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Panopticon
As the California borderland newspaper where they work prepares to close, three reporters are oddly given assignments to return to stories they’ve covered before—each one surprisingly personal. The first assignment takes reporter Aaron Klinsman and photographer Rita Valdez to an abandoned motel room where the mirrors are draped with towels, bits of black tape cover the doorknobs, and the perfect trace of a woman’s body is imprinted on the bed sheets. From this sexually charged beginning—on land his family used to own—Klinsman, Rita, and their colleague, Oscar Medem understand that they are supposed to uncover something. They just don’t know what.
Following the moonlit paths their assignments reveal through the bars, factories and complex streets of Tijuana and Otay, haunted by the femicides that have spread westward from Juarez, the reporters become more intimately entwined. Tracing the images they uncover, and those they cause and leave behind, they soon realize that every move they make is under surveillance. Beyond this, it seems their private lives and even their memories are being reconstructed by others.
Panopticon is a novel of dreamlike appearances and almost supernatural memories, a world of hidden watchers that evokes the dark recognition of just how little we can protect even our most private moments. It is a shadowy, erotic novel only slightly speculative that opens into the world we all now occupy.
Following the moonlit paths their assignments reveal through the bars, factories and complex streets of Tijuana and Otay, haunted by the femicides that have spread westward from Juarez, the reporters become more intimately entwined. Tracing the images they uncover, and those they cause and leave behind, they soon realize that every move they make is under surveillance. Beyond this, it seems their private lives and even their memories are being reconstructed by others.
Panopticon is a novel of dreamlike appearances and almost supernatural memories, a world of hidden watchers that evokes the dark recognition of just how little we can protect even our most private moments. It is a shadowy, erotic novel only slightly speculative that opens into the world we all now occupy.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published November 5, 2010
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98 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 31, 2020
On the California/Mexico border a newspaper is closing shop and three of their top reporters are given different assignments, that end up having eerie similarities. One involves a mysterious motel and a missing woman. This novel has a dream-like quality to it, involving a surveillance-minded society, where cameras document everything. There is also a connection to the “feminicide" in Ciudad, Juarez where scores of women have been murdered over the past 25-plus years. I should have loved this book. It's premise and style fit me perfectly but the trippy and unfocused, narrative kept me from fully locking in. It just missed the “mark”.
December 15, 2010
My review is not descriptive of the plot but hopefully a reflection of the thought that the author is trying to provoke through a clever entanglement of interelated stories involving the characters. If you want a book that causes you to think while you are reading and after you are reading, this is it. This is in the category of a complex read. The author develops a world of constant recording of images with video cameras everywhere including your laptops. Images and clips are recorded constantly and are readily found through multi-faceted search tools. YouTube to the extreme. Strangers are able to view your most private moments and know your life as well as you. Additionally, people are able to edit and recast these images and some do as a precoccupation in the book. Like dreaming,the world as it has been recorded becomes a different reality. Sorting out the factual memory from the dream memory from the edited imagery (virtual memory) leads to the complexity in the book. Just as dreams can sometimes seem so real, could we ever get to a point where edited video images could cause us to question our memory of past events. Today, people struggle with how much their privacy is being invaded by the written word in Facebook, Twitter and the like when many users don't even know to whom they are divulging information. With cams becoming prolific on laptops, cell phones, could our images and recordings become extremely easy to collect without our knowledge or permission?
Food for thought?
Food for thought?
October 1, 2011
I tried and I tried, but I just couldn't get through it. It seems like the author is a pretty good writer, but the plot was awful. I can't not recommend this book enough. It actually started out pretty good, but that was before the plot started up.
November 25, 2010
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/...
Cameras are Everywhere in David Bajo’s “Panopticon”
In this artful novel set on the California-Mexico border, a journalist chases several mysteries.
By Jenny Shank, 11-15-10
Panopticon
by David Bajo
Unbridled Books, 384 pages, $29.95
David Bajo’s arresting second novel Panopticon, set on the California-Mexico border, follows the journalist Aaron Klinsman as he chases three mysterious assignments during his last week on the job before the newspaper he works for is to print its final issue. Klinsman gets the first assignment from his managing editor, who has vanished, and heads to room 9 of the Motel San Ysidro, which he finds an empty except for bits of black electrician’s tape stuck in odd places, and the imprint of a woman on the bed. He hasn’t been told what exactly he’s supposed to investigate or report on in this room, so he leaves for his second assignment, covering an event put on by a group of masked Luchadors—Mexican Lucha Libre wrestlers.
