The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zeran

Paloma’s problem wasn’t the language, but the weightlessness of that word. That’s why I didn’t respond...and faced with my silence, it was Consuelo who finally spoke. And I switched off again, trying to avoid falling under the weight of those sentences, convinced, as I had been as a little girl, that we don’t live for a set number of years, but rather we’re assigned a set number of words that we can hear over the course of our lives. Each of my mother’s words was like a hundred, a thousand, regular ones, and killed me quicker. Perhaps that’s why I’d learned another language: to buy me more time.

When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zeran’s genre-defying semi-nonfiction work from last year, was one of my top 10 books, and as soon as I finished it, I went online to order this, her first (and only, as of 2023) novel. It is quite different, as one might expect given the distance between a memoirist approach to historical events and an actual novel, but it does share a lot of similar concerns: the impact of the past on those in the present, the treatment of the marginalized in Chile, and most prominently, the way the powerful in a society erase, rewrite, or hide anything and anyone that doesn’t serve their goals.

It opens, after a short prologue, at a party on October 8, 1988, the night Pinochet’s reign in Chile ended. The narrator, Iquela, is a child and doesn’t fully understand the impact of what’s happening. Her interest is less in the adults gathered around the radio, listening in shock as Pinochet is deposed, as it is in her friendship, and youthfully romantic rendezvous with her friend Paloma just outside, on the patio. The two share a kiss just as the gathering breaks into chaos: Paloma’s father punches Iquela’s and everyone disperses quickly, chaotically, and nothing is explained to the girls or Felipe, an adoptee who spends the book having visions in which he counts down casualties of the post-Pinochet violence that sweeps over Chile, desperate to reach zero, an accounting of all the dead that leaves no remainder. They’re brought together again, years later, when Paloma returns to Chile from Germany, where she’s been living with her mother, who has died and whose body has been sent, perhaps against her will, back to Chile to be buried. When Paloma arrives and meets with Iquala’s mother to claim the body, they find that it has not arrived; that it has, in fact, been lost in transit, and the three kids, now older teenagers, requisition an old hearse and set out on a road trip to get it back.

There’s a bit of As I Lay Dying in the structure, not just in the journey to inter a body properly but also in the way the narrators swap in and out, the main three but also occasionally another who is unnamed who may be Paloma’s mother speaking from beyond the grave, and chapters that are only a sentence or two long. Each of the primary narrators has a distinctive voice and concerns. Felipe’s sections are stream-of-consciousness, recounting nightmarish visions of bodies that need counted before they can find peace, often punctuated with moments of shocking physical or sexual violence. An outsider both by genealogy and temperament--his grandmother, tasked with caring for him after his father, a revolutionary, was killed, gave him to Iquala’s family after he brutally dismembered a parrot during one of his visions. He nurses an unrequited crush towards Iquela but is driven by his obsession with accounting for all the Chilean dead. Iquala narrates more traditionally and her concerns are largely relational--her difficult relationship with her overbearing mother, her surrogate sibling-ship with Felipe, her sapphic longings towards Paloma--deformed into complex shapes by trauma. And finally, Paloma spends most of the novel in a state of shock, convinced that finding her mother will resolve the conflict she feels about her expat status.

When they finally arrive at the airport where Paloma’s mother’s body was lost, they find a hanger stacked high with caskets, hundreds and hundreds of Chileans who’ve been forgotten, erased, mislabeled, ignored, left to rot until they’re disposed of by someone who can’t handle the smell anymore. I know I missed a lot of the subtext here, given my minimal knowledge of Chilean history, but in some ways the takeaway here is universal. In the end, the remainders are the children, the children’s children, who are left behind in the wake of nationalist violence and fracture, left with no past and no clear future.

The Return by Roberto Bolano

If The Return is to be our primer on Roberto Bolano, then we may come to find that he has a fondness for three types: the murderer, the detective, and the porn star. The last of these is the most interesting by degrees, though perhaps by default--Bolano possesses little insight into a killer's psychology, and no one has said anything remotely interesting about detectives since Raymond Chandler.

Naturally then, the best of the stories collected here is "Joanna Silvestri," about the eponymous porn starlet reconnecting with a now aging, somewhat destitute John Holmes. "Jack" has a sort of otherworldly presence:

...I know really photogenic girls who lose it as soon as they start a blow job, they look terrible, maybe because they're too into it, but I like to keep my face looking good. So my mind was on the job and, anyway, because of the position I was in, I couldn't see what was happening around me, while Bull and Shane, who were on their knees, but upright, heads raised, they saw that Jack had just come in, and their cocks got harder almost straightaway, and it wasn't just Bull and Shane who reacted, the director, Randy Cash, and Danny Lo Bello and his wife and Robbie and Ronnie and the technicians and everyone, I think, except for the cameraman, Jacinto Ventura, who was a bright, cheerful kid and a true professional, he literally couldn't take his eyes off the scene he was filming, everyone except for him reacted in some way to Jack's unexpected presence, and a silence fell over the set, not a heavy silence, not the kind that foreshadows bad news, but a luminous silence, so to speak, the silence of water falling in slow motion, and I sensed the silence and thought it must have been because I was feeling so good, because of those beautiful California days, but I also sensed something indecipherable approaching, announced by the rhythmic bumping of Shane's hips on my butt, by Bull's gentle thrusting in my mouth, and then I knew that something was happening on the set, though I didn't look up, and I knew that what was happening involved and revolved around me; it was as if reality had been torn, ripped open from one end to the other, like in those operations that leave a scar from neck to groin, a broad, rough, hard scar, but I hung on and kept concentrating till Shane took his cock out and just after that Bull ejaculated on my face.

