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Bolaño's Santa Teresa is a thin fictional mask over Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican border city facing El Paso across the Rio Grande. The map runs from the international bridges and the old downtown out to the maquiladora factories and the desert lots on the city's edge, where over years the bodies of hundreds of murdered women were found. A European frame, followed here to Bremen, opens the book far from that violence.

The critics

Bremen, Germany

The Part About the Critics

The book opens in Europe with four literary scholars whose shared obsession with a reclusive German novelist binds them together at academic gatherings. A conference in Bremen sharpens their rivalries and their friendship before the trail they are following eventually points them south to the Mexican border. Bremen stands here for the book's European frame, remote from the violence at its core.

The Part About the Critics

explicit Bremen is named in the novel and is a real city in northern Germany, far from the border setting; it is flagged as an excursion beyond the book's anchor in Ciudad Juárez.

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