The newspaper’s photographer, Rita Valdez, meets Klinsman at the Luchador event and then accompanies him to the mysterious hotel room to shoot pictures of the woman’s imprint. After their work is done, Valdez and Klinsman put the hotel room to further use. They had been close coworkers for years, but didn’t have sex until this night, one week before Rita is to move to Mexico to begin a new photography job. “Seven days is right for us,” she tells Klinsman.
Meanwhile, their coworker, Oscar Medem, continues to report on the murders of hundreds of young women in Juárez—disappearances echoed by the mystery woman’s imprint on the hotel bed—and to look after his son Artie, whose mother no one has met. Oscar is principled, talented, and brave. He is passionate about his story, telling Klinsman:
“Over the last fifteen years over four hundred women have been murdered in Juárez. Anyone who cares just a little knows this. Apparently it’s an acceptable number for us to go about our days, buying shirts and bagel toasters. But what’s getting lost in all the cries and stomping about drug armies doing the killing, about a violent society that allows femicide, is the fact that two men—known men—have killed at least a hundred and thirty-seven young women and girls for blood sport. Who knows how many more they’ve buried. They get to hide inside the mass of hate and murder they inspire.”
Klinsman, stricken by severe insomnia as he chases his assignments, draws dreamy sketches in his notebook of figures from borderland myth. But as Oscar’s story demonstrates, there are forces at work along the border that are much more terrifying and lethal than any chupacabra.
The stories these journalists are chasing end up being connected, and Klinsman begins to unravel how when he figures out that the electrical tape in the hotel room was applied to conceal the cameras that are hidden everywhere, capturing Klinsman as he goes about his life. But no amount of tape can hide all the cameras. As Rita says at one point, “I think everything you and I do for the rest of our lives can be viewed by anyone who wants to or happens to watch. Any way they want.”
One of Bajo’s most ingenious creations in this abundantly clever book are the young men throughout the city that Rita calls salamandros—because they spend so much time at home in the dark in front of their computer screens that their skin is pale like a salamander’s. These mandros watch the video footage collected by the ubiquitous cameras, and compose dream-like movies out of the events of other people’s lives. The fact that the newspaper Klinsman works for is shutting down is an apt symbol of a society that is evolving from words as its primary means of communication toward images, what the mandros trade in.
All of Panopticon‘s characters are fascinating, but Rita Valdez is especially so, a smart, uncompromising, sexy photographer who always finds a way to “control the light.” Once she goes to Mexico, and Klinsman observes her through video footage, he thinks, “She already looked so different down there. Not chola. She looked like someone to be reckoned with on another level, a much higher level. If she took your picture you would feel it like a punch, and the reel from it would convince you that you were flying outward, spreading outward. She still carried her cameras and bag on her hip, slung with a gunfighter’s pride.”
Panopticon moves forward with the logic of a dream or myth, which could be annoying or disorienting if a lesser writer attempted it, but Bajo works with masterful confidence in this mode, grounding his characters with enough vivid detail about their lives that they never feel like anything less than real, sympathetic people, no matter how surreal the events of the book become. Bajo’s crystalline, precise prose also keeps the sometimes-bizarre plot from losing the reader along the way.
With Panopticon, Bajo has constructed a story that addresses a range of thorny contemporary issues—such as the relentless killings of young women in Juárez, the increasing use of cameras to capture people’s public and private lives, with and without their consent, and young people who live their lives through their devices—without the book ever becoming a lecture on these topics. As journalists who dare to write about the almost surreal violence taking place around the Mexican border continue to be murdered, the characters Bajo portrays—the last reporters standing after downsizing, layoffs, and newspaper bankruptcies, who continue to report on a story even though it endangers them—become like a band of avenging folk heroes. Panopticon converts the wonderful and horrible particulars of life near the border into a remarkable story and a true work of art.
Cameras are Everywhere in David Bajo’s “Panopticon”
In this artful novel set on the California-Mexico border, a journalist chases several mysteries.
By Jenny Shank, 11-15-10
Panopticon
by David Bajo
Unbridled Books, 384 pages, $29.95
David Bajo’s arresting second novel Panopticon, set on the California-Mexico border, follows the journalist Aaron Klinsman as he chases three mysterious assignments during his last week on the job before the newspaper he works for is to print its final issue. Klinsman gets the first assignment from his managing editor, who has vanished, and heads to room 9 of the Motel San Ysidro, which he finds an empty except for bits of black electrician’s tape stuck in odd places, and the imprint of a woman on the bed. He hasn’t been told what exactly he’s supposed to investigate or report on in this room, so he leaves for his second assignment, covering an event put on by a group of masked Luchadors—Mexican Lucha Libre wrestlers.
