I finished Part 1 About the critics and I knew I was missing something, I explained the basic events to my partner and they responded "It sounds dumb" and I responded that yes it does sound dumb but I know that I am missing context because there is no way that this is just the surface events, I was just failing to put it together

So a quick summary of part one, there are four main characters we follow, three men a single woman. The men are from France, Spain, and Italy and the women is from London and all of them are obsessed with this fictional German author and it becomes the glue that kind of holds them together. The French and Spanish guy begin a romantic relationship with the woman from London, and she makes them aware of each other. They have this whole who will she pick as they try and find more information about this German author. Eventually they meet someone who tells them they know someone who saw them recently in Mexico, so they go and “kind of” try and look for him, well everyone except the Italian. They try very poorly, eventually the woman goes back and tells the other two she actually was in love with the Italian the whole time. The end. There is more but that is the gist of it.

This part of book tackles many topics such as the “civilized” world of Europe and their view of countries like Mexico. The European professors have little regard for the academics in other countries of less renown. They are critical or Amalfitano who by the way is from Spain originally but since he now lives in Mexico that somehow marks his as beneath them. He gives the following long speech and it ends with one of the critics simply not able to understand nor wanting to understand what he is saying

"It's an old story, the relationship of Mexican intellectuals with power. I'm not saying they're all the same. There are some notable exceptions. Nor am I saying that those who surrender do so in bad faith. Or even that they surrender completely. You could say it's just a job. But they're working for the state. In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they're laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this might be true across Latin America, except in Argentina, intellectuals work for the state. It was like that under the PRI and it'll be the same under the PAN. The intellectual himself may be a passionate defender of the state or a critic of the state. The state doesn't care. The state feeds him and watches over him in silence. And it puts this giant cohort of essentially useless writers to use. How? It exorcises demons, it alters the national climate or at least tries to sway it. It adds layers of lime to a pit that may or may not exist, no one knows for sure. Not that it's always this way, of course. An intellectual can work at the university, or better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn't mean, they won't get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual think he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. This mechanism somehow crops the ears off Mexican writers. It drives them insane. Some, for example, will set out to translate Japanese poetry without knowing Japanese and others just spend their time drinking. Take Almendro - as far as I know he does both. Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me. The weather is good, it's sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valéry, possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend's house and talk. And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become more apparent, wounded vanity, the desire for just once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of lights and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense an earthquake, they try to be eloquent where they sense a fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they're incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage on which they work is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. The shrinking of the stage doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller too, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage there are others, of course. New stages that have sprung up over time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humor, but it still sinks. The humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language, can't even enrich it themselves. Their best words are borrowings that they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They're sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends the theaters are closed and they cover the openings of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night. The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. Songs can be heard in some bars, the notes reaching the street. Sometimes an intellectual wanders off course and goes into one of these places and drinks mezcal. Then he thinks what would happen if one day he. But no. He doesn't think anything. He just drinks an sings. Sometimes he thinks he sees a legendary German writer. But all he's really seen is a shadow, sometimes all he's seen is his own shadow, which comes home every night so that the intellectual won't burst or hang himself from the lintel. But he swears he's seen a German writer and his own happiness, his sense of order, his bustle, his spirit of revelry rest on that conviction. The next morning it's nice out. The sun shoots sparks but doesn't burn. A person can go out reasonably relaxed, with his shadow on his heels, and stop in a park and read a few pages of Valéry. And so on until the end." "I don't understand a word you've said," said Norton. "Really I've just been talking nonsense," said Amalfitano

At first, I thought that the shadow was passion but instead it could be ignorance, like in Plato’s cave. I feel Bolano is criticizing two things in this novel. One is the overconsumption of one’s passion for a specific niche, or diving too deeply into academics and secondly our ability to understand the world around us. The first part of this giant monologue I see as a mockery of the academic, someone who simply just spends their days studying what is they want as they also do nothing at the same time. This can also be seen in the critiques who talk and think way too much that they do nothing at all. This can be seen in how they hand their relationship among this love triangle and then later when they over analyze a phrase said in passing. These academics lose their shadow (ignorance) and begin to speak about the knowledge they have gained, and gaze into the deep dark void, but eventually some go mad by what they see and onlly does the return of that shadow, that ignorance is it that these academics can stay sane. I really like this paragraph and thinking of it in this way allows me to appreciate it even more.

