And yet, there can be no question that a work of art is an object, in the sense of gaining its import from being separable from its artist or even performers.  While the death of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, and its following by Hamlet certainly bears more than audible echoes in the names, the play is far from reducible to the event, even to the man ‘Shakespeare.’  It has taken on a life of its own.  Or, thinking of Wagner, one is surprised at Hagan’s hatred and evil in early productions being made into a sort of heroism leading up to the second World War; it is precisely because of the neutral and indifferent objectivity of the work that such a subjective imposition functions, not as outlandish, but as remarkably informative of a hidden potential that existed all along in Wagner’s great work.

Beckett, though, is perhaps most clearly enamoured with the problem of objectivity and its capacity to rid the work of the contingency of the author.  For Beckett, it is almost unfortunate that his novels must have a novel at all, and he often goes to great lengths to strip not only the identity of the narrator, but by ‘The Unnamable’ steals even its bodily presence, rendering it a voice without a body, an awful incarnation of pure subjectivity which, strikingly, coincides with mere objectivity: brute, lacking in idiosyncrasies, incapable of anything but universal and communicable thoughts.  One almost finds here a sense of language without reference, as if language could speak of and to itself without needing to reattach to the corporeal.

The magic of this is generated by the style of Beckett, who wrote in a foreign language first, and then re-translated it later into his first language. He put a barrier to the free-ness of his thought, preventing its immediate and smooth expression, halting its unimpeded flow intentionally.  The self-restricting might strike many, in our day and age, as misguided, but for Beckett it was requisite for an artist to fight against their own thought.  Following from his fellow expatriate, Joyce, Beckett knew full well that the flow of speech that often runs through our minds are hardly ours, but are most often simply common-currency, well-used cliches, types and forms that are so public as to be vulgar.  To allow writing to spill directly on the page turns it into a shocking exercise in banality, as evidenced by Warhol’s ‘A Novel.’

This amounts to a contradiction.  On the one hand, Beckett moved his characters into the realm of language-as-such, the pure space of words without referent, often leaving characters immobilized and often skeptical about the world outside them, outside meaning anything but their soothing and self-directed words.  But on the other, Beckett wars with language, nervous about it falling into the mundane.  It is a testament to his writing how simple and sparse his prose is, how anxiously he held himself from innovation or linguistricks.  This might, then, count as the highlight of his work, that he is capable of producing separations that are not separations, capable of revealing differences without difference, much as the way it is a sort of non-occurrence when death finally arrives, a change in degree not kind.  The body and voice, the living and dead, the inner and outer, language as expressive and language as neutral-medium.

All of this makes sense of itself out of Beckett’s willingness to engage in his novels backwards, not as expressing his thoughts subjectively, but needing to express them as objects, as objects capable of translation, as capable of appearing in one language or another indifferently.  It is in this sense we should say he speaks language as such, outside any culture or space, and creates works truly objective.  The paradox, of course, is that the object is the subject itself.

And yet, to experience Mahler in the same way many experience a Shostakovitch is unnerving, but becoming more and more common. The latter’s symphonies are the ultimate expression of what one might call the idiosyncrasy of pop-culture, of being personal in their most general, of being both part of a crowd and not fitting in, perhaps the defining feature of Soviet-Russia, the sense of being part of Socialism but with an ironic, and saddening, distance. They are, in a certain sense, anti-art, more of the ironist M. Rascal than the work of a Schumann who, it might be said, literally went mad on account of his work.  Shostakovitch is, perhaps, an early version of Spielberg, a fantastically talented worker who is, at the same time, not just subject to the norms of his era but, in his own way, the very epitome of those norms.  Both artists share a sense of creating cliches, so that even their novelty feels conformist.  There is a sense of ‘making a Spielberg film’ and ‘making a Shostakovitch symphony’ that indicates an evocation of art without being artistic, the capacity to make cheap vulgarity without appearing to be kitsch, like an inverted-Warhol.  It is, in this sense, the opposite of ‘making a Joyce novel’ or ‘making a Goddard film,’ where the sense is rather of a continual failure to make popular, a sort of indecent relation to the public reader.