The newspaper’s photographer, Rita Valdez, meets Klinsman at the Luchador event and then accompanies him to the mysterious hotel room to shoot pictures of the woman’s imprint. After their work is done, Valdez and Klinsman put the hotel room to further use. They had been close coworkers for years, but didn’t have sex until this night, one week before Rita is to move to Mexico to begin a new photography job. “Seven days is right for us,” she tells Klinsman.
Meanwhile, their coworker, Oscar Medem, continues to report on the murders of hundreds of young women in Juárez—disappearances echoed by the mystery woman’s imprint on the hotel bed—and to look after his son Artie, whose mother no one has met. Oscar is principled, talented, and brave. He is passionate about his story, telling Klinsman:
“Over the last fifteen years over four hundred women have been murdered in Juárez. Anyone who cares just a little knows this. Apparently it’s an acceptable number for us to go about our days, buying shirts and bagel toasters. But what’s getting lost in all the cries and stomping about drug armies doing the killing, about a violent society that allows femicide, is the fact that two men—known men—have killed at least a hundred and thirty-seven young women and girls for blood sport. Who knows how many more they’ve buried. They get to hide inside the mass of hate and murder they inspire.”
Klinsman, stricken by severe insomnia as he chases his assignments, draws dreamy sketches in his notebook of figures from borderland myth. But as Oscar’s story demonstrates, there are forces at work along the border that are much more terrifying and lethal than any chupacabra.
The stories these journalists are chasing end up being connected, and Klinsman begins to unravel how when he figures out that the electrical tape in the hotel room was applied to conceal the cameras that are hidden everywhere, capturing Klinsman as he goes about his life. But no amount of tape can hide all the cameras. As Rita says at one point, “I think everything you and I do for the rest of our lives can be viewed by anyone who wants to or happens to watch. Any way they want.”
One of Bajo’s most ingenious creations in this abundantly clever book are the young men throughout the city that Rita calls salamandros—because they spend so much time at home in the dark in front of their computer screens that their skin is pale like a salamander’s. These mandros watch the video footage collected by the ubiquitous cameras, and compose dream-like movies out of the events of other people’s lives. The fact that the newspaper Klinsman works for is shutting down is an apt symbol of a society that is evolving from words as its primary means of communication toward images, what the mandros trade in.
All of Panopticon‘s characters are fascinating, but Rita Valdez is especially so, a smart, uncompromising, sexy photographer who always finds a way to “control the light.” Once she goes to Mexico, and Klinsman observes her through video footage, he thinks, “She already looked so different down there. Not chola. She looked like someone to be reckoned with on another level, a much higher level. If she took your picture you would feel it like a punch, and the reel from it would convince you that you were flying outward, spreading outward. She still carried her cameras and bag on her hip, slung with a gunfighter’s pride.”
Panopticon moves forward with the logic of a dream or myth, which could be annoying or disorienting if a lesser writer attempted it, but Bajo works with masterful confidence in this mode, grounding his characters with enough vivid detail about their lives that they never feel like anything less than real, sympathetic people, no matter how surreal the events of the book become. Bajo’s crystalline, precise prose also keeps the sometimes-bizarre plot from losing the reader along the way.
With Panopticon, Bajo has constructed a story that addresses a range of thorny contemporary issues—such as the relentless killings of young women in Juárez, the increasing use of cameras to capture people’s public and private lives, with and without their consent, and young people who live their lives through their devices—without the book ever becoming a lecture on these topics. As journalists who dare to write about the almost surreal violence taking place around the Mexican border continue to be murdered, the characters Bajo portrays—the last reporters standing after downsizing, layoffs, and newspaper bankruptcies, who continue to report on a story even though it endangers them—become like a band of avenging folk heroes. Panopticon converts the wonderful and horrible particulars of life near the border into a remarkable story and a true work of art.
