The narrator met fellow poet Alberto Ruiz-Tagle at University in Chile just before the military coup that topples the Allende government. Later, Alberto becomes Carlos Wieder, a lieutenant in the Chilean airforce whose extra-curricular career as a serial killer is facilitated by the murders and disappearances of political opponents to the new regime of General Pinochet. Later still, Wieder goes to ground and is hunted through his contributions to underground poetry magazines in Europe.
This novel is a curious mixture of politics and literary criticism; it seems to be predicated on the idea that poetry is important. It references inter alia Borges, Georges Perec, Vathek by William Beckford and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. There's an intense flavour of the typical cocktail of South America and students, of youth and disillusion. There are times when the story seems to wander down a sidetrack; there are echoes of the prose and narrative structure of Jorge Luis Borges (such as when the narrator considers the precise translation of the Bible that Wieder might have used for an early performance poem). But mostly, I suppose, it is about evil and our typically inadequate response to it.
Selected quotes:
- "Drifting east, shaped like cigarettes or pencils, the clouds were black and white at first, when they were still over the coast, but as they veered towards the city they turned pink, then bright vermilion as they headed up the valley." (Ch 2)
- "But who, wonders Munoz Cano, have ever seen a dentist's waiting room where the rotten teeth (sic) are standing in line?" (Ch 6)
- "Prisoners are a dead weight in times of civil war." (Ch 7)
- "Every one of them seemed confident and utterly self-assured, immune to ridicule and doubt, a condition which, on reflection, is perhaps not altogether exceptional, given that these were French writers." (Ch 9)
July 2024; 149 pages
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