In the beginning of Roberto Bolaño's posthuomous masterpiece is a quote from Baudelaire, "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." That about sums up the aesthetic approach of the tome, the first section of which begins with the seemingly irrelevant story of an international group of academics chasing as elusive German author to the small Mexican border town of Santa Teresa. Sure, the academics give conferences, fall in love, and learn just briefly of a series of crimes in which hundreds of women have been killed in Santa Teresa over the past decade, but ultimately nothing happens, the academics do not find their author, and the story continues without them.
But this desert of boredom is the genius of the work, for in each section we get closer and closer to what is happening in Santa Teresa, reaching through the boredom to an unmistakable and spine-chilling horror that seems to lurk just below the surface of the page. Even the section about the crimes, essentially 200 pages worth of crime reports on every single raped and murdered woman in Santa Teresa (the crimes based off the still unsolved murders of women in the real Ciudad Juárez) told with the "false neutrality of a police report." These page are brutal, graphic, and yet, still part of the desert of boredom surrounding the horror that has not yet been revealed. As such it is interesting to note that Bolaño has turned Baudelaire's quote into a kind of architectonic structure for the plot of his novel. Instead of moving forward in time, or with building events, we have a microscope that starts off on the boring international level and gradually circles closer and closer to the terrifying circumstances of one small town.
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