The Defectors

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In his final interview, Roberto Bolano says, I would like to have been a homicide detective, much more than a writer… I’d have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime, alone by night…

This aloneness, this perfect solitude, is very much at the core of The Defectors, a book of odd and uncanny episodes about people trying to defect from reality. There is a secret policeman in 80s communist Prague who becomes obsessed with a fiercely independent female detective novelist. There is a Buddhist psychotherapist who travels around Amerika offering the talking cure in a Volkswagen Beetle. There is an adjunct professor in Russian emigre Brooklyn who quits his job to build a Golem made of stainless steel.

As the book progresses, the episodes become increasingly experimental. Ultimately, like particles in a supercollider, they get smashed together and fly apart. And we get a brief glimpse of something new, some never-before-seen particle, a cosmic thought.