What we should say about Shostakovitch, to adequately express the problem, is that in his work subjectivity is experienced as the most common and shared aspect of our being.  His trick is to touch the listener intimately, but in a way that every listener feels singled out.  It is rousing and exciting, but by a falsification: what seems to speak to our inner being, our true self, speaks to everyone’s inner being and true self.  Which is to say, it reveals that what we prize about ourself is not private, though we treat it as such, but entirely public, a product of society, a fragment of ideology.

Which is why it is unnerving to find Mahler placed in the same cannon, as merely another late-Romantic.  Mahler’s work, much like Joyce and Goddard for that matter, seems remarkably antagonistic to the individual, to the existential-angst definitive of the modern individual’s character, to the idiosyncrasy of the present day subject, consumed in private emotions and incommunicability.  For all three, the individual was a mere chance occurrence, a collection of thoughts that merely conjoined accidentally in one person, not essentially.  Mahler is fully aware that our private most thoughts are something implanted in us, as with Harrison Ford’s character in Blade Runner, and that what we treasure as most personal is instead something common and vulgar.  This gives the objectivity of his work, the overwhelming sense of the social collectivity, the almost militaristic sate, its force; not that it is opposed to the subject, but that it is the subject in reverse.  What we take to be our private-self is, in truth, merely the ossification of the bombast of trombones, the vigorous drum-rolls of the march, the almost disgusting and crass carnival tunes that populate the third symphony.  When the subject does appear explicitly in Mahler, it is always something mourned and long-lost.

Encountering Dudamel’s Fifth is, perhaps, the most acute instance of the turn that has occurred in the Mahler audience. His work has become comfortable. Dudamel seems untroubled by the militaristic pomp of the fifth, relishing in it with gusto, despite that Mahler never engages it without breaking it into a minor or crashing it down upon some lone, individual voice, drowned by the snares and the opaque and subjectless horns. Nor does he find it unnerving that the work seems divided and troubled, instead finding time and again a certain carefree spirit in the movement, as if trying to capture a jubilant Mahler, thrilled with the county fair band.  The sense of contradiction, that overused word in Mahler criticism, is completely lost.

It would be wrong to cal Dudamel’s version poor. It just no longer takes Mahler as ‘art,’ as something that cannot and should not be digested. To paraphrase Artaud, Dudamel seems to eat supper without worrying about the later smells of his bowels, living in an aseptic world. There is no sense of this possibility in Mahler, whose use of minors and silences can locate the underside in almost anything: every triumph also a defeat might be his motto, and his placement on the cusp between triumph and defeat has long given his work its autonomy and profundity. To side with one to the detriment of the other might make for good Beethoven, as often marks Karajan’s versions, but certainly makes for poor Mahler.

Shuffling him back into the corner is obviously a nostalgic dream not worth attending to. Still, it causes a moment’s pause to think of how a generation can come to have so internalized the contradictoriness and suffering of a composer that it might suddenly turn the anxiety-producing work into something ‘beautiful.’  It is the sad fate, such as is often found with Pollack’s work, that something that assaults and overwhelms our person in its affectiveness can, given time and the slow-growing apathy that has come to define post-modernism, become bland and innocuous.

Although the masterwork many cite in this regard is Melville’s ‘The Confidence Man,’ and for good reason, it should be noted that a similar situation is very prevalent in ‘Moby Dick.’  In ‘The Confidence Man,’ the reader slowly grows anxious over the need for the mysterious character of the title to become embodied, to slowly gain definite presence and stand separate from his ephemeral existence beneath the multiplicity of masks he wears.  Ironically, Melville’s con-man is also Nietzsche’s woman, nothing but the movement between accidents without any essential substance.

