SONATA

A trademark hallucinatory tour of the Southwestern borderlands by its chief literary interpreter.

The work of Bowden (1945-2014) falls into two rough categories: meditations on the psychotic world of the drug cartels and its supporting players south of the border and the wanton destruction of desert places by capitalist predators to the north of it. In this posthumous work—one of numerous books that he left behind in various states of completeness—he writes of a beleaguered Border Patrol agent attempting to keep illegal crossers from coming across the line even as a coyote tells him, tauntingly, “I’m crossing fifty Brazilians tomorrow, right along this stretch and you can’t stop me.” Naturally, he made good on his promise. Two leitmotifs play prominently in Bowden’s book: sandhill cranes, intermediaries between the human and spirit world; and madness, whether enacted by institutionalized patients in a Mexican jail or by the renowned painter Vincent Van Gogh. (It’s Bowden’s love for Beethoven, who makes an appearance, that gives the book its title.) Bowden has two rhetorical modes as well: swiftly moving run-on sentences that take up whole pages (“…you are the illegals coming north, or climbing out of a container in a port and here is what is wrong with you, you didn’t pick the right parents and this will not be forgiven, and this is true of the Mexican or the Chinaman or the zone-tailed hawk or the lion padding softly down the creek in the night, eyes huge with hunger for the fresh blood of the deer”) and portentous, short, fragmentary paragraphs (“I drift off, people tell me I vanish before their eyes. A ghost in my own life”). The former category is dominant, and if the author is incantatory, one sometimes wishes he’d reach for a period. Earlier works such as Blue Desert and Killing the Hidden Waters are more disciplined in this regard.

Not Bowden at his best, but even middling Bowden is better than most contemporary authors at their peaks.