then it would no longer be her hair; it would no longer be her. The knots, the entanglement (expressed often in language that is equally convoluted), are what make “that hair” what it is, and similarly what make Mila who she is: someone whose identity can never quite be pinned down, caught between her “own particularity” and the “stock black woman” to whom she can only aspire, and who “today deserves [her] deference How to be worthy of her? I don’t know how to do my hair on paper without this story slipping from my grasp” (86). Just as her hair can never fully be “tamed” (95), except through an imaginary encounter with the Little Rock photo taken before she was born, so her story remains unruly, “leaving literature waiting at the door” (124). Hence That Hair never quite takes shape as a novel. How could it?
If reading this book is therefore often frustrating, then that is surely part of the point. As the narrative only comes in and out of focus, without ever settling in one place or time, does that not mirror what the narrator terms her hair’s “cycles” of growth and regrowth punctuated by new cuts and stylings (85)? So long as Mila has hair on her head, old stories are abandoned and cut short as new ones emerge without ever coming to any single conclusion.
The subject of the assertion contained in the title of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019) is, in the first instance, a young man by the name of Hilari who composes poems–though he does not write them down. He comes up with poems mainly for people and animals, and one of them (shades of Walt Whitman) is a song for himself, a “Poem for Me, Hilari”:
I sing to the moon when it blossoms full, Round fang in the kindly night, [. . .]
I sing like someone plowing a garden, Like someone carving a table, Like someone raising a house, Like someone climbing a hill, Like someone eating a walnut, Like someone lighting a fire. Like God creating animals and plants. When I sing, mountains dance. (69)
But throughout this book–a book that is itself surely Whitmanesque in that it, too, “contain[s] multitudes”–we see plenty of others also carving tables, raising houses, climbing hills, and the like. Many sing, and many mountains dance.
The mountains here are the Pyrenees and we are in Catalonia (Solà’s novel is translated from the Catalan), a rural retreat for city-dwellers seeking picturesque “authentic[ity]” (62) or a respite from all the “noise” and the “cars and all the buildings and the pointy corners and the straight lines” of Barcelona (129). Here, one might imagine, is natural peace and age-old tradition, where little changes and perhaps nothing happens.
But we are also on the border between Spain and France, a pathway traipsed by refugees and soldiers fleeing the Nationalist advance of Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This is a countryside strewn with the detritus of war, such that many decades later young children can still come across bullet casings and unexploded grenades half-buried in the earth.
Moreover, this is a landscape of unquiet forces that traverse the boundary between natural and human history, between life and death, between reality and myth. There are the four women, for instance, hanged as witches in some previous century and perhaps not without reason, in that they laugh at authority and “piss upon” the crosses that are “sullying the mountainside” (19). These women are among the many ghosts or revenants that never quite go away (or always come back) as they permeate the stories and songs related and recited by this novel’s many characters.
Almost every chapter, in fact, introduces a new narrator, some of whom are human, usually residents of this precarious existence on the hostile mountainside, and others of whom are more than human. Again, however, these boundaries blur. A bear narrates its violent history with humans and its undying desire for revenge–“Wake up, ye men who hunted us. [. . .] We were here first. Long before men and women” (147). But in the very next chapter, a woman plays the part of a bear in some folk ritual of “the Bear Festival in Prats del Molló” (152), albeit adjusted to the times in answer to the question “When are we going to have a woman bear?” (151). And a little later we hear from Jaume, a man who has escaped the region (but will soon, of course, go back) and who goes by the nickname “the Pyrenees bear” (170).
This is a novel that humanizes great natural forces (even the mountains themselves, or the vast geological pressures that give rise to them, are given a voice, speaking almost sub specie aeternitatis: “Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children” [107]). But it also gives vent to the inhuman fears and desires that both shatter and consolidate the bonds between men and women.
If this novel has a center (and arguably it does not; arguably it is as polycentric as it is polyphonic), it is the story, told in fits and starts, of the family living in the farm or smallholding that goes by the name of Matavaques (“cattle slayer,” as we’re helpfully told [131]. The books opens as a young father, Domenèc, is killed by being struck by lightning, with the weird sisters of course in shadowy attendance. We later pick up on the story of his widow, Sió, his daughter, Mia, and his son, Hilari, he of the oral poems and songs.
Hilari, however, is struck down young, like his father before him, but in his case not by random lightning but in a hunting accident, out with friends. His killer (Jaume, known as the “giants’ son”) is the man who goes by the name of Bear who we meet much later, in self-imposed exile from the mountains after he has spent some time in jail for his crime . . . presumably manslaughter, which goes to show that it is not just cattle that are slayed around here.
It is not clear whether Jaume’s story is one of the “bad stories” that, we are told, are the stories men tell, as opposed to the tales told by the witches and other women, “stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories” (112). As a whole, Solà’s novel is a remarkable patchwork of ventriloquy that allows a whole range of entities to speak–and often we hear the same events retold from very diverse viewpoints.
We do not necessarily have to resolve the differences between these different perspectives, or to know how things will ultimately work out, because we know that this is merely a partial snippet from a much longer history of mountains and the people who live on or near them. Indeed the book ends on something of a cliffhanger: one revenant has returned to Mia’s (Hilari’s sister’s) life, and we do not know what will happen to her relationship with another man who has helped briefly to obscure her loss in the meantime.
There are still stories to be told. “He’ll say some things,” Mia tells us. “The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. [. . .] Then I’ll say some things. The ones that I can” (197, 198). And at the end of it all, perhaps “when we’re done, we’ll see who we are” (197). This is a song of their selves, a point-counterpoint of stories of creation and recalibration that is as unending as the tectonic forces that make and unmake the very ground beneath their feet.
Marisa, the narrator and protagonist of Beatriz Serrano’s Discontent (2025) has what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” which he defines as “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 3). In her case, her pointless employment is as a mid-level manager in an advertising agency. In meetings, she comes up with clichés or finds ways to fend off deadlines and decisions–“Let me check a few things” (7)–while she daydreams, scans Twitter (now, of course, X) and doodles tiny penises in her notebook. Later, she will hand off any actual work she has been asked to do to the students she is teaching in a course in “a master’s program at a private university that hired me thanks to the English diploma I listed on LinkedIn” (10), passing off the task as an assignment for academic credit.
