{"id":9112,"date":"2013-04-15T00:12:31","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T04:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=9112"},"modified":"2013-04-15T23:35:44","modified_gmt":"2013-04-16T03:35:44","slug":"roberto-bolano-mexican-manifesto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/04\/15\/roberto-bolano-mexican-manifesto\/","title":{"rendered":"Roberto Bola\u00f1o: “Mexican Manifesto”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0to read the story in its entirety on\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0webpage. Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s “Mexican Manifesto”\u00a0(tr. from the Spanish by Laura Healy) was originally published in the April 22, 2013 issue of\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading “new” fiction by Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u00a0is problematic. From what I know (which isn’t much), now that we’ve received his published material, we\u00a0are\u00a0tapping into his computer files (I understand some people find this insufferable, but, hey, I’m on board, especially since Bola\u00f1o’s\u00a0work all comes together to form something larger, if not something more comprehensible).\u00a0Bola\u00f1o’s published work is fraught with holes, red herrings, dead ends, to say nothing of the pieces that are deliberately pointless, or, rather, the point is pointlessness, the meaning is\u00a0meaninglessness. How much harder it is, then, reading these pieces that may have been written on a whim and never looked at again, to know where to begin an attempt to unpack it, to know, even, whether it’s worth the effort?<\/p>\n

I’ve now read this story twice. I always love entering into Bola\u00f1o’s\u00a0narrative nightmares. This is\u00a0familiar Bola\u00f1o\u00a0territory,\u00a0though\u00a0this\u00a0fresh in my mind, I don’t think\u00a0he navigates it quite as well as he does elsewhere.\u00a0Still, it being familiar Bola\u00f1o\u00a0territory, I imagine many of us Bola\u00f1o\u00a0fans will enjoy being with him again as he takes us through his mazes. But I’ll be very curious about the reactions from people who do not read Bola\u00f1o.<\/p>\n

The basic premise of the story is this: our unnamed narrator and his girlfriend, Laura, embark on a quest to visit every public bath in Mexico City. They don’t succeed, but they do manage to find the heart of something deep and dark, a journey into the city and into their own minds:<\/p>\n

[A]s we advanced the abyss opened up around us, the great black scenography\u00a0of public baths. Just as the hidden face of other cities is in theatres, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap cinemas, old buildings, even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City could be found in the enormous web of public baths, legal, semilegal, and clandestine.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, the way Bola\u00f1o describes them, these public baths encapsulate all of the “hidden faces” of other cities.<\/p>\n

The first one they patronize remains ever after their favorite, and they return often. Montezuma’s Gym is a maze of private and public rooms separated by steamy glass screens that distort and mask everyone. The private\u00a0saunas are two rooms, and in the first is “an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis\u00a0and bordellos.”\u00a0This ethereal world, where steam can cause euphoria, sleep, or suffocation, is used to explore humanity’s physical and mental uncertainty (it was in these places that they “mined\u00a0the certainty of our love”).\u00a0The baths’\u00a0ethereal feel, in which human motive and perception matches the heat and choking steam, is all very Bola\u00f1oesque, and we can uncomfortably bask in it.<\/p>\n

The contradicting feelings are heightened when they visit in the evening hours, which is their most common schedule:<\/p>\n

The baths at that hour seemed to enjoy, or suffer from, a permanent shadow. That is, a trick shadow, a dome or a palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial’s pouch; at first you’re grateful for it, but it ends up weighing more than a tombstone.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Underneath it all, unseen below the tiles, are the “hot pipes and boilers that stoked the business from some secret place in the building.”<\/p>\n

Our narrator, particularly at first, finds that his paranoia is heightened as well. Though they most often occupy the private rooms, this does not stop people from knocking, either to visit because, in some way or other, they’ve become “friends” though solidarity in this underworld, or, more commonly,\u00a0to sell goods or “performances.”<\/p>\n

During one visit, Laura accepts a performance from a proprietor of two young boys. The narrator notices how skinny they are, how skinny he is, how skinny all of them are. As it gets hotter — “unbearably hot,” though they do nothing about the heat — and they all begin sweating, he thinks they are all melting. The boys’\u00a0proprietor and, even, one of the boys falls asleep in the room where the air is getting thicker and thicker with steam, until the narrator simply cannot see anything.<\/p>\n

I stood and took two steps along the wall. I heard Laura calling me. A Laura with her mouth full. What do you want? I said. I’m suffocating. I went back, less carefully than before, and bent down, feeling my way around the place where I figured they must be. I touched only hot tiles. I thought I was dreaming or going crazy. I bit my hand so I wouldn’t scream. Laura? I moaned.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He finally succeeds in turning off the steam and he and Laura are able to exit. Despite this existential crisis, a panic so acute it is not understood so much as felt, they continue to use baths and even run into this trio again, though “things were never the same.”<\/p>\n

