Somehow the ending left me cold, and I might be dense but I still fail to see the significance of the title. Although I read that book 6 was recently discovered amongst some old papers of Bolaño's, so perhaps it wasn't the end after all!
"They turned flight into freedom, even of freedom was no more than the perpetuation of flight."
This book is so daunting; I hesitate to really sit down and get into it. I feel like I need to really dedicate a day to it, otherwise I will never get through the beast!
I'm still not totally sure where this one's going and I'm not sure how Bolano keeps getting me to come back, considering his tendency to ramble too long in areas that don't seem to move the story along.
I'm really struggling through this thing. It just feels like a whole lot of literary masturbation most of the time. Bolano goes off for paragraph after paragraph (and sometimes they're a page long each) describing some minute detail of a peripheral concern... which turns out to be completely irrelevant to the plot. I'll soldier on, but it's a hard slog at this stage.
Really enjoying this so far. I will have to put it down to read Eco's 'The Name of The Rose' for our reading group.
At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter's underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.
Additional information
- Pages: 912
- ISBN: 0330447424
- EAN: 9780330447423
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Picador
I've gotten to the part about the crimes. I don't know if I'll be able to make it through. Not because of the all the dying---that doesn't bother me---but because of the monotony. 60 pages in and almost every page has a paragraph that starts like this, "The next victim was found [insert some remote place] in a ditch. She had been vaginally and anally raped. She had stab wounds in her [insert various body parts]. The cause of death was ruled [insert either strangulation or stab wounds]." When I flipped ahead through the remaining 250 pages of that section I saw the same line, over and over, all the way to the end. Expecting me to read 300 pages of that is pushing it.
rsinger replies...
Is that a Gustave Moreau on the cover?
marcel replies...
Apparently it is, yes. From a painting called "Jupiter and Semele".