Her students at least are still eager and enthusiasm. Marisa is long past jaded: “I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist” (8). She once wanted to be an artist or a curator–she studied Art History at university, and still likes to tour the Prado when she takes one of her many midday breaks, playing hooky while still on the agency’s clock. She originally took her job as a temporary thing, staying on in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis because “the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things” (17). After all, she has bills to pay. And it is nice to be able to take off at short notice for a week or two to the Canary Islands. Any residual anxiety can be dealt with by popping Lorezapam (Ativan) a few times a day.
Indeed, her life is hardly all dismal. She has enough money, few commitments (no children or partner, but a guy in her building is a regular “friend with benefits”), stable employment, and sufficient distance from the demands of her employment that she is happy to see it as a performance or a game: “Work is just a role you play and I’ve mastered it perfectly. [. . .] I know what to say to make the time flow faster, without actually doing anything, until I can go home at six” (6). She may well be alienated, but she knows it (no illusions), and she is not exactly mining coal or being sent up chimneys. She does not really care whether her agency does well or otherwise, and she knows how to keep up the pretense that she is contributing willingly and productively to whatever success it may have.
The worst she has to endure is the vacuous small talk and naïve sloganeering of her colleagues (“teamwork makes the dream work” [25]). And she has at least one co-worker, Rita, who thinks much the same as herself, and they can entertain themselves by rolling eyes at each other during meetings. At the end of the day, rather than feeling downtrodden or oppressed, Marisa feels that she has “tricked capitalism for one more day” (27). After all, Capital has hardly appropriated much if any of her labor power. And what would she be doing otherwise? She spends most of her spare time (and much of her “work” time, too) watching YouTube videos.
She does recognize, however, that this is a game that is not without victims, even if she is not one herself. She indulges in a measure of hypocrisy that we might call post-post-feminist. She has, after all, (she tells us) read her way through the feminist canon: “Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Virginie Despentes. None of that matters” (29). Not only does she still shave her legs and buy expensive face cream, she is called in to shield her company from accusations of sexism, such as when she helps come up with a “sorry not sorry” apology for an ill-advised tweet made by a freelancer on their social media team. She has “been branded the office feminist who needs to be consulted on all gender-equity issues. I’m a token; what I read outside of work and the fundamental beliefs I fight for when I’m not too tired are used by the company to improve their image” (29). “A part of me is disgusted,” she admits, “like I’m betraying my gender” (61).
But (bull)shit gets a bit more real when Rita, who is if anything even more “discontent” than Marisa, stops coming in to work and is found to have died, perhaps by suicide. No longer is Marisa simply “betraying” an abstract concept such as “gender.” Now perhaps a real, flesh and blood person–although hardly a “friend,” as she realizes how little she knows of Rita’s life outside of work–has literalized the daily “dehuman[ization]” (49) that Marisa otherwise keeps at bay through humor and irony. It is a struggle to admit to herself that perhaps humor is not enough, and that maybe she is not “trick[ing] capitalism.” It is almost unimaginable that she might admit this to anyone else, though she fantasizes about telling her mother:
Mom, I don’t think I’m doing OK. I don’t think anyone is entirely OK, but I think I’m a little worse than the rest. I don’t think I’m as bad as a girl I knew, named Rita, who I never told you about, but who I think killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. Goes to show you how well I knew her. Mom, I want to escape, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to live this life. (129–30)
Discontent could, then, be written as tragedy, but though it definitely makes some serious points and lets off some shrewd and cutting barbs, for the most part it is cast as comedy (it is indeed often very funny), and ultimately as farce. It culminates with a company retreat, which is of course the very epitome and culmination of corporate ridiculousness (as also in the magnificent recent TV show Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat). Here, much bitter fun is made of the fact that Marisa’s boss wants her to help him find a speaker who would be “maybe a woman who can empower other women, but also men.” She considers what to answer:
I think about talks on the wage gap, on why women leave their careers to take care of their children, or on the mental burden of housework. I think about talks on destroying gender, sex, the patriarchy. I think about talks on sexism in the workplace, on the need for better applied policies on equality or on companies’ lack of real commitment to equity. I know that’s not what Ramón is looking for. (61)
In the end, Marisa herself speaks at the retreat, but rather than making the broad social commentary that she briefly envisages for the occasion, instead (spoiler alert) she takes the occasion as an excuse to spike her colleagues’ drinks with MDMA (Molly, Ecstasy). This is all very funny (it briefly reminded me of novels such as Kingsley Amis’s classic satire, Lucky Jim), not least the brief coda to this event which consists of a series of emails around the ensuing “internal investigation team-building retreat” (155), all of which are interspersed with Marisa’s automatic out-of-office reply, as she herself has blithely jetted off to Fuerteventura. But it is not exactly a critique. After all, isn’t the point that her colleagues (and maybe also the people who buy the wares that they all hawk) are already basically drugged, pictured here as zombies enthusiastically embracing the banal rewards of consumer capitalism?
But I guess the idea is that sobriety–or the cynicism and even feminist-informed self-knowledge that Marisa, for instance, instantiates–is no alibi. Surely, most of us do already know that work is shit; Marisa is far less of an outlier than she seems to think she is. We can be knowingly complicit or unknowingly so. Either way, simply knowing (however much disillusion and discontent go with it) is not enough.
At the very end of Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018), there is a mention of a young boy “staring at his own reflection on [a] black screen” (239). The book’s resonance with the TV series, Black Mirror, could hardly be clearer. As with Charlie Brooker’s show, Schewblin’s novel takes technology, especially the screens with which we are in constant interaction, as a point of departure for examining our all too (post)human foibles and frailties.
Also like Black Mirror, the innovation at the center of this book is hardly very far removed from what we already have with us. No jet packs, flying cars, or hyperdrive here. A “kentuki” is a digital pet or toy, not so different from the Tamagotchi that were briefly all the rage just before the turn of the millennium, perhaps crossed with the Furbies that came out around the same time. They are semi-autonomous digital robots dressed up with the accoutrements of an animal (rabbit, owl, crow, dragon. . .), for which their owners feel a sense of responsibility, and with which they can establish rather primitive communication. They can scurry around on built-in wheels but have no limbs and cannot climb, and they make noises such as squeaks or purring sounds, but cannot speak.
The difference is that with a kentuki, there is a real live human being at the other end, controlling the creature’s movements via an Internet connection. Moreover, via a camera built into the kentuki’s little eyes, they can see you, but you cannot see them. So if you buy a kentuki, you can choose either to purchase the object itself, of which you become a “keeper,” or to buy a code that establishes a connection with and the means to operate someone else’s object, of which you thereby become a “dweller.”
