All manner of vanities and pretensions are on display: feuds, factions and privileged sterility. A voice or two cuts through the peacockery. Amadeo Salvatierra, a fellow poet of Cesarea's back in the 1920s, is reduced to typing letters and petitions in the public square. He and Octavio Paz, he notes mordantly, are the only two Mexicans who actually make a living writing. Paz appears briefly, more trapped by his fame than relishing it. (I think that's Belano's point.)
There is a portrait of expatriate writers living in squalid isolation in France. "I was suddenly overcome," one says, "by the full horror of Paris, the full horror of the French language the sad, hopeless state of South Americans lost in Europe, lost in the world."
Interspersed through these innumerable, mostly brief narratives are a half dozen longer ones that tell of Belano in the years following the knife fight. Wandering in France and Spain he makes a series of appearances as a man of action (supernatural action in one story) coping, scrimless, with the world. Individually some of the episodes are powerfully suggestive; but there is the effect of a character making the same point too long and too often.
This whole middle section suggests, sometimes hauntingly, Bolano's theme of art's sterility when shielded from life. Some of the book's best passages are here; but the formlessness, the cascading miscellany, the pile of jigsaw pieces with some missing, the guiding box-picture (fictional as against intellectual) purposefully withheld: these can make the book, or at least the reader, founder. Many gleaming lights are displayed, but foundering nonetheless.
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