‘Moby Dick,’ to the contrary, moves in the opposite direction, taking the fully-embodied travellings over land of Ishmael into his ghostly existence on the ship, from the essence of a young man looking for adventure to being essentially a voice.  As the book progresses, Ishmael becomes less and less embodied, only referencing even himself indirectly, until he is pure narrator, capable of hearing the inner thoughts and monologues of Ahab and Starbuck while they hide alone in their rooms.  Ishmael’s individuality becomes identical to universality: his own body is foreign to him, but he knows of every text and poem on whales, every detail of the deep, every characters thoughts and expressions while they man the crow’s nest or stare into the expanse at night in their private cabin.  What begins as one character among the crew turns into the vision of god, of an infinite wealth of knowledge and infinite perspectives, capable of surviving the end of the world as with Husserl’s transcendental ego or Mao’s China after the world is bombed into oblivion.

In this slow disappearing that Ishmael undergoes, hardly even noticeable to the reader, we also find the rise of the three great personalities of the work: Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb.  Although interpretations vary, all must take into account that the disembodiment of Ishmael into the ships omniscient narrator is made alongside the caricaturisation of obsessed madness, bourgeois reason and the well-lived simplicity.  As with many trios, from Plato’s ancient splitting up into the Karamazovs, there is a sense that no one is a full-person so much as a disembodied fragment of humanity, as Kierkegaard accused Don Giovanni of being.  However, Melville reverses it, giving full bodily presence and liveliness to the caricature, while stealing bodily presence from the balanced, thoughtful narrator.

This, perhaps, is the modern turn at work, where the appearance of the fully human is only in some pathological nuance, in some excessive trait, whereas the dispassionate and critical thinker disappears, making Ishmael’s humanity into vaporous non-existence.  The reversal is careful, and Melville marks it well.  It is not, as it is in ‘The Confidence Man,’ simply the complete loss of the individual behind the many veils, but the twin movement of absence and presence.  For Ishmael, it is a complete loss without even masks, absent from his own story, a mere ghost not implicated in the hunt for the great white whale.  However, Melville does not paint Ahab a as masked figure, not as representation of madness, but as identical to madness, as the very existence of madness itself.

And this is what is so unnerving.  Ahab is perfect in a sense no character has ever been, fully self-identical and complete.  His life has meaning and is filled with desire, and he pursues it absolutely and unapologetically, in the tradition of the truly beautiful and profound romantics.  The madness that makes him into something inhuman is also, not unsurprisingly, what makes him truly human; it is the passion and obsession unto death, the singular fixation, the uncompromising vision that turns him from hunter of an animal to the character of modernity, searching out the place where weak, frail, imperfect man might somehow topple god himself.  This is the great anti-humanist insight of German Idealism: the appearance of the truly human is necessarily an appearance of inhumanity, of the cruel, barbarous underside.

Which, then, is a key to reading Ahab’s  line that the whole world of men lie between the Starbuck and Stubb; it is not meant that all men are one of the two, but that no man is, that all men are between.  Which seems a sad commentary.  Ahab’s final condemnation is that everyone is Ishmael: disembodied, uninvolved, separate.  At best, one might be a character, in the pejorative sense, like Stubb and Starbuck.  But Ahab truly is alone.  And alone because he is fully-human, complete and perfect. 

There is a sense in such works that the line separating the sane from the insane is remarkably narrow, and far more easily breached than initial impressions might allow.  Of course, part of this is due to the rather romantic notion of madness that characterizes these works, where it is rather a deep form of melancholy than something akin to schizophrenia.  Other works do more to highlight the nearly imperceptible difference in the latter, such as certain works of Artaud or certain sections of Pynchon.  Goethe is more focused on the thin line between self-destructive sadness and normalcy, trying to make the work at once very familiar, and yet undeniably ‘other,’ where Werther’s sadness is our own and, yet, exhausts all that we can think of sadness, forces sadness to be something we experience as ‘beyond,’ as more than we are capable of.

