Is El Quemado Jewish?

There’s a dream in which Udo and El Quemado play a game of Third Reich on the beach, as the tide comes in and flood the town. It washes away the pieces.

This is the same as the scene in Infinite Jest with the nuclear geopolitical tennis strategy game and the snow. I almost think that Bolano is commenting on DFW. The Third Reich could almost be a novel-length homage to that scene.

But probably they’re both talking about the same thing, which I’ve been thinking about a lot too.

There’s a saying I first encountered in a Paris Review interview with Saul Bellow. “A fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover.”

There’s a way violence has of creating mysteries. Abusers cover up their misdeeds. Victims cover up their traumas. Bystanders close their ears. These are mysteries that no genius can solve, because the people involved won’t talk about it.

This is the stone thrown into the water.

But that violence builds up. It doesn’t disappear. Victims remember. Bystanders remember. Trust in institutions fails. Eventually, the water you’ve been hiding your crimes in rises up until it consumes you too. And when that happens, you have no way of figuring out why.

This is the sea water that rises to cover the board game. It’s the snow that falls to cover the tennis court. It’s the Genesis flood, too.

That might be the reason why Bolano never reveals the central mysteries of his novels. This is the thing I love the most about his work. That you know there’s something deeply sinister going on. Sometimes it’s so close you can almost taste it. But he never reveals it.

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Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There’s a scene in which the Presger translator, Zeiat, reveals by means of a metaphor involving fish-shaped tea cakes, that the Presger do not believe in qualia. It’s what finally explains the two translators’ seeming confusion of identity — which one is Dlique and which one is Zeiat — because the Presger do not draw invisible lines between things and say this is one kind of thing and this other is another kind of thing.

This is the most fun part of the book. The Presger translators don’t really care about their own existences because they don’t really believe in them; and are just barely able to understand that other human beings do. It’s actually very reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ ruler of the Universe. I think Douglas Adams had a lot of ideas that more ‘serious’ authors are still working on unpacking. They just struck us all as jokes because they were too new to have been rendered banal by repetition and endless explication.

Anyway, Ancillary Mercy is pretty good. The astropolitical resolution is a bit of a deus ex machina, I guess, but that’s okay. As somebody famous maybe said, no serious problem is solved within the terms of its original statement.



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