October 21, 2010
I ordered this book because I had read and enjoyed the author's first novel. This one was completely different (well, maybe not completely). I wound up loving it, but for different reasons. This one was intellectually engaging like the first one but read more quickly. I suppose it's more streamlined in its plotting, though it never felt hurried either. I enjoyed the landscape, mostly San Diego and the area south of the city near the Mexican border, and I was drawn in by the unusual characters, from the Luchador figure (masked Mexican wrestler) to the main character. At first Aaron Klinsman is kind of stony, or maybe just opaque, but he warms as you try to figure out what he is up to and the mystery he is investigating and how his past, present, and future connect. The story is set in a world that is real but shadowy and maybe slightly in the future, as if surveillance technology has taken not so much a quantitative step forward but a qualitative turn. Throughout the book, the idea of watching and being watched and knowing you are being watched (the panopticon) and of having even your inner life exposed comes into play. The overall effect is fascinating and eerie. Unlike a lot of literary mysteries, the book actually explains the mystery it starts with. It's not what you expect, but it works really well. (I don't want to give it away, so I'll just say that it's smart without being merely clever.) That's not to say that the book is meant to be a mystery, but there are mysteries to the plot and the book doesn't just leave the reader hanging or drop off the deep end like some literary novels that pose as mysteries. Ultimately this novel is rich and satisfying but unsettling. (What kind of privacy can there be in a world where everything can be seen? Does this change how we see our own lives/) I think this is a book that both men and women can enjoy, largely because of the full cast of characters around Klinsman. Rita and Oscar are particularly vivid and, like the main character, become more intriguing as you read on. This novel has definitely changed the way I think about sitting in front of an open window or walking by a surveillance camera in a public place.
October 22, 2010
I got this book for free.
“Panopticon” by David Bajo is a fictional book which tells the story of three journalists who are sent to cover one final story before their newspaper closes. The setting is on the California / Mexico border and takes place the near future where every move you make is being recorded by public cameras
Reporter Aaron Klinsman goes on assignment with his friend / lover / photographer Rita Valdez to an abandon motel where there is a woman’s body imprinted on the bed sheets. The motel room is strangely decorated with towels over the mirrors and black tape covering the doorknobs. Together with their newspaper colleague Oscar Medem they are trying to uncover the mystery.
What the three friends discover accidentally is that someone is taking images fr om the public cameras and make movies “vidas” which they star in. Complete with a jazzy soundtrack and a storyline. As it turns out, there is a whole subculture built around vidas which is being unfolded as the story moves along.
At first I didn’t know what to think about this book, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. I will not say it was an easy read, it wasn’t. I had to go back and re-read several passages or paragraphs to make sure I understood where the story was going to – but I’m glad I did.
The central idea of video being spliced from public cameras, using one person as a central figure without their knowledge, is a very interesting concept, which I can certainly see happening. The book is peppered with Spanish words, but the reader is able to figure them out from the context, or they are explained a few paragraphs down the page.
In “Panopticon” the author gets the eerie, dreamlike feeling across very well. The book is well written, there is not a word out of place. The book reads almost like one of those nightmares where you want to wake up but you cannot. The reader must read this book carefully, as it is a tight woven narrative where one could easily get lost.
For more book reviews please visit http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
“Panopticon” by David Bajo is a fictional book which tells the story of three journalists who are sent to cover one final story before their newspaper closes. The setting is on the California / Mexico border and takes place the near future where every move you make is being recorded by public cameras
Reporter Aaron Klinsman goes on assignment with his friend / lover / photographer Rita Valdez to an abandon motel where there is a woman’s body imprinted on the bed sheets. The motel room is strangely decorated with towels over the mirrors and black tape covering the doorknobs. Together with their newspaper colleague Oscar Medem they are trying to uncover the mystery.
What the three friends discover accidentally is that someone is taking images fr om the public cameras and make movies “vidas” which they star in. Complete with a jazzy soundtrack and a storyline. As it turns out, there is a whole subculture built around vidas which is being unfolded as the story moves along.
At first I didn’t know what to think about this book, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. I will not say it was an easy read, it wasn’t. I had to go back and re-read several passages or paragraphs to make sure I understood where the story was going to – but I’m glad I did.
The central idea of video being spliced from public cameras, using one person as a central figure without their knowledge, is a very interesting concept, which I can certainly see happening. The book is peppered with Spanish words, but the reader is able to figure them out from the context, or they are explained a few paragraphs down the page.
In “Panopticon” the author gets the eerie, dreamlike feeling across very well. The book is well written, there is not a word out of place. The book reads almost like one of those nightmares where you want to wake up but you cannot. The reader must read this book carefully, as it is a tight woven narrative where one could easily get lost.
For more book reviews please visit http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
October 23, 2010
With their newspaper folding in a couple of days the managing, Gina, has three of the reporters return to stories that they have reported on before, and once Gina gives the assignment she sort of vanishes.
Reporter Aaron Klinsman goes to an empty motel where the outline of a womans body is imprinted on the bed sheets along with black tape strips placed in various places aournd the room, making it almost look like a crime scene, unsure what to make of it he has a photographer, Rita Valdez, who works for the same paper go back to the motel with him, she takes several pictures but still neither are sure what it means. They soon draw another reporter in with them, and with time being of the essence because the motel is slated to be torn down will the trio be able to figure out whether it is actually a staged crime scene or something else.
