Roberto Bolano

Both Jean-Claude Pelletier in France and Piero Morini in Italy have translated novels written by a mysterious and largely unknown German writer, Benno von Archimboldi. Both have become well-respected academics. The Italian, however, is gravely sick and confined on a wheelchair. Manuel Espinoza in Spain, after suffering from depression, graduated with a thesis on the same writer and then became an academic too. Liz Norton in England has become a fan of the same writer after a German friend gifted her a couple of his novels. The three academics have met at various conferences, share the same interpretation of the German's work and have become good friends. Finally, they also meet the Englishwoman when she shows up unexpectedly to defend their theses at a conference against the attacks of some German critics. All four are single and live alone. The French and the Spaniard have sexual fantasies about the Englishwoman. At a conference they hear a speaker describe how he met Benno von Archimbold when the writer was 29 or 30 years old (the speech is a lengthy free-form multi-page sentence), and try in vain to obtain more information from him. The French and the Spaniard decide to visit Archimboldi's publisher Bubis. The publisher is dead and is survived by his aging widow. The editor-in-chief Schnell welcomes them and lets them interview the only two employees, besides the widow, who ever met Archimboldi, but neither remembers much. The publisher's widow refuses to help them get in touch with Archimboldi. A few days later Pelletier visits Liz in London and they become lovers. Then Liz visits Espinoza in Madrid and they become lovers too, and Liz tells the two men about each other. Liz also reveals that she is divorced. The four meet again at another conference, when Archimboldi is rumored to be a candidate to the Nobel Prize, but Morini points out that Archimboldi has never even won a single award in his home country of Germany. After the conference Morini learns from an Italian newspaper of a female journalist who traveled to the north of Mexico to cover a mass murder perpetrated by a druglord. The "menage a trois" among Liz, the Spaniard and the French continues. The wheelchair-bound Morini has a nightmare in which Liz drowns in a swimming pool and decides to visit her in London. Liz tells him the story of the first painter that moved in that neighborhood, Edwin Johns, who became famous for including his own severed hand in one of his paintings, the most radical self-portrait, but was then interned in a mental hospital. Then other painters began moving there and the district became an art district. During his stay in London, Morini also meets a bum at a park. A Serbian critic writes that Archimboldi, now old and lonely, booked a flight from Sicily to Morocco, but he never boarded the flight. Liz becomes restless and decides to break up with both lovers. Pelletier and Espinoza are convinced that Archimboldi, who is becoming increasingly famous, has published his last novel. Three months later they decide to visit Liz together and they find her with a young man, Alex Pritchard, whom they immediately dislike. During another London visit, Alex tells Pelletier to be careful with Liz, calling her a "Medusa". Pelletier and Espinoza try in vain to decrypt the cryptic warning. On another London visit they are in a taxi with Liz when they start an argument with the driver, a Pakistani, who thinks they are pimps and she's a whore. Pelletier and Espinoza attack the poor driver and almost kill him, leaving him unconscious and bleeding in the street. Pelletier and Espinoza, devastated after Liz dumped them, turn to prostitutes. Pelletier's favorite is Vanessa, a woman married to a Moroccan man who had a son before he met him. Morini takes Pelletier and Espinoza to visit the mad painter Edwin Johns at the mental hospital. Morini asks him why he cut his hand. The painter whispers something in his ear and then leaves. That night Morini disappears and for a few days his friends try in vain to find him. When he reappears, he refuses to say where he went. Morini tells Liz that he spent two days in London, refuses to provide any details but then remarks that he now understands why Johns cut his hand: for money. In 1997, during a seminar in Toulouse, the four friends meet Rodolfo Alatorre, author of a novel, who tells them that his friend Almendro "El Cerdo" in Mexico City has just met Archimboldi in person, and that Archimboldi was actually the one initiating the contact. El Cerdo said that Archimboldi was about to fly to Sonora's capital Santa Teresa, in the north of Mexico. The friends are surprised to hear that the German is in Mexico and speculate what could be the reason. They ignore the theory of a Dieter Hellfeld that Archimboldi is none other than the widow Bubis. Three of them (not Morini) decide to fly to Mexico. They eventually reach Santa Teresa where they are welcomed by the local university. The dean of arts and letters introduces them to the local Archimboldi expert, Oscar Amalfitano, originally from Chile (note: like Bolano himself), who becomes their local guide. They check in vain all the hotels, looking for a Reiter (the alternative name Archimboldi may have used to purchase the air ticket) or an Archimbaldi. They briefly doubt that Almendro made it all up. Liz suddenly summons both Pelletier and Espinosa in her room and makes love to both. Liz then calls Almendro and doublechecks his story. They even come to suspect a magician in a circus to be Archimboldi in disguise. Liz abruptly decides to fly home and later sends a long email to explain why, a very long email that we read piecemeal while we follow the further adventures of Espinosa and Pelletier in Sonora. Espinosa dates a girl named Rebeca while Pelletier mostly re-reads Archimboldi. They learn that 200 women have been murdered in that region and the killer has not been apprehended. Liz writes that a) she has learned that Johns died and b) she has fallen in love with the invalid Morini in Italy. Pelletier is convinced that Archimboldi is there in Santa Teresa but he and Pelletier eventually abandon the search and return to Europe.

