The New Yorker: "Labyrinth" by Roberto Bolaño

January 23, 2012: "Labyrinth"by Roberto Bolaño
The Q&Awith Barbara Eppler, Bolaño's first American Publisher, is interesting, butof no help with this story, which I think I love. I say I think I love it because I don't know that I have the energy tounpack it to see what's there. If there's nothing underneath the dazzlinglanguage and the manipulation of time, then I might like it less.
The story is based on a picture, and that picture appears tobe the one in the magazine illustrating the story—take a look at it as you readthe description of the people he names. I've reproduced it here, although whenI read the story on my Kindle I hadn't yet seen it. He's describing this tableand these people in great detail, whose actual names he uses, and then, Isuppose—although I have no way of knowing—he is fabricating the rest: what theydo with each other outside of the picture, what is happening beyond thepicture's frame, etc.
What appeals to me here isn't so much what happens, but theintersection of the real and the imagined, which includes a person who isn't inthe picture at all, and also the way in which the characters, as time passes,have lives outside of the picture but are also always frozen in the photograph.
After the detailed description of the people in thephotograph, about a third of the way into the story the author begins toimagine: "Let's imagine J.-J. Goux, for example . . ." He has Goux leave thepicture and walk down the street. Then he imagines that some of the people arelooking at someone out of the frame, and imagines this might be "a youngjournalist from South America, no, from Central America." He goes on to suggestthat there may be something sinister about this journalist, that he's bitterand will do some harm. It's wonderfully imaginative, even if in the end itdoesn't produce any real action.
What do other people think? Or do you know something aboutthe people the author has named here?