The second thing is how that seeking of knowledge and how it does not really “do” anything. The later part of this monologue explains the failure of the academic to translate the dark parts of the cave, the unknown whispers that is the human condition and why things such as serial femicides have to exist in the first place. You may find an explanation, perhaps not a good one, but then what. The cave will still be there, you may have translated, granted poorly parts of it, but how does that change the situation? I think these were the question Bolano was probing the reader to ask.

This novel in itself is that same what he seems to feel as a fruitless translation of human suffering. For example, I already talked about the inertness of the professors, but eventually this talking and talking and talking builds up between the two men, they are frustrated and angry and imagine harm would come to the other so that they would come out as the victor. Eventually that rage is unleashed once they were able to find a target for their aggression on a Pakistani Taxi driver. This can serve as a reflection for the murders in San Teresa where the powerful can not really do harm upon each other, so instead they take it out on someone else.

This is not the only conversation revolving around violence, there is also the paradox of how some violence is seen as artful while other forms of violence are barbaric and uncivilized. Why is that chopping off your hand and putting it as an art piece beautiful, but someone beating up another is sees as not? This paradox can also revolve around the amount of attention this violence gets, the artist is praised, the taxi driver they beat up is barely a whisper. There is one more thing I found interesting about the violence enacted on the taxi driver and that is when Liz Norton screams at the two men to stop hurting the Pakistani as he will hate the British more. One, it was not the life of this man that was important but the reputation of where she was from. Second, the two men who are not British do not care if this man has a negative viewpoint because it not *their* country. If we move that view macroscopically, how much violence is enacted on someone else’s borders with little regard because they are simply “not from there” or the fact that morality can be tied up to one’s place of birth, to preserve its reputation. Many questions like these come from this book.

Amalfitano is the Chilean professor that guided the three critics in the last book. A very short book, this book revolves about the downfall of Amalfitano into madness because well he does go a little loopy talking to voices and all

We start off with his wife’s madness as he goes off back to Europe in search of a professor that she may or may not have had relationships with, it is implied that she is making it up since the poet is rumored to be gay. The story does not indicate weather she was insane before the marriage or after. My assumption, based on crux of the novel, that being Santa Teresa is that the place was the cause of the madness, because as we see later in the novel Amalfitano becomes subjected to it as well. So for Lola it may have been her way to escape, she comes back once more to inform him of her AIDS and hang out with their daughter one final time.

Then there is the geometry book that Amalfitano begins to obsess over and we saw a glimpse of this book in Part 1, but here we get the story behind the book. He had books brought from Barcelona and he becomes fixated on the idea that he does not remember packing it. He recalls a strange story about someone leaving the book out on a clothesline and see how the it handles the elements. In a way this represent him and how he a professor, nor a geometry granted, but an intellectual is just thrust upon the elements of Santa Teresa with nothing to do but to be battered. He was placed here with no reason and he himself can do nothing about his situation. Well, he could, but seems to choose not too; however, that “choice” seems to be affected by the voice he begins to hear later in the novel.

What I mean by not doing anything is, he worries about his teenage daughter Rosa going off on her own, always late at night, but he simply lets it happens and instead begins to obsess with menial things like the book, like in a way the book will give him answers as his nerves fray. He listens to the radio for talks about the crimes in Saint Teresa but then turns it off and again goes to the book.

This is around when the voice begins to talk to him, it claims to be a male figure in his life, first his grandfather and then his father. As I see the voice could be the voice of Santa Teresa and perhaps what caused his wife Lola to also go insane, but instead of becoming obsessed with a poet this voice is telling him to relax. To be inert, because all other emotions have betrayed him. We see this as a very common trait for Amalfitano as he lets his wife just go, he let’s his daughter just go, he is the book on the clothesline where things happen to it, it does not happen to the world. The voice perpetuates this inertness with quotes like

“and you’ve also thought about your daughter. And about the murders committed daily in this city…But you haven’t thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand.”

