De-humanisation Of Victims - Plot Device to show us up?

[WordsBeyondBorders]

In 'The Part About Crimes' of 2666, initially the victims are mentioned with their names with a bit of background, as the pages go, they are mainly referred to as bodies (mostly like newspaper reports) and the reader's level of involvement with them reduces as we tend to with news bytes we notice in passing. I assume that this is Bolano's way of saying that we get inured to just about anything and everything that happens around us over a period of time. We just get numb to it. This also could be that we are descending more and more into hell, where all feelings pass and we just become spectators without any feelings.

What are your thoughts on it.

[BoBandy]

I would buy that. By the end of the Part About the Crimes, I was fatigued with all the murders, and the reports didn't have the same effect on me--I really didn't care that much anymore. That is hell.

[Madkropotkin]

Excellent point. I feel the same way. It was probably the part I was most looking forward to and enjoyed the least. It felt like a chore to trudge through that section.

[BoBandy]

What really fu--ed me up was finding out that the Part About the Crimes is essentially lightly fictionalized non-fiction. The feminicidios been going on in Ciudad Juarez since the early nineties. There have been at least 400, and probably more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_h...

[Madkropotkin]

I know, that is why I was looking forward to reading that part, I thought he was going to expound something I was unaware of of those crime in Northern Mexico. But alas, nothing new, same old conjectures. Great book nonetheless.

[Fab]

Im currently coming to the end of part four which i'm happy to say as i feel like its corroding my soul. This seems to me a book about death. The majority of the setting for this story is Mexico, a country known for its celebration of life and death with festivals such as the ' Día de los Muertos Season'.
Death appears throughout (what i have so far read): the impending death of Archimboldi, Fates's mothers death, the death of a book and its ideas on a clothesline and part four and many of the character's dreams seem to be metaphors for death.

[Donavan]

I got soul fatigue halfway through Part about the Crimes and had to put the book down for a while. (I forget what all I read during my break. Happy stuff perhaps.) Starting the book was hard because I knew going in that all these murders had happened in Mexico. It probably took six months before I could face wading back into Part about the Crimes. When I picked the book up again, I finished the rest over a weekend. And I was satisfied and disturbed. And I immediately went back and started the book again from the beginning.

[Madkropotkin]

It is a very disturbing book, but very well written.

@Fabiano, I think your right, taking into account Bolanos health at the time of writing this book, it seems to come from a very dark place.

@Donovan, how did you feel the second time around?

[Donavan]

I really like the first part, so that's why I think I started reading the book again -- maybe to remind me why I stuck with it.

[James]

BoBandy wrote: "I would buy that. By the end of the Part About the Crimes, I was fatigued with all the murders, and the reports didn't have the same effect on me--I really didn't care that much anymore. That is hell."
That may precisely be what Bolano was trying to achieve with the murders. He may have wanted the readers to eventually exhibit the same level of apathy in regards to the murders as the rest of the Santa Teresa population/world. I think that apathy is a very strong motif throughout the novel, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's what Bolano was trying to elicit from his audience - maybe he wanted to show us that we're not exempt from it.

[James]

Jodi wrote: "I think so, too. At the beginning of the section it is frustrating and you get sort of disgusted at how complacent the police are about their jobs, not driven by a sense of duty and justice to find the killers. But about halfway through, the reader becomes apathetic as well. I found it wasn't so much that I didn't care about the victims, but rather I got to the point of giving up on the police and accepting the fact that they don't feel the moral obligation that we expect of them."

This is exactly the cycle of emotions that I went through whilst reading the fourth part.
However, when I gave up on the police, I started to believe in the efforts of the journalists. Bolano clearly revered the written word. When Oscar Fate started to get interested in the crimes, he wanted to write about them - of course, he was also met by apathy and dismissal from his boss. Then more and more journalists were writing about the crimes in the fourth part - when one went missing, another one took up his rifle, so to speak. Then that congresswoman got involved, encouraging another journalist to investigate and write a piece. I think that it was those parts of the novel that gave me some sort of hope. There were people that wanted to contribute and wanted to help in some way or another - regardless of what their motives were - their actions were admirable.