Goethe is a careful writer, in the sense of lavishly devoted, to his characters, and Werther is no exception. Indeed, Goethe grants him the nobility to be tragic with the sense Hegel gives to the ancient Greek heroes, where it is an honor to be found guilty. Werther’s guilt is his melancholy, which is not the half-hearted melancholy of many Romantics, but the wondrous melancholy of the absolutely faithful, of one who persists unto death in their impossible love. The story opens with Werther suffering from one woman’s loss, and he goes barely three letters before he has lost his second love. The second part gives him another loss, and then he goes to lose again what he has lost before, reveling in the pain.  Assuredly, this makes the book silly and at times stupid, but Goethe does not for a moment act as if the reader is in the wrong for seeing through his character for being the mere puppet he, in fact, is.  The clownish playing of Werther comes across as over-acting and sappy, and yet never so fully far-afield from our own experience.

Which is the trap of the work, and also with the work of Salinger.  What must, in the end, be accomplished is the sense of excessiveness that produces abnormality in both Werther and Caulfield instead reverses itself into the key to their humanity.  The ultimate trick is to turn what is obscene and other into the very signature of what it means to live as a human: to become overly attached, to be stuck in short-circuits, to be incomplete, to repeat failures unthinkingly and without the capacity to learn from them.  Indeed, this list seems more akin to the mouse in a maze, which is what gives it its uncanny character and its peculiar Hegelian synthesis of the highest and the lowest, where the true index of being fully and genuinely humans i, in their way, the basest and most pathological idiosyncrasy.

But for anyone who has walked through one of her fuller exhibits is well aware, those works are one of two sets.  The other set is something akin to the work of Bosquiat: scrawls, doodles and lots of writing ranging from non-sensical fragments to remarkably self-conscious paragraphs.  In this series, she is very overt in her intentions.  She wishes to grasp what it is to be a ‘black artist,’ or, at times, a ‘black female artist.’  For Walker, there is no right concept for these identities, nor are they identities she can shed.  It is clear in her written works that she follows Bosquiat’s wild oscillation, between identifying with blatant stereotypes of what a ‘black artist’ or a ‘black woman’ should be, while at other times she moves in the other direction, questioning whether she is even required to address these issues.  Isn’t she an artist?  Shouldn’t her work speak for itself, not for its artist’s gender, race, heritage, &tc?  Why is Picasso’s history contingent and accidental to his works, and her ‘history’ the key to her works?  Or, in the reverse, is Picasso’s history contingent?  And is Walker’s own history contingent?  Does she need to be African-American to make the art she makes?  Can she make art with racial-caricatures only if it is of her race?  Is it possible to critique race only for those of the race?

It would be one thing if someone came to ask these questions of Walker’s work, but it is unnecessary; she asks these questions herself, overtly, repeatedly, as if to prevent the viewer from getting to ask them first.  It is these works that set the stage for her silhouettes.  Those silent and awful/awesome figures seem to be most profound when seen against the background of questions that haunt Walker on how her art is possible, in what context we can think about it, and who she must be in order to attempt it.

The silhouettes are very often disgusting and racist; it would be wrong to pretend like Walker is ‘entitled’ to be racist because she’s African-American, because it’s ‘her’ culture and race.  That fully misses the work.  The problem, for her, is that it is not her culture or race.  Or, perhaps more precisely, it is no more hers than it is ours, ours being any American: it is only within a culture fractured historically by its race-relations, its history of slavery, its inequality and antagonism that this art can arise.  And it is to this culture that Walker’s work speaks.