There is one connection, and one connection only, between dweller and keeper, which is broken if the dweller chooses to break it, or if the keeper either lets the thing run out of battery or otherwise disables or destroys it. Moreover, nobody gets to choose whose dweller or keeper they become: the pairings are randomly established, and could well cross cultures and continents. The dweller has a built-in on-screen translation so that they can understand a keeper’s instructions, or eavesdrop on their conversations with others. It is much harder for a keeper to receive any kind of message from a dweller, and in the book we find characters resorting to various stratagems such as Ouija boards or Morse code to do so. But while keepers tend to want to speak to and hear from the “other side” inhabited by dwellers, a dweller cannot be compelled to respond, and may well take advantage of the fundamental opacity of their role to be simply a silent voyeur of a keeper’s life. One can already imagine some of the ways in which things can go wrong.
The novel interlaces the disconnected stories of a variety of different kentukis, sometimes from the point of view of the dweller, sometimes from that of the keeper. It thereby criss-crosses the globe, establishing parallels or direct connections between cities or city pairs that lend their names to chapter titles: Lima, Barcelona, Zagreb, Beijing, Lyon, Umbertide (Italy), Antigua (Guatemala), even Vancouver (Canada). Some cities are the setting merely for brief vignettes that either break off or do not go anywhere in particular. In other cities, longer narrations develop with a number of twists and turns as either keeper or dweller develops new perspectives on their experience, but suffice it to say that they rarely end well.
Again as in Black Mirror, a gadget initially envisaged as improving people’s lives (by providing companionship to the lonely, for instance, or allowing people to travel the world from their bedrooms) ends up complicating and even ruining them in unforeseen (if not entirely unpredictable) ways. We soon run into issues of ethics (can a keeper be accused of “abusing” their dweller? What if anything does a dweller “owe” their keeper?) and also politics (should the kentukis be “liberated” from their keepers?). Questions of epistemology (what can we “know” of what is behind the screen) and perhaps above all affect also abound. People may after all know that these are mere toys, whichever side of the screen they find ourselves on, but they soon become subject to or provoke love, desire, jealousy, suspicion, fear, anxiety, and so on. Even though dwellers cannot “feel,” the kentukis’ tactility comes to the fore, both when keepers are drawn to pet (rub, scratch, caress) their creatures, and when, for instance, a dweller from the tropics sets his kentuki on a mission to touch and even plunge into Arctic snow.
Through these little machines, subjects and selves become fragmented and globally dispersed in technological proxies and prostheses, re-embodiments that feel as real (or realer) than the sites where what one character calls the “brutish hunk[s] of meat” (92) that are our biological bodies actually reside. But all this is hardly science fiction. As with Black Mirror, we quickly grasp that Little Eyes is a reflection of a current condition that has been with us for some time.
Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (2017) reminded me of a host of similar novels, though it also has much that is original and striking of its own. Its opening scene, for instance, has echoes (deliberate or otherwise) with the way that Carmen Laforet’s Spanish classic, Nada (1945), begins. In both, we see an adolescent girl struggling up steps with a loaded suitcase to an unfamiliar apartment where (for reasons that are not fully explained) she will spend the next year or so with relatives she has never previously met, who strike her, at first at least, as hostile and even monstrous. In both cases, the host family is impoverished, and there is much emphasis on food (or its lack). But there are also strange psychological tensions and a disturbing erotic undercurrent, especially around a strong-willed older male figure who never quite fits his environment and then dramatically dies–in Laforet’s novel, at the tale’s conclusion; in Di Pietrantonio’s, more like halfway through. The protagonist is only able to negotiate all these difficulties as she becomes friends with a female figure of about the same age, who teaches her lessons in resilience and resistance.
The twist in A Girl Returned is that the family to whose strange ways the unnamed narrator has to adapt is in fact her own birth family. (In Nada, the equivalent household is packed instead with uncles and aunts.) For it turns out that she has been living with, and formally or informally adopted by, an aunt or uncle. But when the story opens, she has been forced out of that arrangement (because, she believes, her adoptive mother is ill, perhaps terminally) and is returned to a set of biological parents and siblings that she has never known. Moreover, in a test of in the influence of nurture versus nature, her aunt and uncle had raised her in a life of relative privilege, of urban sophistication, ballet lessons, and beach clubs by the sea. Her “real” family, by contrast, live hand to mouth in a much smaller town, speak dialect rather than standard Italian, are crowded in a single bedroom with only a flimsy partition to separate the young from the adult, and the children drop out of school early as they are expected to help in the constant effort to put food on the table.
If Carmen Laforet is a possible forbear for Di Pietrantonio, it is also impossible to ignore the shadow of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (likewise translated by Ann Goldstein), whose female narrator similarly looks back on a youth marked by economic hardship, with scholastic success the apparent key to social mobility. But if Ferrante’s novels revolve around a “brilliant friend” (“amica genial”), here it is the narrator’s new-found younger sister, Adriana, who calls the narrator a “genius of verbs” (78) and is subsequently in turn described as “a genius, that Adriana” (133). (It must be admitted, however, that almost any novel is bound to suffer in a comparison with My Brilliant Friend. Di Pietrantonio’s is not a bad book, but it does not have the texture and finely-judged ambivalence sustained at such length by Ferrante’s magnum opus.)
A Girl Returned is perhaps most interesting for what it has to say about memory and forgetting. Like both Nada and My Brilliant Friend, its story is told by a narrator who is recounting her experience at a much later date. (We are teased with fleeting references to what must have happened in the meantime: her youngest brother is now in an institution, for instance; Adriana may soon be getting married.) As such, she reviews and reflects on the gap between what she realizes now and what she did not know then. Thinking back, for instance, she is kinder and less judgemental towards her biological parents than she was at the time. She is drawn to moments of light amidst what was often darkness and even violence: “Every so often I think again,” for example she tells us, “of the hand of the first [mother] that for a few moments rested on my shoulder, at school. I still wonder why she placed it there, a woman so sparing of caresses” (129). Ferrante’s narrator–if we have to make the comparison–is by contrast much less forgiving of her own mother, even if she can similarly see that the older woman’s defects are the result of a struggle against a harsh and inhospitable environment for women of her class and [lack of] social status.
