(read about Part 1 here)
Weighing in at under 70 pages in my paperback volume, this is easily the shortest section of the five. It may also be the one where I had the most trouble staying engaged. In part this is because I was feeling a little sad about leaving my critics. And I kind of wanted them to reappear - to see what was happening to them through the lens of Amalfitano. After all, we had already met him in the last section, as the man assigned to usher the critics through Santa Teresa as they search for Archimboldi.
But here we get Amalfitano on his own, some years (how many????) earlier, mostly soon after he moves to Santa Teresa. This timeline issue made me crazy, and it's probably my own fault. In some sections, I know when I'm at, Bolaño uses dates. In this one, I didn't catch them, nor did I catch clues in other sections that might have tipped me off. What I do know: the critics aren't here yet, but the Juarez-esque murders have already begun, enough to worry Amalfitano. Which reminds me....
Who is Amalfitano? I don't have a good answer to this question either. He is Chilean, a professor, a single father to Rosa, who possesses a Spanish passport. He seems to have a really shaky grasp on sanity. He's also sufficiently unremarkable - for this reader at any rate - that I was left with simply a feeling of "well, that was weird," enough so that I had to flip back through the section just to try to remember what happened.
I made a note while reading of the observation that "madness is contagious," which appears fairly early in the section and seems as good a summation as any. But I also loved this passage, a flashback, where Amalfitano's Italian father marvels at his young son:
His father was silent then, looking at his son with frank admiration and pride, as if asking himself where the hell the kid had come from, and then he was silent for a while longer and afterward said in a low voice, as if telling a secret, that Italians were brave individually. In large numbers, he admitted, they were hopeless. And this, he explained, was precisely what gave a person hope.
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