That is what gives the works their disorienting character.  The temptation to say ‘this is not my culture’ or ‘not my race’ is not felt more strongly by either non-African-Americans or African-Americans.  It is no one’s culture or race directly.  Despite feeling historical and proximate, it is also foreign, unfamiliar, ahistorical and unreal.  The realization is that her silhouettes portray no one’s real culture or race, but they belong to us in a way we cannot articulate.  We keep attempting to localize them, but Walker continually prevents it, reminding the viewer over and over that they, too, exist within these curious works: as racists, as oppressors, as stereotypers, as slaves.

This, then, might be the grand feature of her work.  Walker actually places us outside a space that is all too intimate.  She lets us feel like outsiders to our own myths, fantasies, hatreds, confusions and sins.  And this is what makes her work so unsettling: what is most alien to us turns out to be something very intimate, and something very public that we share.  It is the deep secret we all know about but dare not speak, the hidden shame that had long been secluded, that Walker lets out.  And lets out in the most awful way: directly, unambiguously, in all of its manifest monstrosity and depravity.

Would McCain have been judged as harshly had he made similar errors?  Put in those terms, the standard for Obama is clearly not an independent standard.  The standard for Obama is Obama’s own standard, not the American general-standard for political integrity.  Americans have become so accustomed to modest degrees of indecency, if not illegality, that the standard for politicians is fairly low.  Obama, to the contrary, demanded that the standard for himself be placed high; perhaps impossibly high.  To find out he is involved in politics as usual is not terribly damning for anyone who treated him as a regular politician; but to anyone who judged him by the standard he set for himself, he has failed miserably in this process.

And yet, his approval ratings seem unassailable.  One sign of his double-standard is that he has been given a standard he cannot possibly live up to, while it is clear that this is hardly the standard used for most politicians.  On the other hand, he is given an unquestioned degree of support and trust, despite his failures.  As if to make up for the first impossible standard, he is given a second impossible standard, one he cannot fail in regards.  So long as he is not-Bush, there seems comfort with him.  The critical criterion on the one-hand is off-set by a certain aesthetic-charismatic standard, where Obama can do no wrong.

It would be wrong to praise one standard and protest the other.  But it is also clear that the two standards are not in an adequate relation.  He can fall well-short of the first, critical standard without imperilling the second, but if he fails the second, more charismatic, no amount of success on the first can save him.  There is something comforting and terrifying in this: comforting in his capacity to remain supported even as he tries new, and perhaps unsuccessful things, while terrifying in that he need focus more on his populism than on right-judgement.  This suggests a very intereing 100 days…

Yet, one cannot view merely one de Koonig painting or one Sherman print and receive much of a sense of encountering art. On its own, a de Koonig work strikes the eye as vicious and brutal, as if women were a beast that the painter tore asunder. An individual Sherman print seems sexist if not offensive. It is only as a series that something begins to stand out, something troubling. In both cases, the series begins to invert our initial perception: what we found to be a gross idiosyncracy of the artist in de Koonig is actually a very familiar carving up of women into functions, the reduction of women to parts, the denial of an ‘essence’ to women. The original impression of beastliness turns into the recognition of their piecemeal character, that ‘woman’ is a construct of bodily markers and signifiers, that we interpret ‘woman’ according to certain indicators and nothing but these indicators. This is the trick of de Koonig: to prevent us from finding something ‘eternally feminine’ in the mere aggregation of organs that make up the female body.

Sherman might seem to be contrasting this perfectly, since every photo involves the same body. But, in fact, her work instead copies it through a different set of ‘organs:’ clothing, postures, expressions, gestures. What remains the same, the body of Sherman, can barely be discerned, whereas ‘woman’ appears rather clearly in every shot, though as clichés. The woman who seems to be waiting for her lover, the forlorn housewife, the damsel in distress, the overly passionate, the easily deceived, the strong-willed woman… What begins as a subjective nuance, the belief that the viewer has ‘seen this before,’ turns out to be an objective nuance, that woman is objectively taken to be this series of postures, gestures…