Softened perhaps by memory and time passing, Di Pietrantonio’s narrator is even surprisingly generous towards an older brother who is a hair’s breadth (or less) from taking advantage of her sexually. She is saved only by his sudden accidental death. Yet at the very end of the book (on its penultimate page) there is a moment of solemn mourning, as the narrator and her sister “silently [. . .] remember [. . .] him” (179) at the very beach where he had first acted on his incestuous desire, kissing her open-mouthed (53). One would have thought this would be something the narrator would want to forget.
But her greatest fear is to be forgotten. Even as she is with her biological family, she continually hopes that she may be reunited with her former mother, and has to believe that she has not been forgotten by her. She clings on to the hope that, even if her adoptive mother is not in touch with her, this must be for some good reason–perhaps because she is in hospital; or even because she is dead. If she is alive, however, she must surely be thinking about her “lost” daughter, and at some point will come to take her back. But she is not always able to sustain this hope: “In certain melancholy moods, I felt forgotten. I’d fallen out of her thoughts. There was no longer any reason to exist in the world. I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips” (115). And when the narrator learns the true reason why she was “returned” to her biological family–her adoptive mother, who previously thought herself infertile, gets pregnant–the worst thing she can imagine doing in revenge is to erase her erstwhile mother from her memory: “I immediately decided not to see her Again [. . .]. I truly lost her, and for a few hours I thought I could forget her” (128).
Of course, she cannot fully forget, and by the novel’s end, after a rather excruciating dinner, she can see her adoptive mother as herself a victim, constrained by rules to which she only unwillingly agrees. More generally, at last the narrator seems able to let go of motherhood entirely, and certainly the idealization of mothers. It seems significant that, so far as we can tell, the narrator has not had any children. Mothers cannot protect you–if anything, whatever their best intentions, they only make things worse. It is thanks to her “alliance” with her sister that the two of them are said, at the book’s conclusion, to have “survived” (170). And together, the two sisters care for their disadvantaged younger brother, visiting him regularly, bringing him strawberries: “Then he eats them, after holding them up to the light, one by one, gripping them by the stem. He observes the tiny variations in shape, in color. I suspect that he’s trying to count all those seeds on the surface” (113). These are the relationships, and these the observations of detail and minor difference, that ultimately matter. This, perhaps, is what is worth remembering for Di Pietrantonio.
At one point in “The Part of Archimboldi,” the 325-page section with which 2666 concludes, we find ourselves something like four, five, or even six or more levels of narrative deep, as digressions and parentheses accumulate with no clear end. We might find ourselves in danger of losing sight of the whole, embedded as we are in so much detail within detail.
Hans Reiter, the protagonist of this section, has yet (despite his name) to become the writer Benno von Archimboldi, who gives this part its title, which itself returns us to “The Part of the Critics,” in which the critics Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton travel to Santa Teresa in search of the elusive Archimboldi. Earlier I called this quest a “macguffin”: a gimmick that merely serves to get us to Santa Teresa, site of serial femicides and setting for this book’s central “Part of the Crimes.” But as such, the search for Archimboldi is also the novel’s frame narrative, and here we return to it. The critics may never track down their man (and indeed they are not once even mentioned in “The Part of Archimboldi”), but we do ultimately discover why the novelist may have made his way to Sonora and the US/Mexico borderlands: it turns out that Klaus Haas, imprisoned suspected author of at least some of the Sonoran crimes, is his nephew. As the book ends, Archimboldi is therefore en route to Mexico.
But before Achimboldi, there is Reiter. And if the broad plot of the novel’s frame involves the search for Archimboldi, we could say that this section tells the story of how Reiter became Archimboldi, which is equally the story of how Reiter became a writer. This narrative therefore takes us from Reiter’s birth, in 1920, in rural Prussia, child of a one-eyed mother and a crippled father who had lost his leg in the First World War, to his nomadic existence as a successful novelist and concerned uncle.
But before he becomes a writer, Reiter is a reader. Bolaño (or whoever our narrator may be… a brief Afterword to the novel, by Ignacio Echevarría, tells us that a note discovered among Bolaño’s papers states that “The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano” [1125/898]) marks Reiter’s birth with a double literary reference, to Elias Canetti “and Borges, too, I think,” who both, supposedly, claimed that “the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited” (797/639). In this case, however, these esteemed authors are wrong: the young Reiter is a creature of the water rather than the forest, and particularly a creature of the watery depths of lakes, rivers, and seas in which he likes to dive, inspired and informed by a stolen book that becomes to him something like a Bible: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Indeed, we are told that his diving and his reading are one and the same activity: “The book [. . .] was stamped on his brain, and while he dove he would slowly page through it” (799–800/641). Reiter learns to “read” the submarine world as he learns how to name things in this world through the pages of a book, which he later copies as he fills a notebook with drawings of seaweed and their Latin nomenclature: Chorda filum, Leathesia difformis, Ascophyllum nodosum . . . . This may be no book or stories (neither Bolaño nor Reiter seem particularly preoccupied by the usual structure of beginnings, middles, and ends), but it literally provides him with a language of description and reference that provides a sense of order to a chaotic and unfamiliar environment.
Reiter never completes his schooling–his headmaster declares that “the boy wasn’t fit for school” (“no estaba capacitado para estudiar”) in 1933, “the year Hitler seized power” (810/649). But he is sent to work at the local country house of an absentee baron, where he is tasked with dusting the books in the house’s immense library, and where he meets and strikes up a strange friendship with the baron’s nephew, who spends much of his time reading in the library. The nephew, Hugo Halder, introduces young Hans to the idea of genre, and the difference between history and literature. Why, asks Reiter, does Halder seem to focus on history books in his reading? “‘It’s because I don’t have a proper grasp of history,’” Halder replies, “‘and I need to brush up.’ / ‘What for?’ asked Hans Reiter. / ‘To fill a void.’ / ‘Voids can’t be filled,’ said Hans Reiter” (820/657). And indeed, as Reiter starts to expand his reading beyond his cherished Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, we see exactly how his reading opens up voids rather than filling them.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, sent as an infantryman to the Eastern Front, Reither finds himself in a village on the banks of the Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine, where in an abandoned farmhouse he finds a sheaf of papers or notebook hidden in the hearth. This turns out to be the work of the farm’s former inhabitant, a Jew named Boris Abramovich Ansky, and Reiter sits himself down in the hidden spot where he found it, “until well into the night, until his joints were stiff and his limbs frozen, reading, reading” (884/708). He also takes the notebook with him as he goes out and about, and as he is sent to the Crimea even as the Russians steadily advance West: sheltering from their artillery and airforce, he “pass[es] the time reading Ansky’s notebook and sleeping and watching things grow or burn around him” (925/740). He reads it from the moment he wakes up, “opening it at random” (921/737). He “ceaselessly read[s] and reread[s] Ansky’s notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky” (928/742). He even dreams about the thing, with a vision in which now reading and diving no longer combine so neatly as in his youth, or perhaps they combine all too well as the notebook is imagined “reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever, half of [it] stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves” (929/743). The book has become his obsession, and he envisages it dissolving into his fluid surroundings, but not without leaving a physical residue on his body.
