Imma turn this into a full post rather than a comment because the page looks lonely to me (ahem, Caitlin), and I want to add another photo of something precious.

In answer to your question, Bribs, it would seem to me that Bolaño's not letting us into the heads of the women - or not giving them a voice - is a continuation of their voicelessness concerning the homicides. Both in terms of media coverage and help from authority figures, the defense of these woman seems to consist of little more than hushing it up if not outright ignoring it. In the documentary I watched about it, the woman who was in charge of the police force that was supposed to address this problem said that people were exaggerating and that "1xx deaths wasn't that much anyway." Hmm. I know also that a number of arrests have been made of men who it turned out had no evidence against them, but like the women being killed they didn't really have any resources to defend themselves. It makes sense (in a cold-blooded way) for the authorities to deny the problem (hey, we didn't fuck up), or accuse defenseless people (hey, we fixed it and you can't prove otherwise). Never mind that the murders continued.

Anyway, back to the book. I don't particularly think that if that's what he's going for he chose a very great path. Might it not be better to give us a person right in the thick of it who we can really identify with? At this point (my point) aside from Rebeca, we have almost no Mexican characters. Why did the author make so many of his peeps non-Mexicans? Even our main character in Mexico so far is Amalfitano, who's Chilean. By the way Amalfitano is starting to bore me so he better get a move on. Do you have the page number of the different sections? Can you tell me them along with the full page count or your version? I can't skip ahead without pushing the one page forward button on my kindle.

I also wanted to tell you the epilogue story to that article you sent me about the blog. I asked Mono if he'd heard of the site and he got really upset. (Called you a pendejo, which is not complimentary, although he assumed the person he was referring to was another friend of ours here). He was not happy that I'd heard of the blog and assumed I must have heard it from this guy because he's in the Air Force too and apparently all the military people know about it but it's not so much of a civilian thing, at least in this part of the country and as far as he knows. Mono told me to "go to that site if you want to see what they did to my friends and what they would have eventually done to me if I hadn't left the narcotrafficking area of the military - but I hope you don't." Thought it was really interesting and kind of frightening to hear him have such a reaction to it, especially in contrast to the way the NY journalist was almost praising it. The other thing I was going to say is I visited the site (before I heard Mono's opinion), and the pictures of course were disturbing enough, but the write-ups were equally freaky. Just very cold and matter of fact, like reading a classified ad completely devoid of feeling. Pretty disgusting and it really made me stop and wonder what the hell we're doing. As in human beings, mucking it up-like. Really depressing. Quick, look at the puppy!