SOUNDTRACK: MARTHA WAINWRIGHT-I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too (2008).
I’ve been a fan of Loudon for years. I also rather enjoy Rufus. So why not check out Rufus’ sister Martha and see how she stacks up in the family canon. Actually, it’s not fair to compare because she is an entity all to herself. And indeed, I feel that she sounds nothing like her family (maybe a weeeeee bit like Rufus, but not really).
In fact, I find that Martha’s voice rests comfortably between Mary Margaret O’Hara, Jane Siberry and, somewhat surprisingly, Patti Smith.
Lyrically, the title of the album pretty well tells you where she’s coming from: smart-assed and a little pissed off. But the real question is what kind of songs does she actually write? Well, the second song on this disc “You Cheated Me” is so strong and so catchy I was convinced it was a cover.
The rest of the disc is an exciting collection of styles: baroque arrangements, pop folk, and even straight ahead rock. There are times when the songs are not so much difficult as cantankerous: with her vocals reaching extraordinary heights. But it’s not just Martha showing off her range, the vocals work very well with the lyrics.
She also adds two covers on the disc: Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” which she takes some of the weirdness out of but which adds a bit of her own eccentricities to it. (It’s a great cover). The other cover is the Euryhthmics’ “Love is a Stranger” which doesn’t sound like a cover until the chorus kicks in.
I feel like the disc is a little long (somehow it feels like it should end after “See Emily Play”) but that’s not really that big of a complaint. Even though Martha sounds like others, she is still quite a unique presence, and this is a worthy CD for anyone who likes quirky singer songwriters.
[READ: Week of March 1, 2010] 2666 [pg 353-404]
I was bracing myself for a horrific section here. The Part About the Crimes is 280 pages of women being killed in graphic detail. Well, that turned out to be not exactly true. At least so far.
Nevertheless, the Part is largely filled with crime scene details about the many many women who died in the Santa Teresa region between 1993 and the beginning of 1994.
For my sanity I’m not going to detail all of the young women who were killed in this Part. I know someone on bolanobolano is detailing all of the deaths in the book, so I’ll assume that that is dealt with there.
After (by my count) 9 women are killed from Jan-May 1993, with varying details given (although most of them were sexually assaulted) the Part shifts to another depraved man.
A stranger, crying, sits in the back of the church. Some women in the church hear him, but they feel a sense of fording from him and they do not offer to help. After a few minutes he starts peeing on the floor, copious amounts of pee, far more than the average bladder could hold. When the priest and sexton are called out, the man stabs the sexton and flees the scene.
This case was given to Inspector Juan de Dios Martínez who works diligently to figure this (and soon to be more) events set in churches. He immediately goes to the Santa Teresa Asylum to see if they have any inmates that match the description. The director, Elvira Campos, says there are two but neither one was out last night.
The Penitent, for that is what he is called, returns to several local churches where he proceeds to smash the religious statues and icons. He also pees outrageously on the floors (enough to fit in a watermelon!). He doesn’t appear to set out to harm people, just statuary However, when he is confronted, he lashes out and does, in fact, murder.
[I have recently learned that Bolaño really hated Garcia Marquez and Laura Esquivel’s magical realism, and I can’t help but wonder if this outrageous amount of urine is sort of a piss take on the scene from Like Water for Chocolate when Tia is born through a flood of tears. I think there’s another over the top flood sequence in 100 Years of Solitude, but the details escape me].
More deaths follow, although mercifully, none in July or August.
The Mexico City newspaper La Razón sent Sergio Giozález to write a story about the Penitent. He interviews most of the participants this far. He also learns about the crimes against the women. He includes that in his report and promptly forgets the whole business.
But through him we learn that Elvira of the Asylum believes that The Penitent suffers from sacrophobia: fear or hatred of the sacred or sacred objects.
This leads to the strangest foreplay ever. Elvira and Inspector Martínez have lunch and discuss sacrophobia and then a whole litany of phobias from the mundane (agoraphobia) to the bizarre (vestiphobia–fear of clothes) to the crippling (pantophobia–fear of everything [as seen in A Charlie Brown Christmas!)) or (phobophobia–fear of fear). After this whole string of fears, we learn that they slept together. Or rather, they sleep together every 15 days. With precise regularity in almost every detail each time.
We then get the story of the two Pedros (which I confess I found confusing). Pedro Negrete (the police chief) wants to hire a bodyguard for his friend Pedro Rengifo. There’s also a man named Epifanio (who is the police chief’s assistant (I believe)). He winds up hiring a young boy Olegario Cura Expósito (known as Lalo Cura–lunacy).
On the way home, Epifano is driving the police car and he runs over what he thinks is a wolf but which turns out to be a coyote (And, of course, you would offer proof of this by telling Epifano to…pick up the coyote?? to see how much it weighs??)
Lalo practices shooting with security chief Pat O’Bannion (!).