Part II

Oscar Amalfitano, the Chilean professor of philosophy who teaches at the University of Santa Teresa, is 50 has a ten-year-old daughter, Rosa, whom he raised alone because her Spanish mother Lola left him after two years to visit a poet she was in love with. Rosa left with a friend, Immaculada, and started writing letters to Oscar. She admitted that Immaculada was a lesbian but she, Lola, was not. Her letter told Oscar about the Spanish poet, who used to live with a gay philosopher, and how she, Lola, "saved" him by having sex with him (before she ever met Oscar). The poet was now interned in a mental asylum. Lola and Immaculada eventually found a way to see him, but the poet was crazy. A doctor, Gorka, recognizing the importance of his poetry, was writing a biography and interviewed Lola. Eventually, the girls ran out of money and Immaculada decided to leave for Paris, and Lola remained alone, penniless, still trying to see the poet. She hitchhiked regularly from her hotel to the asylum, where the poet ignored her, and had sex with the drivers who gave her rides. She started sleeping in a cemetery. Oscar, reading her letters, realized that Lola had gone crazy too. One of her drivers, Larrazabal, invited her to move in with him, but eventually she moved out and went to France. For five years Oscar didn't hear from her. Then she wrote that she was living in Paris, had a son (Benoit) and a humble job, and was sick. Two years later she showed up and stayed for a few days, just enough to let Oscar know that she was dying of AIDS. One day Oscar found a book in his house that he didn't remember buying, a treatise on geometry written by a poet, Rafael Dieste. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1919 in Buenos Aires hung a geometry textbook from his balcony and left it to be slowly destroyed by wind and rain, Oscar hung Dieste's book outside so that the wind could read it. Meanwhile, Oscar was becoming friend with Silvia Perez, the professor who invited him to Santa Teresa, and her 16-year-old son Rafael was becoming friend with Oscar's daughter Rosa. The dean Augusto Guerra too invites him to socialize and that's how Oscar meets his son Marco Antonio. Oscar is the grandson of an Italian immigrant. His father despised Chileans and in retaliation Oscar despised Italians. One night he started hearing a voice and thinks it's the voice of his grandfather but the voice eventually reveals to be the voice of his father. Meanwhile the police found the body of another murdered teenage girl and Oscar got more worried about Rosa's safety. As voice continued to appear, Oscar started thinking about a book on telepathy written by a Lonko Kilapan who claimed that telepathy was widespread among Araucanians like Oscar. The book contained 17 proofs that Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme, the founder of Chile, was an Araucanian, the term used by the Spaniards for the Mapuche people of south-central Chile. The book claims that Chile is geographically and politically similar to ancient Greece. The book describes the two systems of communication used by the Mapuche during the revolutionary wars that led to the independence of Chile: the "adkintuwe" (signaling with movement of tree branches) and telepathy. The Spaniards discovered "adkintuwe" but were never able to decipher it. the magical powers of the Mapuche helped the revolutionary secret lodges during the revolution. In ancient times the Araucanians had spread all over the world, also creating the Aryans in Europe and the Indians in India, and kept in touch with telepathy. The book argues that the Araucanian language was closely related to ancient Greek. According to the book, O'Higgins was the son of a Spanish father and of an Araucanian mother. Oscar was startled that his own mother Eugenia's last name was Riquelme. Oscar was also invited to a party by Pablo Negrete, rector of the university, where Marco Antonio confessed to him that he was a masochist and enjoyed pretending to be gay in order to be beaten by other kids. One night Oscar dreamed that Russian president Boris Yeltsin was the last communist philosopher.