Reiter’s account of what he constitutes then a third narrative level, which continues off and on for fifty pages or so, when Reiter finally returns to the village and, before he then abandons its farmhouse for good, returns Anksy’s “notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. Let someone else find it now, he thought” (929/744). He passes the book on to future readers, just as the novel itself reproduces its content for us, who become thereby readers by proxy. Indeed, we read much more of what Reiter himself reads than we ever read of what he writes, in that even by the end of Bolaño’s novel we have very little sense of the content of Archimboldi’s own work. Any sense of what counts as literature (and literary value) comes either from Reiter/Archimboldi’s discussion of the topic, or from what we understand to have moved him first to write.
Ansky’s narrative in some ways mirrors Reiter’s own story: it is a tale of nomadism and displacement occasioned by the violence that sweeps across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. The difference is that, where Reiter fights with the German Wehrmacht, Ansky signs up at a young age (in fact, long before World War Two) with the Russian Red Army.
It is not long, however, before Ansky’s story is interrupted (much, again, like it itself interrupts Reiter’s). After a tour of duty in Siberia and the Arctic, he travels to Moscow where he meets a writer named Efraim Ivanov, whose tale now briefly takes over before being told roughly in parallel with Ansky’s own. We are now therefore at a fourth embedded narrative level. Ivanov’s story concerns the fate of a writer in the nascent Soviet Union, but perhaps more generally the problematic relationship between writing and politics, even (or perhaps especially) a politics of the Utopian Left. For Ivanov had long been a true believer–a “party member,” we are told, “since 1902” (888/710), even before, one must assume, the 1903 split that led to the division between Menshevik and Bolshevik. Before the 1917 Revolution he was still no more than a “promising writer” (888/711), fruitlessly in search of new literary forms to match the political experiments that were on the horizon. After the Revolution, he turns to science fiction as a genre suitable to the Communist sense of futurity.
At this point, then, we are given a fairly detailed account both of the short story with which Ivanov makes his name, and of a subsequent novel whose reception turns out to be much more mixed. With the extended description of both texts, then, we are now entrenched in a fifth nested narrative layer. Russian dolls indeed! Moreover, the short story, entitled “The Train through the Urals,” itself revolves around a similar nested structure. It tells the tale of a boy in 1940 (i.e. some twenty years in the future at the time that the story is written), who travels to meet his grandfather, a scientist and former Red Army soldier, whom he asks “tell stories about the revolution and the war against the Whites and the foreign intervention” (890/711). The grandfather’s stories, therefore, constitute a sixth and (for now at least) final narrative level: they are stories within a story (written by Ivanov) within a story (told by Ivanov) that is in a story (written by Ansky) within a story (Reiter’s) that itself is an element of the grand story that is Bolaño’s 2666.
We might here add, however, that 2666 itself could be described as the proliferating elaboration of a hint provided in another of Bolaño’s novels, Amulet, which is the only place in his fiction where the date 2666 is otherwise mentioned (it never once crops up in 2666 itself). And Amulet in turn expands upon a chapter (chapter four) from Part II of The Savage Detectives, as one of a series of interviews that interrupt that progression of what is arguably that book’s main plot, which involves the search for forgotten visceral realist poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Or alternatively, the fourth chapter of The Savage Detectivesmight also be seen as a development of a story first found (at least in literary/written form) in a very short section of Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco.
In other words, the grandfather’s stories of the Russian Revolution are arguably nine or even ten levels deep–or, if you prefer, within nine or ten sets of parentheses–within an over-arching narrative that concerns either the search for a poetic ur-text in the mid 1970s or the repression of Mexico’s student movement (and by extension, of all Latin America’s radical youth movements) in the late 1960s. Which is apt in so far as these same stories, asked of a grandfather by his grandson, similarly involve a return to a mythic past (which is actually the then present projected into a future that is now past), as well as the recovery of how political radicalism may be seen in years to come.
All of which shows how 2666, and Bolaño’s work as a whole, concatenates and expands, not via a process of extension but through intensification. After all, the story that this massive novel tells from beginning to end lasts less than twenty years: from November 1980, the first date to be mentioned on its first page, to some time in or shortly after 2001 (a date that occurs on page 1111), which must be when Archimboldi decides to leave for Mexico. The book expands not by linearly adding to the end, or by going back to begin ever earlier, but from the middle, via digressions that follow and mirror (and complicate) its main themes, in a search for a secret (Santa Teresa and the killings that take place there as holding “the secret of the world” [439/348]) that we will later see has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.
Finally, it in Ansky’s notebook, and so in this digressive expansion in medias res, this opening up or escape through and beyond the middle of the work, that Reiter comes across Arcimboldi, who we are told was an Italian artist (and a real one at that), even though the first mention of his name immediately leads to a digression about Courbet, which then is followed by a joke as told to Ansky by Ivanov (and as told to Ivanov by Soviet anthropologists at a party) about a misencounter between (French) anthropologists and natives in Borneo. . . And Ansky (or perhaps Reiter’s summary of Ansky’s account) is surprisingly brief when he returns to Arcimboldi (or Arcimboldo, as he’s also here called, and is more generally known). We learn, however, that “When he was near despair, Ansky returned to Arcimboldo.” Moreover, that “the Milanese painter’s technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of semblance. [El fin de las aparencias] [. . .] Everything in everything [Todo dentro de todo], writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance” (917–18/734). The joy or happiness that Arcimboldi provokes has something to do with what here is translated as a refusal or limit to appearance, and with a strange capaciousness (everything in or, perhaps better, within everything) that might remind us of Bolaño’s own technique, as described here hitherto. Everything is (already) in everything, so no need to seek it elsewhere (isn’t this Belano and Lima’s mistake in The Savage Detectives?); everything is immediately at hand, if you know how to look.
