Month: February 2026

I took a break from reading during reading break, for better or worse, which has made for an interesting re-entry into the world of our novel. I caught up on reality tv and scrolled through way more Instagram reels than I should have, consuming all sorts of media that was not written by our beloved Bolaño. Though it was a bit slow to get back into our book, I do think the three (?) weeks between the last time we read The Savage Detectives and now was a good palate cleanser. I felt myself excited to get back into things, especially with the momentum, now that the end is feeling nearer and we’re officially over the halfway point, like when you’re on a kayak and the shore ahead is finally closer than the one you left behind and your arms start to hurt a bit less.

I don’t have much to add about the reading this week that I haven’t said in previous weeks, I think we’re all just waiting to figure out the point of it all and where the story takes us. I think I’m growing to enjoy the episodic narrative more than I did last time, now that we know what to expect a little better. I do wonder about the length of each entry we’re reading, as we talk about long books and why novels end (on a whim?). Our class discussions have made me now look at each mini story and think: why is this entry so short? Why does this entry need to take up twelve pages, what does this say that couldn’t have been said in two?

I highlight a few sections each week that stood out to me. An entry from this week’s reading that I enjoyed was Mary Watson’s, a travelogue of 1977 (p.253-269). It was relatively lengthy, but read like the kind of adventure a twenty year old (or however old, we only know she was older than nineteen) would have, and there were a lot of characters whose stories we only glimpsed from the section. I also loved how she was so infatuated with some guy for the summer only to move on immediately after term started back up, a true summer romance. It wasn’t even particularly interesting (similar to quite a few of the entries), so I’m not sure why it stuck out to me, I think it was the ominous “something bad is going to happen” feeling to keep the reader guessing about each character, and then how the end of the night watchman’s story is told only through someone else’s dealings with him (Hugh). Hugh was an interesting character, especially with his moment of loneliness when he realized there would be nobody to tell that he died now that his girlfriend had dumped him (268). I put a sticky note beside his words about not being able to voice this feeling or explain that loneliness.

I find myself struggling to know what to write about this week’s reading. This was one of those books that I’ll finish and probably not really think about again (besides our incoming class discussion). I neither loved nor hated it. I don’t really feel any particular way about Amulet, I just read it and now it’s over. I did like the prose, and I enjoyed the slightly more bouncy(?) writing/narration style to what we see in The Savage Detectives. By bouncy, I mean like:

Where maybe your most straightforward non-nonsense author (maybe an author really into historical accuracy) might tell the story like the black line, our narrator’s voice is the pink, where everything is a “yes, but…” or a “maybe, while also…”

I found love to be a strong theme throughout the chapters, a love of poetry, of Mexico, of young poets, of language and words and slang, of her friends, and of storytelling.

I also thought a lot about Poulet’s writing on the phenomenology of reading as I was reading. The narrator talks about how much she loves the poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfías, and while she says she worked with them in Mexico before they died, it’s unclear how much of her “knowing” poets is from meeting them versus reading their poetry. It’s Garfías’ poems she’s reading in the bathroom when UNAM was seized, and she then spirals into her stories about various poets she knew. In reading Garfías’ words in this scene, it’s like a part of him (as author) was with her (as reader) in the bathroom stall; her act of reading inspiring the literature to become “a sort of human being,” and linking “a common consciousness with the reader” (Poulet 59).

One idea I underlined to share this week was her mediation on movement towards the east: “To where night comes from. But then I thought: It’s also where the sun comes from” (Bolaño 54). I have never thought about the night coming from the east, because I guess I’ve always been so fixated on the sun setting in the west.

Then, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts about who the narration is for. When the narrator says “you” (like “I still have to tell you about her”) (41), is she speaking to a generally undefined audience, as in everyone who reads the book, or is she addressing it to something/one more defined (like the young poets she loves and mentors)?

I have now reached the twenty-first chapter in The Shadow of the Wind, where Daniel (main character) has just left his meeting with Nuria (who knew Julián Carax personally) after discussing Julián and his books. I had hoped to finish chapter 24 in this section, but I’ll just have to pick up some slack with the page count in future weeks.

This section wasn’t boring, but it was less immediately grabbing than the previous section (it mostly contains our main character, Daniel, running around the city tracking down clues about who Julián is/was and why it’s all important). Or, maybe the section wasn’t less interesting, but rather the experience of putting a book down and not touching it for a week at a time is taking some of the adrenaline/drive/will to read out of it. I feel like I am normally such a mood reader, so trying to balance a schedule of two alternating books is definitely teaching me a lot about how I read and how my motivation levels rise and fall.

We found out (spoilers ahead) through a letter from Penélope (lots of tension, betrayal, loved Julián, “found out” mysterious information that Julián apparently did not know) that Julián had left Barcelona to “pursue [his] dreams” (143-44). I would love to know more about this man, I feel like we’re getting little scraps of information here and there that are supposed to eventually (presumably) paint a bigger picture, but I might need to start keeping a notebook or something because I feel myself forgetting all the little clues and how they connect.

One passage I bookmarked to share for this week’s blog post was just a couple pages before I stopped reading, on page 175 of my edition: “Julián lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one, That all of his characters were himself.” (Outside of the context of Julián being some mysterious author with mysterious intentions whose books are bringing mysterious people with mysterious backgrounds into Daniel’s life), I thought this quote was kind of inspiring, that authors (but also all of us) live on in our stories. When we create art, of whichever form, we bury parts of ourselves in it, and so each time we read a poem or a novel, we’re keeping the author alive (which is taken more literally in the context of The Shadow of the Wind, where someone destroys all of Julián’s books to kill him completely).