Part III

The novel then moves to New York's black neighborhood Harlem where Quincy Williams' mother dies, as does her neighbor, Rosalind's mother. He is known as Oscar Fate. He is a black reporter for a Harlem newspaper called Black Dawn. He is sent to Detroit to interview Barry Seaman, a former leader of the Black Panthers who has also written a cook book (here Bolano was probably inspired by Bobby Seale). Oscar Fate attends one of Barry's lectures, in which Barry talks about his life as a Black Panther and then cook book writer (a lengthy multi-page ranting monologue). Oscar Fate then falls asleep in his hotel room while the TV news broadcasts from Santa Teresa where many girls have been murdered. He is woken up by a phone call from his editor who asks him to fly to Mexico to cover the boxing match between the black boxer Count Pickett and a Mexican boxer. The reporter who should have gone, Jimmy Lowell, has been murdered in Chicago. Oscar Fate flies to Tucson and then drives to Sonora. On the way to Santa Teresa, Fate overhears two men talking about crimes being committed there. The older one, professor Albert Kessler, who sounds like a detective, has a theory, but doesn't want to be quoted. As he drives into Mexico, everybody asks Fate if he's going to write about the killings. He replies that he's going to cover a boxing match, and noone seems to know about it. When he arrives in Santa Teresa, Fate meets El Merolino, the Mexican boxer, and his black sparring partner, Omar Abdul, who moved there from California, and is befriended by a fellow reporter, Chucho Flores, who introduces him to movie buff Charly Cruz and to Rosa Mendez, who seems to have slept with everybody. Chucho Flores informs Oscar Fate that more than 200 girls have been killed: they disappear and they are found much later in the desert. Oscar phones his editor asking if he can stay a week to report on the story of the murders, but his newspaper is only interested in the boxing match that involves a black boxer, not in the murders that involve no black person. This reminds him of when the newspaper turns out a report on a Muslim sect that worshipped Osama bin Laden. Oscar Fate meets a reporter who is investigating the murders, Guadalupe Roncal, for a big Mexico City newspaper. Two journalists have already been killed in Mexico City for their reporting and she's fears for her own life. She is there to interview the suspect, who has been arrested, a man who came from the USA. Chucho introduces Oscar Fate to a pretty girl, Rosa Amalfitano, and another man, Juan Corona. The boxing match is uneventful: the black boxer easily beats the Mexican. Oscar Fate spends one more night with the crowd, mainly to see Rosa Amalfitano, to whom he has been immediately attracted. They hang out at Charly Cruz's house. Oscar Fate sees Corona kissing the other Rosa and then sees his Rosa Amalfitano snorting cocaine. He drags her away but is assaulted by Corona holding a gun. Oscar knocks him out and then Rosa tells him how she met Chucho through Charly whom he had met through Rosa Mendez and how she became Chucho's girlfriend (including a detailed description of her performing oral sex on Chucho). Her father didn't like Chucho and told her to dump him. She did that after Chucho became jealous and because he was always on drugs, but she remained friend with him. This conversation takes place in Oscar Fate's hotel room. A cop comes to look for him and he takes Rosa and leaves. They move to her father's place. Her father knows that he's getting increasingly crazy but he is lucid enough to ask Oscar Fate to take her daughter to the USA and put her on a plane to Barcelona, which Oscar accepts to do. They leave the house as a cop drives by. First they go to the prison with Guadalupe to interview the serial killer, a very tall German man, the 43-year-old Klaus Haas.