What Ansky (or Reiter, or Bolaño) doesn’t tell us is the substance or content of Arcimboldo’s paintings. They are in fact at first sight all about appearance, about its ephemerality or fleetingness. He is known for still lifes, what in Spanish are known as “naturaleza muerta”–that is, paintings of flowers, vegetables, meat, and the like–whose elements are (wholly unnaturally) arranged to produce the effect, from a distance at least, of portraiture. Alternatively we might say that he painted portraits whose elements turn out, on closer inspection, to be merely disconnected items that bear only a synecdochic relationship to the whole that they purport to represent. Thus his portrait of a librarian comprises what turns out to be a stack of books. His portrait “The Admiral” is composed of fish and other marine animals and shells. The same goes for his more abstract pictures, such as “Summer” or “The Sense of Smell,” which turn out, upon closer inspection, to be precarious conjunctions of (respectively) elements associated with the season, or items that are fragrant or pungent in one way or another.
Again, is this not all about appearance? Or does it rather take us to the limit (the endpoint) of appearance, by showing us the forced proximities upon which resemblance rests? Is not all resemblance or representation a form of trompe-l’œil, a trick played on the eye?
And it is of course Arcimboldo, plucked from Ansky’s journal, who gives Reiter his pen name, when he finally turns to writing. But it may be that Bolaño, too, has also learned the “single lesson, but one of vital importance” that Arcimboldo teaches, a lesson that has something to do with distance and scale. The closer we get to Bolaño’s text (perhaps any text?), the more its claims to depict a broader figure dissolve, but also the more other universes and worlds open up. From the illusion of the portrait we move to stranger, vegetal worlds of what is “still life,” but not necessarily life as we know it.
As an experiment (and in preparation for an upcoming discussion of reading with AI, in the context of reading The Savage Detectives), I thought I would ask ChatGPT a few questions about the book, and see what it came up with. You can find the transcript of the resulting chat here: https://chatgpt.com/share/69c7928a-1ac0-832b-a01f-d991cb125134. Note that, because I am on the free tier of ChatGPT usage (i.e. I do not pay for it), I was only able to ask it ten questions. I may or may not continue the experiment later.
In sum, in some ways I was quite impressed with ChatGPT’s responses. On the whole, in general terms, it came up with some quite plausible readings… though I would emphasize that these are readings, plural, in that when pushed it would change its tune, albeit without fully acknowledging its shifts in interpretation. Moreover, the more detail I asked of it, the more it seemed likely to make mistakes, or to hallucinate. Again, while the overall sense it made of the book was often reasonable, and sometimes even revelatory, it still made several basic errors, and continued to make errors even when I tried to correct it. To put this another way (and drawing on Dan McQuillan’s description of AI as a “bullshit generator”; see also Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit): it came up with some quite high-quality bullshit that, as is generally the case with bullshit, had more than a kernel of plausibility or truth, but when pressed it tended to contradict itself or even to start to fall apart altogether.
Of course, in that (as we know) ChatGPT cannot “read” a text in anything like the conventional sense of reading, it draws its interpretation from what others have already said. So it was perhaps equally worrying that when, at the end of the chat, I asked it for its sources, its response was somewhat vague and evasive, even though at the same time it did provide some reasonable avenues for further study. But the worry is that, on taking up elements of ChatGPT’s proposed interpretation of Bolaño’s novel, I would be inadvertently plagiarizing the work of some other scholar, whose identity the AI bot could not help me to locate. At the end of the day, after all, LLM AI applications constitute the large-scale capture of intellectual, cognitive, and linguistic labor, whose origin they (necessarily) obfuscate.
It is possible that some of the less helpful or more worrisome aspects of the interaction with ChatGPT could be mitigated by better attention to the prompts I was giving it. For instance, if I continue this experiment in the future, I am tempted to ask it both for specific references to the text to support its claims, and for references to secondary criticism throughout the process. This might encourage a more grounded (and more transparent) interpretative process. Alternatively, rather than asking it directly about the text, one might begin at least with a review of the secondary literature on which it is drawing. That might keep it (and me, as a reader of ChatGPT’s “reading”) more honest.
Briefly to go through the questions I asked it…
First, I asked simply for it to provide me with the novel’s plot. It did a pretty good job of this, albeit that it had more to say about the book’s narrative structure than about the plot per se. The plot, after all, is not told linearly, and yet it kept to the order of the narration (the “discours” in Genette’s terms), rather than helping to reconstruct the story’s “histoire.” Having done this, it went further (beyond, indeed, what it had been asked) to advance some proposal’s as to the novel’s overall meaning. But in general, just about everything it said in response to this question was pretty much reasonable and defensible, and to some extent what I would even call insightful: the notion, for instance, that in the broadest terms the book’s plot involves a failed or futile search for origins, followed by “dispersal and disappearance.” Similarly, the summary of the novel’s themes as “literary ambition,” “friendship and exile,” and “the mythology of the avant-garde” makes sense, even if it is not necessarily the whole story–but then what summary is?
I did, however, feel it a little odd that this plot summary omitted the role of Amadeo Salvatierra, who is a recurrent voice in Part II of the novel, and who is important for the plot in that it is he who provides Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano with the information about Cesárea Tinajero that motivates and enables the road trip to Sonora around which the whole book revolves. So second, then, I asked ChatGPT about him…
In response, the chat implicitly recognized its error in omitting Salvatierra by saying that “he plays a crucial symbolic and structural role in The Savage Detectives” and that “he is actually the hinge between myth and history in the novel.” I was somewhat surprised, however, that ChatGPT should in fact spend more time on Salvatierra’s thematic or conceptual significance than on his function in the story. Indeed, the more that the chat edged towards concrete description, the more likely that it flirted with outright error. Hence, although its broad claims continued to be defensible and even perhaps enlightening (if not altogether unarguable), when for instance it states that “Amadeo possesses (or remembers) the only surviving work by Tinajero,” this is at best misleading: Amadeo very definitely possesses the surviving copy of the journal in which Tinajero’s poem is published. This is not simply a matter of memory: he shows it to Lima and Belano, so they can read it for themselves. More fundamentally, the chat is simply wrong with basic details when it claims that “Amadeo is an aging poet whom García Madero, Belano, and Lima visit early in the novel.” García Madero does not accompany Belano and Lima in this visit. And to say that it takes place “early in the novel” is again misleading: the account of the visit is threaded through Part II (and does not come to an end until page 588), although to be fair we can reasonably assume that it takes place at some point during the time period of Part I, the final weeks of 1975 as narrated by García Madero… but he never mentions the visit, presumably because he is most likely unaware of it.
