Some of the sections may not be effective as individual books, or at least would be nowhere near as commanding in isolation as they are in concert with the rest, but the group can certainly be read out of order, or in various combinations. One of the most obvious of these alternate arrangements, for simple chronological reasons, is to start with the last part followed by the first, making the novel circular. The resulting structure is something like a spider's web, on any part of which the hapless fly of a reader may land, with Santa Teresa, or whatever Santa Teresa stands for, waiting in the centre.
All roads lead back to Santa Teresa, but they come from wildly different directions: via Harlem, Arizona, almost every country in Europe, several universities, at least three insane asylums, an horrific Mexican prison, and both the German and Russian sides of the Eastern Front in the Second World War.
Each of these sources, and there are many more, contains a dozen characters, a dozen half-told tales which are included only because they bear some relationship to a particular theme. The themes are strictly oppressive: madness, disappointment in love, violence in sex, homophobia, prostitution, corruption, failure. The beauty is in the way they are brought out, by subtle correspondences within the disparate sweep of the narrative. Several dominant motifs emerge, centred in the characters' dreams and flights of madness, and particularly in Bolaño's often staggering similes. It would be impossible to give enough examples to fully illustrate either the precision or the gigantic scope of this process, but a single particularly dense example may hint at it. In the second section, a philosopher named Amalfitano is slowly going mad:
The voice said: be careful, but it said it as if it were very far away, at the bottom of a ravine revealing glimpses of volcanic rock, rhyolites, andesites, streaks of silver and gold, petrified puddles covered with tiny little eggs, while red tailed hawks soared above in the sky, which was purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death.