Part IV

Part IV takes place before the arrest of Klaus Haas. The first mysterious murder took place in January 1993, the 13-year-old Esperanza. Bolano narrates one by one the cases, each one a short tale: 112 women from 1993 to 1997. We are also introduced to police chief Pedro Negrete, who is assisted by officer Epifanio. At the same time a madman begins desecrating churches, typically urinating in them. Pedro Negrete assigns the case of the "Penitent" to inspector Juan de Dios Martinez, who soon falls in love with the director of the mental asylum, Elvira Campo, 17 years older than him (he is 34). A Mexico City newspaper sends reporter Sergio Gonzalez to cover the church desecrations. Meanwhile dead bodies keep popping up in different places, always women. Meanwhile, police chief Pedro Negrete picks up a 17-year-old boy, Lalo Cura, to work as a bodyguard for Pedro Rengifo's wife. One day Lalo and two other bodyguards witness two gunmen attack the woman, and Lalo is the only one not to flee: he kills the two and is wounded. The cops arrest him because one of the gunmen was a state cop, but Pedro Negrete gets him released. A US citizen, Lucy Anne Sander, is also assassinated (and raped), among the many. Women continue to be killed. A US sheriff, Harry Magana, shows up in Santa Teresa looking for a prostitute named Elsa Fuentes who works at the whorehouse Internal Affairs. He is looking for her friend Miguel Montes. Meanwhile, Juan is still having sex with the director of the mental asylum. Meanwhile, a 70-year-old seer Florita Armada begins to broadcast on TV and she "sees" that women are being killed in Santa Teresa and the police can't stop the killings. Harry Magana continues his search for Miguel, which takes him to his 16-year-old cousin Maria del Mar and to a pimp nicknamed Chucho. He is investigating the murder of Lucy Anne Sander. Some months later the US consul, Conan Mitchell, and the mayor of Santa Teresa visit Pedro Negrete inquiring about the disappearance of sheriff Harry Magana. Florita appears again on TV and, after another long confused rant, she again talks about the murders of Santa Teresa. Meanwhile, Epifanio examines the appointment book of a reporter who was assassinated, Isabel Urrea, and shows it to Lalo Cura, who is now a traffic cop. Epifanio also reveals that Pedro Rengifo is a druglord, a "narco". Meanwhile, Sergio Gonzalez is back in Mexico City and works for the arts page, but still remembers the Penitent and the murders of Santa Teresa. The serial killer continues to strike but there is a change in his routine; instead of raping and killing the women, he begins to severe one of their breasts and to bite off the nipple of the other one. Epifanio investigates one specific murder, the murder of the 17-year-old Estrella Ruiz Sandoval. Her best friends Rosa Marquez and Rosa Maria Medina lead him to the owner of a computer store, a German with a US passport, Klaus Haas, whose criminal record shows minor sexual incidents. Despite meagre evidence, Epifanio is convinced that Klaus is the killer and arrests him. Klaus is feverish and in jail tells everybody that a giant is coming to free him. He is initially jailed in a maximum security prison with a rancher who killed his wife and children, a lawyer and a narco who becomes his friend. Klaus is then transferred to a more regular prison where he shares a cell with five other inmates, notably the bossy Farfan. Klaus witnesses how widespread homosexuality and rape are in the prison. Klaus holds a press conference to proclaim his innocence and Sergio Gonzalez is one of the reporters who is dispatched to cover it. Klaus tells tells Sergio that in prison everybody knows that he's innocent, which means that some inmate knows for sure that he's not the serial killer, and Klaus plans to find out who. Police chief Pedro Negrete is outraged that an inmate can hold a press conference and suspects that the narco, Enrique Hernandez, bribed the warden, but doesn't understand why the narco would help Klaus. Bodies keep surfacing everywhere (their situation meticulously described by Bolano), and suspects are arrested. Juan arrests one, Jaime Sanchez, who confesses to killing one of the girls. Klaus holds another press conference asking the press why murders are still being committed if he is the serial killer (imprisoned). Florita again talks about the murders on TV and publicly accuses the authorities of incompetence. Now Elvira, the director of the psychiatric hospital, takes a keen interest in the murders that are publicized on TV. An 18-year-old kid named Jesus Chimal confesses to the murder of one of the women and is sent to the same jail where Klaus is held. Jesus Chimal has three friends in the prison. The foursome is cornered by other inmates, led by