I then asked for more information about the fates of the novel’s key characters.
ChatGPT’s response about García Madero was mostly to the point, albeit again somewhat misleading when it said that “García Madero is almost never mentioned” in Part II. In fact, he is mentioned precisely once… and it is surely important to describe that sole mention, not least because it comes when the so-called expert on visceral realism denies that anyone with that name had ever belonged to the movement.
What it had to say about Lupe was also OK, and even insightful. Again, it is notable (and surely somewhat surprising) how quick ChatGPT jumps to interpretation, rather than description. Perhaps this is because it is drawing above all on interpretations in the secondary criticism? But its conclusion about her fate is fair enough, albeit that this is surely a fate shared with (rather than opposed to that of) García Madero: “Not just absence from literary history, but from the kinds of stories that get told at all.” Eager to please, ChatGPT also offered to expand this discussion via a “compar[ison] to women in other Bolaño novels (like 2666), where this question of disappearance becomes even more central and more disturbing.” This in fact sounds like an interesting direction for further enquiry (and it’s perhaps intriguing that ChatGPT should offer to take me down that route), but here I was sticking with The Savage Detectives…
It was upon being asked about what ultimately happened to Lima and Belano that ChatGPT really started falling apart. Its top-level (i.e. “bullshit”) analysis remained for the most part quite impressive. For instance, the notion that these two characters become transformed into myth, and that there’s an irony in the failure of their mission to track down (what we find out is) the all too material and corporeal Cesárea in Part III, which may indeed lead to the conclusion that “to pursue literature absolutely may mean vanishing from it.” This was one of the ideas that ChatGPT gave me that I quite liked. And yet again, there was the sense that the chat was weak on description and detail. For example, when it says that “At one point, [Belano] travels to Africa and is possibly present during a conflict,” this is at best wishy-washy, almost as though it didn’t want to be pressed on what exactly happened. (In fact, after all, it’s not just “at one point” that Belano is in Africa, but this is where he is last seen. And more than being “possibly present during a conflict,” he is discovered in the thick of the Liberian Civil War.) If we were to anthropomorphize the machine (and it’s hard not to), we might say that this is the answer of a student who has only a hazy recollection of the text and wants to hedge their bets with their answers.
And indeed, when I pressed it further for answers, ChatGPT really started to struggle. Projecting its own confusion onto the text, for instance, the chat said that Belano “travels to Africa (often read as Liberia or Angola, though the novel is oblique).” In fact, however, there is nothing oblique about it: we are told quite clearly that he is in both Angola (Luanda, to be precise) and Liberia (a short distance from Monrovia). With Lima, things got still worse, and ChatGPT started to make multiple errors, even when I tried to zero in on them.
It’s not necessarily worth detailing these errors, though it’s interesting, first, that the app’s tactic when pointed out its mistakes is to concede without fully giving ground. After I observed that it was wrong to a greater or lesser extent about the fates of both characters, it responded: “You’re right to push back—both of those ‘last sightings’ are more precise (and more interesting) than my previous answer suggested. Let me correct and sharpen things.” Yet it is not simply “more precise” to note that Lima is last seen not in Europe (as the chat had claimed) but in Mexico: it is right, where the chat was wrong. Second, moreover, as it made mistakes about the details it also started to make more obvious errors of general interpretation. For instance, in that Lima is located in Mexico City by our visceral realist expert at the end of Part II, it is simply not the case that “he simply fades out of the record altogether, more completely than anyone else in the novel.” There are plenty of other characters (most obviously perhaps, García Madero) who are more fully erased from the record… as indeed ChatGPT had already observed (when it said that, by contrast with Lima and Belano, he “undergoes a kind of negative initiation–into obscurity rather than legend”). The machine is by now contradicting itself, though unsurprisingly enough without acknowledging the fact.
After all, the chat’s tone remains consistent: it retains its aura of confident authority, so much more so that in reading it, one is tempted to doubt oneself… If I had not finished the novel only this week, I might easily have been more prepared to go along with its account, and to question my own memory rather than catching the app’s hallucinations.
For my next question (and by this time I was running out of my allocation), I returned to conceptual issues more than concrete details, in fact feeding it questions about length and endings that I had put to my students in class. Again I feel that its answers were illuminating even (if we can say this of a machine) “thoughtful.” These could definitely have been useful contributions to the discussion we had in class… I had a twinge of regret that perhaps I had missed a trick or two. Put it this way: if ChatGPT had been a student or (as a more likely scenario… and the worry of educators today) if a student had read out ChatGPT’s responses and presented them as their own, they would have been among the more insightful and valuable voices in class. I even like some of its turns of phrase. For instance, I like the notion that “If The Savage Detectives were shorter, it would be a story. If it were longer, it would be an archive.” This formulation is at the same time provocative and neat. Likewise with the notion that what we have here is “a myth of literature built out of fragments, ending exactly where it has to–at the moment when the search reveals that there was almost nothing to find.” In class, I said something similar, or at least similar enough–I put things differently, in that my suggestion was that at the end García Madero at least finds “nothing” in the more substantive sense that he touches and perhaps even falls (or jumps) into the void that lies beyond the “window” of representation. But still, there are some sentences and phrases in ChatGPT’s interpretation that I perhaps wish I had said or considered en route to my own conclusion, or which could usefully have been put to the students as alternative considerations. Could ChatGPT become a valued interlocutor in the classroom?
Yet by this point, seeing the chat’s weakness on points of concrete detail, to be honest I had started to lose faith or trust in ChatGPT altogether. Worse, this sense of distrust had become generalized: I no longer felt confident about either its reading or (to be even more honest) my own. After all, if my reading overlapped to some extent with that of a machine that had just shown some fundamental ignorance of basic issues of plot, then did that not cast shadow on my own interpretation, too?