I must apologize twice over: Once for the length of that passage, and once again for its filthiness. It is, however, the emotional crux of this collection, not least because in so much of the rest of it emotion is wanting. Crude as it is, Bolano's ironic sense is ebullient here. There is the great disparity between the "lowness" of the act and the angelic luminescence of Jack's presence; the comparison (which feminists have made before, with sterner faces) between the sex act and the violence or surgery; the too-perfect porn names like "Shane" and "Bull" and "Robbie and Ronnie." And best of all there is the way this impossibly long sentence, like the sudden withering of the organs it describes, limps lamely to the finish: "Shane took his cock out and just after that Bull ejaculated on my face." In the presence of a greater connection, physical touch seems ridiculous.

But Bolano's vices get the better of him: Joanna is thinking all this while being interrogated by a detective, who doesn't care about Jack Holmes. He's looking for information about a minor player in the pornographic world that has no relevance whatsoever to the narrative. So why do it?

Probably because Bolano was obsessed with the "secret story"--the answers to the questions that are left unasked. What the detective wants to know is likely important to him, but to Joanna (and Bolano, and us, by extension) it is irrelevant to the point of incongruity. The stories in The Return have a glancing-off quality to them, the relevance of parts to the whole is left explicitly absent. But there are better ways to do this than to populate stories with cast-offs from Allen Ginsberg, Quentin Tarantino, Chandler and Tom Waits. It is difficult to shake the feeling that The Return is peopled by detectives, criminals, mobsters, and prostitutes because they signify grit. And The Return is gritty all right, ground down by Bolano's style into flat, gray sand:

Bedloe's face was a blood-spattered mask, garish in the light of the living room. Where his nose had been there was just a bleeding pulp. I checked to see if his heart was beating. The women were watching me without making the slightest movement. He's dead, I said. Before I went out onto the porch, I heard one of them sigh. I smoked a cigarette looking at the stars, thinking about how I'd explain it to the authorities in town.

This is unconscionably lazy. Comparing a face to a mask; "bleeding pulp;" the cinematic pulse-check followed by the the words "He's dead." If all the hack writers in all the world put their minds together, could they come up with a sentence more cliched than "I smoked a cigarette looking at the stars, thinking about how I'd explain it to the authorities in town?"

Too often Bolano wants this kind of empty cool to do his work for him. There are fleeting moments of brilliance, like the first sentences of the title story: "I have good news and band news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac." But they are deflected by nonsense like: "Pavlov was waiting for me by the fireplace, reading and drinking cognac. Before I could say anything he smashed his fist into my nose. I hardly felt the blow but I let myself fall anyway. Don't stain my carpet, I heard him say."

Danny liked this book considerably, and though it hurts my sense of honor to say anything too negative about books that are lent to me, I think the best I can say on this one is "mixed results." It seems unlikely that I will try to tackle 2666 any time soon.

01 The Return by Roberto Bolaño trans. Chris Andrews

Sex, Violence, and Literature

Roberto Bolaño has been at the top of my list of favorite authors for about four years.
Why? Because he's better than you.
I like to think of him as these things:
1. a failed poet that found success in fiction (everyone that fails is better for it)
2. obsessed with all the best themes at the wrong time, and
3. one that died too young (drug circumstances notwithstanding)

I could easily waste 1000 words discussing the letdowns of the translation by Andrews or the crap editing/production job of New Directions, but those are two negative aspects in this new year of optimism and positivity.

The Return reawakened my love of this Chilean expat. The Savage Detectives has been and remains my favorite work by Bolaño because of the humor, confusion, and scope; Admittedly I've never loved any of his shorter fiction (novellas, short stories).

While there are moments of perfection in all of his writing, I have pages of quotations that forced me laugh, admire, and miss my stop on the train, The Return finds a way to make those moments span an entire story that creates a feeling of eternity but can be read in 30 minutes. It's hard to explain, but within the 13 stories in this collection I felt fear, anger, love, arousal, disgust, awe, and satisfaction.

Yeah, I said aroused. "Joanna Silvestri" is a fantasy. Not my fantasy, but Bolaño makes her yours. I was happy the book is hardbound, just wished it was a bit bigger.

Sex is an obsession for Bolaño-themes of prostitution, pornography, and whores collide with violence and revenge. The story titled "Murdering Whores" really is about a whore that murders. Bolaño doesn't play with cliché. His background in poetry will not allow it. But he knows sex. Sex is used as bait, pleasure, profession, and child rearing.

Why is this worth reading and rereading? Because it is poetry. It makes you experience everything for the first time again, every time. Bolaño creates characters that are realistic, believable, and at the same time you wish they weren't. Nazis, Russians, ghosts, detectives.

Oh yeah, there's an awesome story about witchcraft in the Spanish First Division and Champion's League. I think Bolaño wrote that one for me though.

p.s.-if you think this is crude and that you, as a self respecting young woman or man, would never read such trash, be happy I didn't mention the story on necrophilia