And what of all the confusion and paranoia? What does this mean?<\/p>\n

I don’t know yet. As with the characters, it is easier to feel this than to understand it, which is one reason I love Bola\u00f1o’s\u00a0work so much (and why I’m such a big fan of Krasznahorkai’s\u00a0work).\u00a0Attempting to\u00a0“understand”\u00a0is further complicated by two additional elements to the story, which the story begins and ends with, but which are absent in the remainder of the story:\u00a01)\u00a0a mural of Montezuma himself, who stays suspended over a pool, watching, while meanwhile\u00a0his courtiers try “with all their might to ignore whatever it is the emperor sees”; and 2) a brief look at\u00a0the workers. An eighteen-year-old orphan boy\u00a0works at Montezuma’s Gym, and\u00a0our narrator ends the piece by thinking of him and the other workers:<\/p>\n

The color of the\u00a0pool’s rocks, doubtless the saddest color I saw in the course of our expeditions, comparable only to the color of some faces, workers in the hallways, whom I no longer remember, but who were certainly there.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is it the mural and these workers witness? What makes them so foreboding and sad?\u00a0The narrator and Laura wander around the city in a haze, building their love on foundations connected to boiler rooms — I don’t know all that this is saying, but it isn’t limited to the narrator and Laura, and\u00a0it is indeed foreboding and sad.<\/p>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am one of those readers new to Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Trevor, and I much appreciated your introduction. I was glad to see you use the word nightmare, as the dreamlike story read like a nightmare to me. In addition, I enjoyed your idea that Bola\u00f1o\u2019s work is \u201cfraught with holes, red herrings, dead ends, to say nothing of the pieces that are deliberately pointless, or rather, the point is pointlessness, the meaning is meaninglessness.\u201d<\/p>\n

I take your warning — that maybe one ought to stay fluid in one\u2019s reaction to him. So I will just talk about the things I thought about while I was reading.<\/p>\n

First of all, he titles this story about sexual (mis)adventure \u201cMexican Manifesto.\u201d Manifesto, however, has very little to do with sex and everything to do with political declaration. I feel on my toes from the beginning that something regarding the human condition is being talked about. It\u2019s impossible not to associate the word manifesto with Marx, the \u201cCommunist Manifesto\u201d and Trotsky, who was exiled to Mexico. So I read on, bearing in mind that whatever I read would probably have a political subtext.<\/p>\n

But before continuing, I must reveal that I have slightly more interest than the ordinary American in Chile and Pinochet\u2019s overthrow of Allende in 1973. My son-in-law was born in Chile in 1973, and his parents came to the United States shortly after, the coup having turned their world upside down. For that reason, I have slightly more patience with Bola\u00f1o\u2019s opaque style than I would otherwise.\u00a0 Life in times such as the Pinochet era is likely to make people speak obliquely. So while I am frustrated to read a story that seems to be talking about sex but has a political title, I am more than willing to give Bola\u00f1o some space.<\/p>\n

Next, I notice that the woman in this story is named Laura. It\u2019s hard not to make the leap to Petrarch\u2019s Laura, given that Laura is given headliner status, her name being the first word in the story and the speaker\u2019s name never being revealed. But this Laura is Petrarch\u2019s Laura\u2019s polar opposite: risk taking where the other is sheltered, sexually daring where the other is \u201cpure.\u201d But someone with more background in Petrarch than I might be able to make more of this.<\/p>\n

At any rate, Bola\u00f1o\u2019s Laura appears to be the speaker\u2019s guide to a kind of underworld, but unlike Dante\u2019s Virgil, she is not a dispassionate soul. Her purpose appears to be to deepen her own erotic experience of the affair she is having with the speaker. We have no sense of her having any other understanding of him, although he speaks of her with a kind of combined awe and despair.<\/p>\n

Right away, another name crops up in the story: that of Aztec emperor Montezuma. Montezuma\u2019s Gym is the name of the first bath house the couple visits, and a mural of Montezuma graces the foyer. Montezuma \u201clooks fixedly out of the mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark, wide-open eyes in which I often thought I glimpsed terror.\u201d I think, when searching for what manifesto might mean, Montezuma\u2019s appearance is important, Montezuma being the indigenous emperor conquered by Cortes. So we are in the territory not only of conquered peoples (or twice-conquered peoples), but also the territory of terror.<\/p>\n