And this is what produces the provocative nature of both series: looking at enough works in the series, the initial experience that the artist is being sexist or derogatory suddenly snaps back, indicating that it is the viewer that is sexist, that the viewer is the one who has reduced women to a series of organs, partial-objects, aggregations, &tc. And this is what Sherman brings out so clearly in de Koonig: precisely where he seemed to be his most idiosyncratic and abstract, he was actually already being the most universal and concrete. What we take as sexist and denigrating is, shockingly, changes by viewing these works as a series into a condemnation of our own conceptualization of what ‘woman’ is…

Archimboldi is granted a sort of superhuman non-relation to the events around him: forgetting the face of his father, capable of holding his breath for impossibly long underwater, engaging in battle not only fearlessly but insensibly, going MIA multiple times in the war without any retaliation, righteously striking out at a war criminal, loving a mad woman, disconnecting himself from any family, becoming more and more unreal with each story of his exploits until he appears merely in the dreams of others as a ‘giant,’ an inconceivable force that can accomplish what others do not even hope for. What fantasy is this? Why is this Bolano’s final remark to the literary world? Archimboldi is no ancient hero, striking down gods, nor a modern hero, trapped by inexplicable tragedy and suffering. He is a pariah in all traditions, wandering the earth as an outcast and yet seemingly unaware of being outside of anything. His writing is placed in no tradition, seems to be without predecessor, seems un-German. What is this figure?

A right answer is not to be forthcoming. Rather, Archimboldi seems merely to be the repository of all of the inconsistent hopes and dreams that make up Bolano’s world. One can’t help but think of Obama’s comment that he was simply a blank screen where people project their ideas.  It is all the more unnerving, because the first section, ‘the Critics,’ found themselves overwhelmed with how easy it was to project features on to Archimboldi.  Rather than the last section laying their speculation to rest with Archimboldi’s ‘real life,’ it instead only increases it, as if his real life does not detract from his mysteriousness or the ambiguity of his personality.  His real life is every bit as unhelpful at explaining him as the make-shift life the critics had imagined for him.

As the book ends, Archimboldi fades into the background and the final story is of his young sister and her son. In this gesture, Bolano concludes by firmly placing Archimboldi as the direction to which dreams are directed, to an insubstantial place that is a sort of projection of his two relatives, who entreat him without certainty what Archimboldi is even capable of doing. Archimboldi is barely a main character in the section bearing his name, because his thoughts always seem so opaque to the reader.  Rather than finishing by making him more transparent, Bolano stops talking about him at all, going off on a non-sequitor that finally intersects with Archimboldi in the last four pages.

At the end, the relatives come to Archimboldi seeming to ask, ‘what can this untimely, ephemeral writer really accomplish?’ The question is Bolano’s own troubled question to himself. Uncertain upon his deathbed, Bolano concludes by asking whether there is ever a right time or place for his writing, whether there is ever a world or tradition in which his work will fit in. His ambiguity is not despair. He is not sure where or whether he wants to be included in any tradition. But, as with Archimboldi, the story ends with him lending himself to those who call upon him.  In this way, Bolano paints his own ending rather beautifully; although he is not sure what his writing means or what it will stand for or what tradition it will ultimately belong to, he unpretentiously offers it as a gift to all those who need literature in order to live.

This is not an easy task. Bolano hints at Stalin’s harrowing insight that a million deaths is a statistic but a single death is a tragedy. The grace of his writing gives each death its place, as if to try and prevent the murders from being merely aggregated, hoping to preserve some dignity to each of the dead women. But the sheer number overwhelms, coming to bore the reader in the mundacity of their occurrence. Which is not a criticism. The boredom is requisite; Bolano must desensitise the reader over the three-hundred pages, letting them wander the streets of Santa Theresa with victims, citizens, and the murderers.

