(Parts 1, 2, & 3)
Wow. ...just, wow.
Here's the section about the murders of the women in Santa Teresa. It's about 280 pages long, and when it starts with about 10 pages of murders starting in 1993, you wonder if this is what Bolaño has in store for you: an individual accounting of each woman killed in Santa Teresa. If that's all he had done, it would have been tremendous, and a statement, a reminder when you're talking about hundreds and thousands of killings that each one is its own story too. But no, interspersed is the reaction by the authorities and others. So we learn about a few detectives and policemen, an arts reporter from Mexico City who starts covering the murders, and a bunch of other people, including the suspect who gets nabbed as the serial killer, even as the murders continue while he is in prison.
It's along the way that you start to wonder if you missed something and should have been paying more attention during the previous sections. Were there clues left for you? Did you miss it? (Or maybe you aren't wondering, because perhaps you actually caught it, unlike me.) Or are they red herrings?
Also, to revisit a point above. What comes out of reading is the realization that there isn't a single killer or band of killers. It's that somehow, for whatever reason, in Santa Teresa there has arisen a climate in which the killing of women has grown essentially permissible. They become statistics, to paraphrase a great mass murderer. It becomes an indictment of something much larger than it seems.
But typing these thoughts, muddled as they are, I feel that they are sort of trite. They don't do the section justice. Trust me.
And the fun quote of the section, referring to a medical examiner:
Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?
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