Jorge Volpi
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by Philip Gambone

Two years ago, when I began writing this column, which I call "The Writer in Mexico," I aimed to look at both Mexican and foreign writers who have set their novels, stories, plays, poems, and travel accounts in this country. In the almost sixty works of literature that I have so far considered, Mexico—its people, its history, its politics, its landscape, its culture—has always been the dominant focus. It seems that no matter who you are as a writer, whether a visitor or a native, you end up directing your literary gaze wholeheartedly on El País.

I have just read a novel by the esteemed Mexican writer Jorge Volpi that completely shatters this idea. In Search of Klingsor (En Busca de Klingsor), published in 1999, has absolutely nothing to do with Mexico. Indeed, Volpi, who is 56, has from early on in his career tried to break the stereotype of the "typical" Mexican writer and his concerns. He has been hailed as one of a new generation of Mexican writers who, in the words of Francisco Goldman, "liberates his peers from oppressive expectations of what Latin American fiction is supposed to be." In Search of Klingsor, is but one example of Volpi's insistence that Mexican literature should move beyond the conventions of magic realism.

In 1996, along with four other Mexican writers, Volpi wrote a "Crack Manifesto," which announced a new literary movement. His contribution to the manifesto—by turns serious, intelligent, and youthfully cheeky—noted: "Writing is able to connect us with our past; it makes it possible that the imaginary friends from our adolescence show up as real creations or, even more, as our contemporary writers."

Imaginary friends—or, in the case of In Search of Klingsor, a pair of imaginary scientists, one German and one American—are at the heart of Volpi's page-turner of a novel, which otherwise is populated by actual historical characters. Set in many locales—Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Copenhagen, Princeton (but never Mexico)—the novel ranges back and forth between the years leading up to World War II, the war years, and the immediate aftermath. "Though most of the scientific and historical information is factually accurate," Volpi writes in the English-language edition's End Note, "the narrator's point of view is always within the bounds of fiction."

Professor Gustav Links, a German mathematician, is the narrator. In July 1944, he has been involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, but miraculously escaped the ultimate punishment that was meted out to hundreds of other conspirators and their associates. At the end of the war, with Germany is ruins, he and a young American lieutenant, Francis P. Bacon, join forces in order to track down the mysterious Klingsor, the code name of an undercover Nazi scientist who was responsible for all the secret scientific investigations of the Reich, including the atomic project. Links becomes a kind of Virgil to Lieutenant Bacon, guiding him through the hell of the Nazi's diabolical wartime agenda.

Albert Einstein
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As the novel unfolds, Bacon, who goes about the assignment of tracking down Klingsor with the meticulousness of the scientist he was trained to be, comes to see how labyrinthine the search is. "There are too many loose ends, too much information, too many possible places to begin," he tells Links. "Klingsor is as elusive as an atom."

Many of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century make an appearance in the novel: Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, to name a few. Volpi, who from his boyhood has been interested in science, knows his physics. And he knows what fierce rivals these geniuses often were. Especially contentious were Heisenberg and Schrödinger, who conducted another kind of war between themselves. The tangled skein of relationships, including a love triangle and other erotic complications, keeps throwing Bacon off the track. Volpi employs all the apparatus of a good detective novel: Who is working for whom? Who is covering up for whom? Lots of people seem to be hiding part of the story. Who is telling the truth?

Erwin Schrodinger
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As much as it is a detective novel, In Search of Klingsor borrows, too, from the mythology and imagery of the quest for the Holy Grail, a grail just as elusive as the one Bacon and Links are pursuing. Volpi ingeniously interweaves this quest motif with discussions of the uncertainty principle, that is, the impossibility of ever possessing all the information on a given system. We can never fully know the reality of things, Bacon declares. The novel is constantly presenting us with a physical and social universe that is mysterious and paradoxical. Where the path that events take is often based on a seemingly trivial decision.

Volpi is at work with many themes in this suspenseful and intellectually effervescent novel, including the intersection of science and morality, the mechanisms of betrayal, and the games that infect social interactions. And he makes his real-life physicists—admittedly not the sexiest cast of characters—come alive on the page. The novel conveys the excitement and peril of that era. His account of the plot to assassinate Hitler, though already told dozens of times, is gripping.

Werner Heisenberg
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Volpi, whose works have been translated into more than twenty languages (including an excellent English translation by Kristina Cordero), is a beautiful craftsman. His metaphors are fun. In one passage, for example, he describes the dean of Princeton posing proudly beside Einstein "like a squirrel waiting anxiously to climb a sequoia tree." He can also be wonderfully lyrical, as in a gorgeous two-page description of the stormy seaside at Helgoland, a lonely German island in the North Sea, where Heisenberg formulated his quantum theory.

Helgoland
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In Search of Klingsor is finally a cautionary tale about the uses and misuses of power—nuclear power, political power, erotic power. As one character cynically notes, "The difference between good and evil, right and wrong, should be determined by those who have the power to do so—that is, men who possess an iron will."

In 1999, when In Search of Klingsor was published, many saw the defeat of Nazism and the fall of the Soviet Union as evidence of the "end of history." The good guys had won and democracy stood triumphant. Today, we know how premature that conclusion was. As Bacon observes, "The abscess of fascism has been eliminated, but the idea is still kept alive in the minds of those ruthless enemies …. I shiver just thinking about how far we could take this. In fact, we've gone way too far already." Reading this novel may set you on edge, reminding you just how fragile peace, security, and the democratic rule of law are. The "ruthless enemies" are still out there—indeed, as they have often been, in our very midst.

Niels Bohr

This week, Jorge Volpi will make two appearances at San Miguel's Biblioteca in conjunction with his new novel, La invención de todas las cosas (The Invention of All Things), a book that explores imagination as the origin and driving force of the world from the Big Bang to the present:

Friday, March 14, 5pm - Círculo de lectura (Reading Circle)
Saturday, March 15, 12pm - workshop with Jorge Volpi, 2 pm - Conversation and book signing

Contact the Biblioteca to register

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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