cannibal serial killer Ayala and including Farfan and his homosexual lover, while the guards watch without moving. Ayala castrates the four inmates and then Ayala, Farfan and others kill them. Klaus is invited to watch the execution and later tells his lawyer about it. Following the brutal torture, rape and murder of two teenage girls, Estefania and Herminia, which makes even inspector Juan cry, five members of a local gang, Los Bisontes, are arrested. One of them happens to be the brother of an inmate who befriended Klaus and the authorities conclude that they were paid by Klaus to keep killing girls while Klaus is in jail. Klaus calls Sergio to tell him that this is absolutely false but Sergio doesn't report on the murders anymore. The mayor, Jose Refugio, goes on television to announce that the case is closed and any further murder will be considered a regular murder not related to the serial killings. In fact, for a couple of months no more murders of girls are discovered. Meanwhile Juan has discovered that the house where Epifania and Herminia were killed is located right in the middle of a neighborhood in which four people own a lot of homes: Pedro Rengifo, the narco Estanislao Campuzano, the mayor and Pedro Negrete's brother Pablo. It is also rumored that Santa Teresa has become the epicenter of "snuff" films, porn films with real murders, so called because some 20 years earlier two filmmakers from the USA, Mike and Clarissa Epstein made an erotic film titled "Snuff" in Argentina which supposedly ended with a real murder, except that the real murder was soon exposed as a fake. In March 1997 bodies of raped and murdered girls start appearing again, and this revives the interest of the press. Sergio Gonzalez is dispatched again to report from Santa Teresa and, after interviewing cops, he meets with the seer Florita, but her dreams are useless because she forgets the faces of the killers when she wakes up. The killings continue and a girl who survives long enough to speak says that the killer has the face of a pig. Klaus convenes a new press conference in the prison, which Sergio attends, during which he accuses two cousins working for narco Estanislao Campuzano of being the killers: Antonio and Daniel Uribe, both married with US citizens and with a second home in the USA. Antonio has disappeared, Daniel denies the charges. Meanwhile, the authorities have hired Albert Kessler, a distinguished criminologist from the USA specializing in serial killers.
This is now 1997, when Espinoza, Pelletier and Norton visit Santa Teresa looking for Archimboldi.
A famous politician, Azucena Esquivel Plata, picks up Sergio and tells him the story of her childhood friend Kelly Rivera Parker. Klaus' press conference, Azucena's story of Kelly and Kessler's arrival proceed in parallel for several pages and they alternate with descriptions of the killings, which usually include intimate details and always end with the investigation being dropped. All of the victims are women, some of them just children, and work in "maquiladoras", factories built by US companies to make products that are then exported to the USA. Azucena narrates her legendary sex life in Mexico City (married, divorced, one child, countless lovers) and how she became a successful journalist and then a leftist politician while Kelly failed at everything she tried in Europe and the USA and eventually returned penniless to Mexico City where she started a service to organize party for rich people. Kelly disappeared after making a distressed call to Azucena and after organizing a party in Santa Teresa for a banker, Salazar Crespo, who laundered money for the local drug cartel, Estanislao Campuzano's cartel. Azucena flew to Santa Teresa where she was welcomed by the mayor in person, Jose Refugio, but couldn't find out anything about Kelly and so hired a private detective, Luis Loya, who discovered that Kelly had been running a prostitution ring and the parties were orgies for narcos, but after two years of investigations Loya died of cancer. So now Azucena wants Sergio to keep writing about the murders in order to pressure the authority to find out what happened to Kelly.
Kessler gives a lecture at the university of Santa Teresa.
One of the reporters who attended Klaus' press conference at the Santa Teresa prison, Josue Hernandez Mercado, mysteriously disappears, and another reporter, Mary-Sue Bravo, who met him at that press conference, begins investigating his disappearance. Mercado's boss thinks that he just fled the country with a woman or something like that, but a fellow reporter tells Mary-Sue that Mercado was most likely kidnapped because he left his house without taking his most precious possession, his own books.
Part IV ends with the last murder of 1997.

Part V