Although the speaker refers to their odyssey through the bath houses of Mexico City as \u201cpleasure and play,\u201d to the ordinary reader their escapades sound like those of people who have no idea what either love or sex actually is. In fact, looking back, remembering these bath house adventures, the speaker conveys a feeling that is anything but playful. The words that dot his language are morose in the extreme: terror, orphan, fight, abyss, black, limbo, shadow, tombstone, dangerous, funeral, the unpardonably lost, last shred of hope, impossible country, tired, darker, misery, suffocating, blank image, bottomless [eyes], saddest. \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Of course, a list of single words taken out of context cannot convey much, but there is no similar list of words one can collect from the story to bear up the speaker\u2019s idea that he was immersed in \u201cpleasure and play.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we hear that both whiskey and marijuana, taken together, were part of the bath house visits, one gets the sense not of pleasure but of anesthetic. One wonders how unsatisfying the couple\u2019s relationship is if they need the danger, strange company, \u201cperformances,\u201d and anesthetizing to achieve their satisfaction.<\/p>\n

We find out that women \u201cwere an absolute minority\u201d in the bath houses and that \u201cit wasn\u2019t uncommon to hear extravagant stories of attacks and harassment, even though, truth is, those tales weren\u2019t very credible.\u201d We are further and further from Petrarch\u2019s Laura, as well as further and further from any politically ideal existence, as well as further and further from the truth, given that the purpose of the bath houses is probably not primarily to provide pleasure to women.<\/p>\n

Finally, when we meet the old man and the boys who provide the performances, it is not difficult to make the leap to the political — slavery, in particular. That the speaker has difficulty being straightforward about what these \u201cperformances\u201d are or how the \u201cperformers\u201d are paid is another indication of things being torqued. The speaker has difficulty seeing what is going on; the steam that obscures his vision is mostly a representation of his lack of understanding of himself or others.<\/p>\n

The fact that the boys are so somnolent seems a tip-off, not to mention that the old man is asleep as well, and finally, the speaker himself seems half-conscious, watching Laura and one of the boys disappear into the steam.<\/p>\n

The fact that the speaker says the language of the boys \u201chad a touch of the funeral and of holes\u201d is profoundly sad and profoundly confusing. His own language then collapses completely when he tries to clarify his strange thought that the boys\u2019 language had a touch of the \u201cAir Hole.\u201d He offers this fragment in an explanation which is not a rational explanation: \u201cOne of the deformed faces of the Immaculate Grave.\u201d The thought is not grammatical, nor is it clear, except that we understand that the whole scene and its meaning is horrific. In fact, he says at one point, \u201cI felt like we were in a Nazi shower.\u201d Laura says, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, everything\u2019s fine.\u201d But the speaker thinks, later, \u201cI\u2019m suffocating [. . .].I thought I was dreaming or going crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what does it all mean? I get the feeling (as Trevor has suggested is the way to go with Bola\u00f1o) that a society is being pictured where everyone is anesthetized, where anyone who can truly see is terrified, where power is so overwhelming that people have no sense of reality, that people live in slavery and that all relationships have been distorted, and that the only way to survive is to be half dead.<\/p>\n

So that brings us back to the problem of manifesto. The odd thing is that while Bola\u00f1o was from Chile, he places this story in Mexico, as if, like many of us, he only truly understands his country of origin when he can look back on it from afar. If your country had suffered a series of governmental failures, to the point that innocent people are murdered, tortured, imprisoned and sent into exile, to the point where you yourself no longer can live there, perhaps this portrait of life in \u201cMexican Manifesto\u201d might have the sound of something true. Bola\u00f1o is suggesting that he knows a place where suffering abounds, and yet where the rulers say it is pleasure and play.<\/p>\n

I am new to Bola\u00f1o. I recommend this strange, unsettling story, just because it is unsettling. There is a coherence to the feeling it gives you: something is gravely not right here, something really important is not right here. Some of what is not right has to do with misplaced power and with slavery, with the idea of sexual slavery being a trope to represent a wider reality and the idea of being half dead is best represented by drugged somnolence.<\/p>\n

I hope the New Yorker<\/i> has the opportunity to publish some more Bola\u00f1o, but I also wish that someone like Adam Gopnick or Louis Menand would do a long essay about Bola\u00f1o as well.<\/p>\n

I look forward to any clarifications or suggestions any of you out there have as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click\u00a0here\u00a0to read the story in its entirety on\u00a0The New Yorker\u00a0webpage. Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s “Mexican Manifesto”\u00a0(tr. from the Spanish by Laura Healy) was originally published in the April 22, 2013 issue of\u00a0The New Yorker. Trevor Reading “new” fiction by Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u00a0is problematic. From what I know (which isn’t much), now that we’ve received his published material, we\u00a0are\u00a0tapping … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,13],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-roberto-bolano"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-2mY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9112"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9116,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9112\/revisions\/9116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9112"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}