Seeing the World Through Books

Throughout these five stories, the reader becomes hypnotized by the succession of Bolano’s images, by the lives he depicts (including his own in the two essays which follow), and by the metaphysical suggestions and possible symbols of his stories, despite the fact that Bolano does not make grand pronouncements or create a formal, organized, and ultimately hopeful view of life as other authors do. There is no coherence to our lives, he seems to say: chaos rules. Although artists of all kinds try to make some sense of life, Bolano suggests that their visions may not be accurate since they have no way of knowing or conveying the whole story, the big picture, the inner secrets of life. He himself avoids such suggestions of order in life. Vibrant and imaginative, Bolano’s stories seduce the reader into and coming back to them again and again looking for answers or explanations that often remain tantalizingly out of reach. Two essays at the end are particularly poignant and important for students of Bolano and lovers of literature. “Literature + Illness = Illness,” dedicated to “my friend the hepatologist, Dr. Victor Vargas,” explores the relationship between writing and the illness which would claim Bolano’s life at age fifty, soon after writing this. In “the Myths of Cthulhu,” a wonderful companion essay, he eventually concludes that “Writers today…are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but [instead] products of the middle and wofire eater imagerking classes determined topampas photo scale the Everest of respectability, hungry formara hare2 rpampas photoespectabilitypampas photopampas photo

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Despite the garish cover, with its closeup of cellulite-free legs and the suggestion of a bathing beauty body, this book is not a steamy potboiler. Instead, the cover accurately reflects the values of the beautiful people of Cascade Heights, a gated and walled residential community thirty miles outside Buenos Aires with full-service security–along with a golf course and top-quality tennis. The wealthy residents of The Cascade, as they call the community, have left their old lives behind, and many of them are delighted to have escaped some unpleasant memories. Living in elaborately built houses with spectacular landscaping, the three hundred residents have created a world apart, their children leaving for brief periods each day to attend an equally elite school outside the community, and then returning home, where they can wander the grounds at will, without supervision. The novel begins on Thursday night, September 27, 2001, when Teresa Scaglia returns home and doesn’t hear any noise from the card room or pool. Thinking that El Tano and his friends are in the changing room at the pool, she goes to bed. When she awakens later, she discovers that he and two of his friends are dead.

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One of the most original and delightful novels of the year, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is simultaneously a literary detective thriller, a parody of the detective story, and an anti-detective story. Taking its title (and one of its primary images) from Elizabethan writer John Dee, who wrote that if an orangutan were given enough time, he would eventually produce all the books in the world, the novel takes place in Buenos Aires, where an international group of Edgar Allan Poe specialists gathers for a meeting of the mysterious Israfel Society, just as a participant is murdered.

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