Mexico City’s Labyrinthine Novels

This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for February 2024

I’ve recently been to Mexico City. I used to live there. Now, visiting as a tourist, I can see the appeal of the city to foreigners. Mexico City is truly a multicultural city, not only for the diasporas that have chosen it as their destination, but also within native Mexicans themselves there is a whole spectrum of subcultures and regional variants that make the city a kaleidoscope of colors, traditions and behaviors.

Mexico city is a city that lefts an impact in whoever visits it. Whether it is a positive or a negative impact will be determined by individual experiences. But it is undeniable that one cannot visit the city without any strong sentiment about it. Its size, the variety of people on its streets, the fact that you can easily walk from a rich to a poor neighborhood without even realizing you did, all of that generates in the visitor a genuine feeling of being lost in a city that doesn’t care for you, which for some could be a liberating experience, particularly if you come from a city in which people care too much about other people businesses.

As such, it is not unusual to carry a feeling of loneliness when in Mexico city. I can assert that I do. And, as many, I take refuge in books when dealing with sentiments of solitude. I personally want to talk about two books that were, at least partially, written in Mexico City, by foreigners, nonetheless, that found in its Boston-like stone buildings a place in which to be inspired. These two books are Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Los detectives salvajes by Roberto Bolaño.

It could be argued that both books are nothing alike, however, by their sheer volume I would argue that there must be at least some tangents that touch both works. And, sure enough, there are many similarities between the two novels. For starters, they deal with wandering as one of their main themes. Being a human yo-yo is how Benny Profane describes his aimless wandering in Gravity’s Rainbow spiritual predecessor novel, V., which could also be applied to the way in which Tyrone Slothrop moves through Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow or Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano move through Mexico in Los detectives salvajes. And I would go even further as to declare that this literary wandering is at least somewhat inspired in the wandering that is necessary to do in order to discover the secrets Mexico City has to offer.

The overall seclusion of Thomas Pynchon make it hard to pinpoint exactly where in Mexico city he lived, as opposed to Roberto Bolaño, who we know used to frequent the café “la Habana”. However, by reading their works, it is not difficult to realize they experienced the city in the same way. Mexico City can be a dangerous place but, most of the time, it is a tedious place, where everything is too close and too far at the same time, where two hours in the metro and in the plethora of buses in the urbanity can lead you wherever you want. As such, it is incredibly tiresome to do the same route twice a day, five days a week if you are a blue-collar worker. But if you are not, when you are a foreign writer, the same route is not for commuting but for exploring. Every way you head is an adventure, even getting mugged can be, on the long term, remembered as a funny anecdote.

The city, thus, is an open invitation to poets and chroniclers, who need to feel people either too close or too far away at different stages of the creative process. Mexico city allowed Roberto Bolaño to feel at home surrounded by friendly faces when he was a political refugee away from his native Chile while at the same time (with just a few years of difference) it allowed the seclusive Thomas Pynchon to hide and calmly smoke pot lost in the masses of people that can be found in Mexico City’s streets.

Another point of connection between both works: both are heavily influenced by Borges’ narrative. Neither Bolaño nor Pynchon have kept their admiration for the Argentinian writer a secret. The author is name-dropped in both novels. Among many of the mentions of him in Los detectives salvajes, it is probably the first one the one that creates the bigger impression: within a conversation about which Latin American poets are homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual, Borges is classified as either a fileno, maricón or asexual person. The mention in Gravity’s Rainbow is probably more forgiving: it is presented as a necessary natural consequence of the Argentinian obsession with labyrinths, a countermeasure to the endless pampas. A labyrinth is, fundamentally, a house built to get lost. And I believe the description applies perfectly to both Mexico City and to both novels. Both books are colossal pieces of literature that require to be read slowly in order to preserve its peculiar essence, just as labyrinths have to be walked slowly in order to not get lost.

The labyrinthine nature of literature (a book is just as good as the books that inspired it) has been more blatantly explored in books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves or Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc, with varying degrees of success. However, while being definitely more “out there”, these books lack the feeling of getting lost while reading them. Every turn, every aisle, every path seems to be prefabricated to inspire the notion of a labyrinth, while never truly achieving such sensation. On the contrary, Gravity’s Rainbow and Los detectives salvajes achieve that sentiment of getting lost in the same way Borges describes a desert or London do so, that is, by the sheer immense-ness of it. Of course, this is the very same sensation one feels while walking on the streets of Mexico City, a gigantic set of monoliths and glass buildings, of small houses that shelter insanely large families and tall skyscrapers that host none, of cheap tacos and expensive lobster; truly, a city in which to get lost.