4 or 5 more women are killed before the end of the year, including a rather disturbing matricide involving a stake. The perpetrator of this crime confessed to being The Penitent but noone believes that he is the perpetrator.
And then Lalo Cura is put to the test. He is on duty with two other bodyguards on duty to protect the wife of Pedro Rengifo. She goes off to visit a friend, and as she leaves, her bodyguards see some hitmen walking up the street. The two bodyguards flee the scene, and Lalo takes over. He puts a bullet in each of the assassins (after getting shot by one of them himself) and then fires some shots at the fleeing bodyguards (who apparently were unarmed?). This was a pretty exciting scene.
When the police arrive on the scene, Lalo is arrested since one of the hitmen was an officer. Pedro Negrete rescues him from jail (and puts a hurting on the officers who abused him) and then goes to Pedro Rengifo’s ranch and demand that Lalo be released from his duties. Negrete asks Lalo if he wants to be a policeman. Lalo says yes.
We get a brief look at prostitutes in the jail cells. The police arrested all of the prostitutes from one brothel in connection with the murder of another prostitute. When Lalo returns to the cells he hears a large party going on. When he goes to the cells he sees the policemen raping the prostitutes. I’m curious about the use of the word “raping,” and I wonder if it means exactly what I think it means. [I ask this not because the police wouldn’t be accused of raping women. It just has such a major impact on the scene. If the implication is that the police are making use of the prostitutes services, that’s one thing, but if they are raping the prostitutes, well, Jesus, that’s really horrible].
The week’s reading ends with yet another dead girl. Just to whet your appetite for the rest of the deaths to come.
COMMENTS
I feared that I was going to be really disgusted with this section of the book (not the writing, but the content). I was afraid that it was going to be very graphic depictions of what happened to these young girls. And, while yes, there was graphic explanation of the vaginal and anal rape that went on (which, yes was quite awful) it doesn’t even come close to the genre of torture porn. Rather, it felt very detached, clinical and matter of fact.
On the plus side, this detached nature could have led to an attitude where you disconnect from all the murders. Yet I felt that the stories of the girls were personalized enough that each one hurt. I did a little (very little I admit) research to see if these were indeed the names of women who were killed, but I didn’t find anything. Does anyone know if any of this is based on real people?
The story really feels like it’s moving forward now (admittedly, no one is finding out anything, so they’re more or less going in circles, but at least they are moving!). I hate to be saying this every week, but I’m really curious to see where this book winds up, as I still have no idea where this book is going to go! (And I am secretly hoping that we see Amalfitano’s Geometria book during this Part too).
A number of people have said that they don’t love this book. And right now I’m in that camp too. I’m enjoying it, but it’s nowhere near my favorite book. I’m also surprised at how easy I find it to read. Compared to Infinite Jest, this book is a piece of cake (well, that’s true of most books) but even compared to other books, it’s quite easy.
For ease of searching I include: Bolano
I think the easy-to-read-ness of the book ends in this section. When I started reading it in November, I read the first three sections in a week and a half. It took me six weeks to get through the Part About the Crimes. Something about the repetitiveness of the deaths makes it a very hard place to come back to (especially when you are reading it on your own and not as a part of a group).
I’m starting to see what you mean. Although I’ve been enjoying the book thus far (and if it weren’t for the time restrictions of the group read, would have easily flown through the first 3 sections), I’m not as excited to continue through here.
The deaths may be getting to me.
I had the same reaction to this first section of this part: I was expecting it to be more lurid. In fact, the worst part for me to read so far was the “party” with the cops, which is exactly as outrageous as you think. (I don’t know from the Spanish, but it doesn’t seem likely to me that in this part, of all the parts of the book, the translation “rape” would get thrown around indiscriminately.) I guess it’s because we had a peek at it happening, rather than as a past deed.
I don’t know, it’s silly for me to be trying to rank the atrocities, but I guess I’m just trying to work out my feeling that this reading was in some ways much less awful than I was expecting.
In re-reading that “party” section, yes it is definitely intended as horribly as I feared.
It’s hard to say that the deaths of countless women (in detail) was mild, but compared to what I expected, yes, quite mild. I don’t know how I feel about reading this yet. I guess that since I am anticipating 100s of deaths, I’m trying to inure myself to them.
Speaking of the translation, I was recently reading a roundtable discussion in The Believer about Latin American writers. Santiago Vaquera Vasquez was talking baout reading books in Spanish and said “Book 4 of 2666 which left me speechless and numb.”
Now, I’m not sure if the rest of the books gets (god forbid) worse, or if the translation has anything to do with it. This is not in any way a dis on the translation, by the way, which I think is really solid.
[…] body—but after the initial jolt, it’s not as crudely executed as that. I want to highlight Paul’s and Maria’s takes on the start of this part, because my own reaction shares in both. Maria […]