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Rating: Inside "The End".
The title is extremely important in a work of art. It is the seal placed to protect the treasure. I do not deny that I purchased this book solely for that reference to Morrison in the title: it was a period during which I would have bought anything that had any more or less significant connection to some rock star. What can I say, I was curious.
The more you read the novel, the more you realize you are inside "The End" by the Doors; it is a disturbing "The End," like the original, or desperate like Nico's version. When the action becomes frenetic and swift, the contrast with the squalid calm of this ideal soundtrack is strong. Squalid, indeed. This is the key word of the novel: squalor.
Sick and feverish, yellow like the pages where it is printed, dark and with no return like Morrison's singing in "The End," this is a book of tired lives, that proceed by inertia without the hope of being redeemed. The protagonist, Angel Ros, is the pulp antihero: subjugated by his woman who perhaps does not even love him, victim of circumstances and events, he is a lonely man. Despite the presence of his companion for most of the book, it is easy to discern Angel's squalid solitude. A dreamer, an idealist: he would like a world of literati and poets idolized like rock stars, like his "friend" Morrison, for example. Angel is a man who loves: he loves Joyce and the Doors, he loves his companion Ana, he loves danger (or rather, he undergoes it and then falls in love with it), he loves his ruin, both in a specific sense (Ana) and a general one. Life tortures him, makes him suffer. It offers him the illusion only to shatter it, leaving him helpless to watch.
Bolano and Porta paint a picture in dull tones, perhaps even deathly ones. In a chaotic and ruthless Barcelona, the antihero half-heartedly fights against adversity, endures it, welcomes it into his life. And then he falls in love with it.
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