The Review of Contemporary Fiction

In Search of Klingsor, by Jorge Volpi, translated by Kristina Cordero
reviewed by Chad W. Post

Jorge Volpi. In Search of Klingsor. Trans. Kristina Cordero. Scribner, 2002. 414 pp. $26.00.

In Search of Klingsor revolves around Francis Bacon, a young American physicist sent to Germany in the aftermath of World War II to investigate inconsistencies in the Nuremberg hearings. While reading the transcripts, he stumbles upon a reference to “Klingsor,” a mysterious personage who apparently controlled all of the scientific funding during the Nazi reign. Bacon becomes obsessed with finding Klingsor and enlists the help of a mathematician named Gustav Links. They visit a number of the great scientific figures of the twentieth century in an attempt to uncover Klingsor’s real identity. This novel does have a number of “spy story” elements, but it’s a mistake to dismiss this book as merely a thriller, and readers looking for something in that vein will end up very disappointed. To get a structural idea of how the thriller genre is subverted, one simply has to look at how the Klingsor storyline is introduced. The first mention of Klingsor occurs on page thirty-six, setting up what is believed to be the main plot of the book. After this, though, the reader is presented with one hundred pages of only tangentially relevant background material on Bacon, which, more importantly, is told through a series of hypotheses and disquisitions that attempt to demonstrate the interaction between scientific theories and life. This interplay of essay and art points to what Volpi is really up to in this book. As a member of the “Crack” group—a handful of young Mexican writers who have renounced American neorealism and magical realism in favor of the literary experiments of Fuentes and Cortázar—Volpi is much more concerned with the form the novel takes than with relating an action-packed story. The novel’s overall structure develops out of three disparate sections, and along with the subtle shifts that alter the course of the narration this is the most interesting aspect of the book. Overall, this is an impressive and playful English-language debut from an author likely to become one of Mexico’s premier writers.