This diverges his thoughts and he begins to spiral in different investigations, he becomes fixated on a small book of the Chilean history and that becomes the focus at the end of this book, he stuck his head into a whole in order to tune out everything around him

Fate
If you will hear every reviewer, say about this part of the novel is that Fate is a guy and that is not even his real name, it is the name he uses for his newspaper. I am taking this little detail at face value and going with the idea that the author named his character Fate in order to demonstrate that Fate is not an untouchable force, it is every being that makes a choice. There are outside circumstances that bring Fate to his position in Santa Teresa but he also affects the situation he finds himself in. By choosing to go with Guadalupe she is able to come face to face with the suspected killer, even if we do not see what occurs from that and of course the big event, is the saving of Rosa. Taking the name fate and placing it on an individual works to mend the concept with a concrete object. It is Fate that saves Rosa, it is Fate that her dad gives her daughter too to potentially save.

There was a part in the novel in which Fate realizes that once he leaves U.S. soil he begins to call himself American and no longer African American. In a strange way you become one with your country outside of it. For example, I do not think many people would call themselves a certain subclass of American when they go overseas. They are American, and all that it entails. Which I found interesting to think about.

On his way to Santa Teresa, we hear a detective talk about the murders in a very casual and dismissive way, saying that no one cares about the femicides because they were outcasts of society. The parallel to this line of thinking is the book about slave trade that Fate was recommended in which the description of slave trading was treated with muted callousness. They were outcasts, so therefore their suffering even if in the thousands was not important. I think of this in light of current events, where the assassination of one individual is led with coverage and half masts and commentary from political officials, but the vast lives lost previous to that one killing, and the lives that continue to be lost in the future is met with silence. I will go further on about this in the part about the killings but it is interesting to see it set up now.

Next think that was brought to my attention is Fate being sick the entire trip after his mother passed away. The entire time there are flashes of his mother's memory that appear to him. I think this reflects how the people in Santa Teresa do not have time to mourn their dead, and perhaps even people outside of it. People die and we continue on, we do mundane things as though nothing major has passed. Perhaps his body was in grief but dissociation led to him separating that grief in order to continue his work. I point to the incident of the other reporter to further my point. At the begging in Fate is assigned this story because the other reported died. The sentence is brief and Fate is excited for this opportunity.

whiteness in mexico

Podcast I found interesting and funny. There are some points I see that they did not or interpreted differently, but that is what is really cool about books. Anyways I enjoyed them well enough to listen to other episodes

This one was... and interesting read there are two things that stuck out to me

One was the just the how inconsequential the women are in this town. They get raped, beaten, killed obviously and, it's just. Well part of the reality.

I want to summarize this part in a coherent manner but I am not sure I can, ugh. Ok let me try. So there is a part here where the police officers are eating at a restaurant and one of the author's, I guess to buddy up to his fellow begins to make jokes. Well those jokes are about women, with the punchlines being violent. This goes on for an uncomfortable amount of time, and the text notes that there are some officers that laugh, and some that do not, but they also remain quiet. Kinda of a quiet acceptance, I feel that is how most people tend to be, they may not like what they hear from their fellow, but because they are in community they fail to say anything about it. I mean I do it and I am sure everyone else has that one situation where they just don't say anything because of whatever reason exists. Is that a fault, yes. Is that also just normal, yes. I don't have an answer here, but internally I am angry at myself so maybe it starts from there. There was a quote that resounded with me "How much of god's truth are found in jokes" in reference to the masogonist jokes that I was just subjected too. This was not a "well it is as god willed it" but more like, how much of our beliefs are in these jokes that we can still find them funny? I hope I am making sence, like perhaps when jokes are no longer laughed at, then that mean it is no longer a truth, no longer a real issue.

The big part that really stuck out to me is the way this chapter was organized. It had listings of women that were murdered in a very clinical sence, a simple police report, a very matter of fact paragraph. These paragraphs would go on and on and on, but sometimes there would be a story sprikled in to break the monotony. that monotony is what shook me. The fact that I found these killings boring to where I was excited to hear about the sidestories. I did not actaully yawn or anything like that, but my attention did wayne and was kept strung along with these characters stories. This is kind of how I feel we treat the many atrocities we are made aware of today. The genocide of gaza, the encroachment in venezuela, the ice kidnappings. Omg, school shootings has reached this state. It use to make headlines all the time, now it happens so frequently they may not even get airetime on national tv. These violent killings and they are considered "old news". Like they are now the "reality" they are now JOKES they are now truth. This part really took me down a dark mental hole. It was not even the murders it was just how I see this in real life and how it just IS. Oh another war? ha I still have to get up to pay my bills. Like how crazy is that sentence really. but it is a joke such as this world sometimes I feel. This is why I have a positive vibes journal yall.