The Defectors

In his final interview Roberto Bolaño says I would like to have been a homicide detective much more than a writer... Id 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 émigré 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.