The indifference that the reader acquires is frustrating, a prevention of anyone holding out against the onslaught of nameless corpses. What Bolano seeks is to prod and push at that part of the reader that attempts to remain human in the face of inhumanity, that tries to feel sympathy and caring even when confronted with the horrors of the world. This is undermined, and the subtle and beautiful soul is divested of their belief in the goodness of humanity or the hope for a better world, left instead experiencing the terrifying spectre of their own apathy. Drawing out this apathy is difficult to do in a reader, though it is omnipresent in the mundane world, a point Bolano offers up in the begrudging police, Hans’ bored and depressed lawyer, the jaded press and the denying politicians. The temptation of the soul, Bolano suggests, is not care but indifference, not loving attention but willful blindness.

And this is perhaps the great accomplishment of the section: to make us un-feel.  The initial experience of disgust at the raping and murdering of often very young women is taken away from us, leaving us with the bitter taste of our own incapacity to hold on to the passion of disgust and outrage.  So many hopes are tied to this feeling, which seems to motivate us to protest, to rebel, to exert ourselves actively against a world we do not believe in.

To paraphrase the young Marx in response to the quip that one cannot make a revolution out of disgust, ‘disgust already is a revolution.’  Our capacity to despise our own world is the first key to overcoming it.  By his slow, craftily movements, Bolano disenchants even that, leaving the reader shocked, not at the murders and rapes, but at their failure to generate the adequate response to atrocity.

With eight years of Bush, politics morphed from the dead space of the ‘end of History,’ as Fukuyama put it, to the ground of hatred and betrayal.  The Bush years, after the WTC attack, became the re-invigoration of politics in vicious dualisms: science and religion, liberal-democracy and Islamic-fascism, left- and right-wing (often ‘conspiracy’), the American way of life and the axis of Evil.  And now in Obama, politics seems to be resurrected in a vulgar form of hope and messianism that dances between merely opposing Bush and opposing the dualisms themselves, never firmly footed in either.

All of these events trouble readers who re-enter Bolano’s early-90s, entering the world of Oscar Fate who shuffles around a political desert.  In the current world that has faced political extremism in all its forms, Fate’s search for the extremes appears curious.  Isn’t the world radical enough?  But the 90s were not so.  It was the era of the end of ‘grand narratives,’ of the belief in profound change.  The goal of utopia gave way to the hope for efficient bureaucracy, for a well-run state, evidenced by the immense power of the IMF and World Bank.  In a world shorn of believers in a new world, a different world, politics becomes administration, and Fate searches for fragments and remainders of the political to escape from the ennui that defines his world: the last surviving communist, the faded and largely irrelevant Black Panther, the failure of bureaucracy to deal with crime. Remnants of the past that haunt Fate as he seeks something to believe in, but leaving him further disenchanted with every step.

The section moves in two directions at once, at the disenchantment in the world and in his beliefs that turns Fate from a proud journalist into a poseur, feigning interest in a sporting match he knows nothing about in a place whose language and customs he is excluded from. On the other hand, though, the story traces a certain re-enchantment, an attempt for Fate to find the world anew after the death of his mother. Fate’s shock at his first erection since her death signals how cut off he has become in the world, and how the meeting of Rosa returns him to life. Or not return, but provides him with a new life.

But this is hard to praise. The ending of the section, where Fate saves Rosa and drags her out of the danger of Santa Theresa and the danger of her mentally-fading father, hints that there is a guilt even in this action, the guilt of the survivor. It is a gesture, and not one that stops the tide of murders, but only saves one life. Fate the political journalist, out to change the world, abandons his vision to become Fate the smuggler, taking one woman away from her doom. The sadness of the act rings with its resignation, with the resignation that marks that whole decade. Perhaps the greatest work of those years, and a close approximate to Bolano’s own work, Delillo’s ‘Underworld,’ traces the same great arc from hope and profound moment of radical change to the point in 1992 when all that is left is saving one mark of failure from the past. Leaving Santa Theresa, Fate does not save a young woman so much as lose himself entirely, carrying out the marker of his impotence with him as he finally lives up to his name and accepts that he, with the world, has failed.