Rhapsody in a Circle
Walk into Anoosh’s bookshop and you will ask the same question, “Why on earth do you have all these copies of Adolf Hitler’s biography next to The Holy Koran?” The idea of displaying a religious text that teaches peace and love next to a biographical one meant to humanize the most inhuman is baffling. Yet, it is in this world, “a most terrifying scene of holiness and blood,” that Bolivar finds himself held hostage.
Marlon Fick’s novel, Rhapsody in a Circle, is a continuation of Bolivar Collin’s misadventures which began in The Nowhere Man. Bolivar is a global citizen currently registered as a resident in Mexico with his beautiful wife Teodesia and their two children, Karlita and Paco. But he has been missing for five years. He is living, against his will, under an assumed name and working as kingpin Aguilar’s courier. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn how the internationally famous author came to exist in a world where he is unrecognizable and suspicious.
Bolivar’s autistic tinge makes him valuable to his captors as “something like a savant.” His talent for deciphering messages, to “cycle through the alphabet starting with A, skipping two letters each time” and working “backwards to lift out the message from the typographical errors” leaves Bolivar trapped in a reiterative and tedious existence among strangers. His sustaining hope is to return to a reiterative and tedious existence with those he loves — “oatmeal and juice” for breakfast, Karlita practicing scales on the piano, and political arguments with Paco.
Sometimes this tediousness seems unrelenting. Fick tends to rhapsodize through his characters about literary history, notions of God, and politics. Conversations frequently return to Bolivar’s unflinching personal beliefs. He finds friendship in like-minded individuals who share a “theology pretty much the same” as his. Bolivar is Fick’s ticking time bomb, ready at a moment’s notice to go off on some diatribe. The main character’s strong personality leads him to actively try to change his environment and those around him. A strongly centered individual might rub a few dinner guests the wrong way, but in a world slowly stripping Bolivar of his identity, it is the only thing keeping him alive.
@ Francisca (Paquita) Esteve
Ironically, in a setting of religious intolerance and bloodshed, Bolivar finds inner peace through music and writing. His favorite piece of music, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, is described as “a bird rising and widening its circles … the farther we are from a thing, the more it grays.” Life is expressed, like music, through “waxing and waning … augmenting and diminishing.” No matter how high the bird flies, it maintains a sense of direction by maintaining a circular course relative to its center takeoff point. Like the piece, Bolivar does not stray far from his true identity, despite being planted in the midst of cartels, trafficking, and terrorism.
Leonard Bernstein believed that it did not matter how one cuts, copies, and pastes Rhapsody in Blue; it would remain the Rhapsody in Blue. The same can happen in our lives. We may change locations, jobs, and even our names; yet, with some luck, we retain something of our true selves. Like Bolivar, we will always seek out our center and find solace in our true identities.
Bolivar’s best course of action is to “remember that Mr. Aguilar would regret any harm that might be done to [Bolivar’s] family.” Despite having a particular “set of skills that could be useful” to the cartel, Bolivar is not Bryan Mills, and the novel is not a thriller. Violence, very much present in the novel, is not the point of the novel. Fick does not glamorize this profane mix of “holiness and blood.” He writes it out matter-of-factly, which will be unnerving for some readers.
Surrounded by violence, Bolivar remains a poet in his heart. And the same could be said about Fick. Rhapsody in a Circle might just be a ruse for penning a poem, a love letter to his wife. It is a poem that matures through hardship, “a poem about dying / Only when we have lived, and about / Circles,” built from a “personal memory [that] was shards of shrapnel and broken glass.” It is a beautiful piece, that rises from the carnage of “holiness and blood,” where the character and author blend into one.
Isaac Calles is a graduate student at the University of Texas Permian Basin. He returned to college as an adult to complete his bachelor’s degree in English after receiving encouragement from his wife and three children.