So the last of my permitted questions was about its sources. I figured I would be better off looking to where ChatGPT was getting its “thoughts” than continuing to engage with the chat itself. Here, however, the app was both honest and unhelpful: “What I’ve given you is a synthesis drawn from general knowledge of The Savage Detectives, familiarity with Roberto Bolaño’s work, and the broad critical conversation around it.” In other words, the AI is drawing on a cloud of more or less established readings, without being able to pin down or lead me directly to who first established those readings, or what debates they had led to. It had, as it were, anonymized the critical conversation, obscuring the identities of those on whose intellectual labor it relies. To be fair, it did then provide some bibliographic references, and ended also with a note of caution that there are indeed “other strong readings that [it] ha[d]n’t foregrounded”… or even, if it were more truthful, mentioned at all. Its appropriation of intellectual labor, in other words, is selective and unequal. It’s notable, for instance, that it acknowledges that among the readings it had ignored were those inspired either by queer theory or by feminism.
And perhaps it would have been helpful if at the very start it had stated upfront that what it was “giv[ing me] is not the interpretation, but a coherent, recognizable strand within Bolaño criticism.” Though of course it had done all it could to make this “recognizable strand” appear to be all its own work, appealing to our technological fetishism that attributes to the machine the qualities of agency and intellect that more properly belong to those who feed it… which is, in the end, you and me.
And so, after some 450 pages, with Part III of The Savage Detectives we are back with García Madero, who along with Belano, Lima, and Belano is barreling along the highway in Quim Font’s borrowed Chevy Impala, heading north to Sonora, in search (we now know) of the forgotten avant-garde poet and original visceral realist, Cesárea Tinajero. An instant has passed, with the clock ticking over from 1975 to 1976. It turns out that the whole of Part II took place not only over the twenty years of Belano and Lima’s itinerant wanderings, nor even only over the eight to ten hours of late night drunken conversation with Amadeo Salvatierra, but in the seconds that separate the old year from the new.
If anything, the end of Part I and the beginning of Part III overlap, as García Madero explains in the his entry for January 1: “Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday, I really wrote today.” Time, indeed, seems to have gotten out of joint (almost as though we were back also in Auxilio Lacouture’s time-travelling bathroom reverie): “What I write today I’m really writing tomorrow, which more few will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day” (591). By declaring this lapse of time to be insignificant or invisible, it is as though García Madero were unconsciously taking his revenge on his own invisibilization during the entirety of Part II.
For, after several hundred “interviews” in that “invisible day,” in conversation with over fifty informants, taking us from Mexico City to Paris, Austria, Israel, Africa, we are firmly back with García Madero as narrator, in a series of diary-style entries. Before long, we perhaps feel as claustrophobically ensconced with him, his thoughts, and his limited point of view, as if we were squished in the back seat of the car between him and Lupe.
Have we missed him? If we have, I suspect we very soon tire of him again, as he returns to the game (though no doubt he himself doesn’t see it as a game) with which he started the novel (way back on page four), of testing people on their knowledge of obscure rhetorical and poetic terms: “what is free verse? [. . .] a testrastich? [. . .] a sestina? [. . .] a hempiepes [. . .] a mimiambic [. . .] a zéjel” (591, 592). “Oh, Jesus,” says Lima (591). If this is García’s idea of fun, perhaps we’d rather he were banished from Part III, just as he was from Part II.
The others, however, get their own back (not that García Madero necessarily notices) by asking him in turn about his knowledge of street slang. Lupe starts turning the tables by asking “All right, Mr. Know-It-All, can you tell me what a prix is?” Belano instantly replies that it’s “a toke of weed,” but García Madero seems to be clueless. Similarly when he is asked for the definitions of “lurias” (“crazy”) “jincho” (“Indian”), “la grandiosa” (“jail”), and so on (597). We have a feeling that such terms are going to be of more use to this quartet than the arcane terminology of aesthetics that García Maduro has to offer them.
For they are not only hunting a poet but also on the run from Alberto, Lupe’s enraged ex-pimp, and whatever reinforcement he has managed to bring with him. Phoning the Fonts back in Mexico City, they discover that, though they thought they had shaken him on the outskirts of the capital, he had gone back to Quim and got from him the name of their destination. The threat of violence hovers around their endeavours. Belano buys a knife. We may be in the last act rather than the first, but still the weapon is much like Chekhov’s famous gun: we know it will be wielded in anger sometime in the few pages that still lay ahead of us.
And so, behold, the book’s dénouement is indeed tragic–perhaps better, a tragicomedy of errors. In a dramatic confrontation on a dusty desert road, a confrontation ensues as Alberto and his policeman sidekick catch up with them now that Lima, Belano, et. al. have finally located the mythical (but ultimately, almost monstrously physical–visceral, if you like) Cesárea Tinajero.
In a confused “blur” seen from García Madero’s limited perspective forever in the back seat (the only thing Tinajero ever says to him is “don’t move”), Lima and Belano end up killing both their aggressors and also Tinajero herself (641–42). García Madero overhears Belano telling Lima “that we’d fucked up, that we’d found Cesárea only to bring her death” (643). The two friends split from García Madero and Lupe, set to bury the bodies and head back down south. Perhaps it’s not now so far-fetched to think that their constant traveling, as documented in the novel’s Part II, is at least initially because they are on the run from the law–or, more likely still, from Arturo’s criminal associates if they ever got wind of why their buddy never returned from Sonora.
In the meantime: was it worth it? We can ask this question both of the book and also of the quest that has structured it. Lima and Belano get to meet and talk to Tinajero, but (seeing everything as we do from García Madero’s perspective), we have no idea what they may have said. Lupe, for now, has escaped her pursuers.
And García Madero’s final diary entries go from a list of placenames that presumably indicate ongoing peregrinations through remote towns in the desert north (“El Cuatro, Trincheras, La Ciénaga” [646]) to picture puzzles that remind us both of Tinajero’s sole published poem (“Sión”) and also the joke representations of “Mexicans” from above with which he had earlier passed the time with his companions. Either way, his earlier facility with language (or rather, with the meta-language of aesthetic terminology, as well as with the narcissistic self-reflection of the diary form) is replaced first by mere names, and second by line-drawn riddles.
“What’s outside the window?” are the last words of The Savage Dectectives (648). They are followed by a broken rectangle, or a rectangle of broken lines: a dissolving frame perhaps, an illusory or precarious dividing line between inside and outside, between the thing and what holds the thing in place. What’s outside the book? Well, at last this long one is at an end, so maybe we’ll find out.