There have been numerous femacides that have taken place for years and they wonder if the motel room may somehow tie into that, finding several clues but not sure how it ties together, will they be able to figure it out?
Panopticon talked alot about how cameras are everywhere, how with modern technology we are captured on film more that we even know, which is really creepy when you think about it.
This book was really slow to start for me, almost feeling like the story was sort of disconnected but it soon starts falling into place and became a book that held my attention. The same thing happened with the characters the more I read the more I liked them, I think Aaron's character was my favorite, surviving a snakebite that most people die from and then dealing with insomnia most of his life made me really sympathize with him.
I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a book that really gets into your head, and makes you work for the story.
Thanks to Unbridled books for providing me a reveiw copy, the opinions expressed are my own.
Reporter Aaron Klinsman goes to an empty motel where the outline of a womans body is imprinted on the bed sheets along with black tape strips placed in various places aournd the room, making it almost look like a crime scene, unsure what to make of it he has a photographer, Rita Valdez, who works for the same paper go back to the motel with him, she takes several pictures but still neither are sure what it means. They soon draw another reporter in with them, and with time being of the essence because the motel is slated to be torn down will the trio be able to figure out whether it is actually a staged crime scene or something else.
There have been numerous femacides that have taken place for years and they wonder if the motel room may somehow tie into that, finding several clues but not sure how it ties together, will they be able to figure it out?
Panopticon talked alot about how cameras are everywhere, how with modern technology we are captured on film more that we even know, which is really creepy when you think about it.
This book was really slow to start for me, almost feeling like the story was sort of disconnected but it soon starts falling into place and became a book that held my attention. The same thing happened with the characters the more I read the more I liked them, I think Aaron's character was my favorite, surviving a snakebite that most people die from and then dealing with insomnia most of his life made me really sympathize with him.
I would recommend this book to anyone who loves a book that really gets into your head, and makes you work for the story.
Thanks to Unbridled books for providing me a reveiw copy, the opinions expressed are my own.
March 14, 2015
I have no idea what this book is about. Okay, I'm exaggerating...sorta. I know what the plot is. It just felt like like it was skipping large amounts of details, and I couldn't understand how it got from one scenario to the next without offering an explanation of why they arrived at that conclusion. In full disclosure, if someone else said that about a book, I would assume they were an idiot who couldn't comprehend the English language, whether or not I even read it. But I assure you I'm quite good with reading/writing comprehension. While I am glad my time reading this book is over, I will continue to read whatever David Bajo wants to throw at me, due to the fact that his previous novel The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri is a great f-ing book. I also learned a new word that I hope to incorporate into my vocabulary as much as possible, which is chingadero. A Spanish speaking friend advises me it means motherfucker. So it was worth it for that anyway!
December 26, 2010
To view the full review go to my blog The Well-Read Wife.
Regular readers will remember that I recently reviewed another Unbridled Books title, the excellent Safe From The Sea by Peter Geye. Now I am finding myself singing the praises of yet another Unbridled Books title, Panopticon by David Bajo. Bajo’s novel about violence and voyeurism in the California borderlands at times evokes Cormac McCarthy’s tale of Texan border violence in No Country For Old Men. At other times however…there is nothing else that can possibly compare to it. The story is so innovative, original and complicated that I have a hard time even explaining the plot to my friends. But I keep trying to because I liked the book THAT MUCH.
Regular readers will remember that I recently reviewed another Unbridled Books title, the excellent Safe From The Sea by Peter Geye. Now I am finding myself singing the praises of yet another Unbridled Books title, Panopticon by David Bajo. Bajo’s novel about violence and voyeurism in the California borderlands at times evokes Cormac McCarthy’s tale of Texan border violence in No Country For Old Men. At other times however…there is nothing else that can possibly compare to it. The story is so innovative, original and complicated that I have a hard time even explaining the plot to my friends. But I keep trying to because I liked the book THAT MUCH.
June 6, 2011
A book most definitely of these times, yet managing to stay rooted in mysticism, which makes it both scarier and more hopeful. The characters are ordinary and extraordinary people (that's how it is, right?), embroiled in life and searching for meaning, and demonstrating the malleabililty of both reality and history. The book has a dreamlike quality, and reading it left me with that delicious full feeling I get after a good dream, satisfied by the experience, although not quite at peace with the remnants that remain in the conscious, like pebbles in the moccasin of my mind.
Read
August 25, 2013David Bajo's Panopticon positions itself in the dream space between the sharp and the hazy. It's the perfect spot for a borderlands novel that wants to pull apart reality and see what it really means in an age where we're always performing, whether we know it or not. Identity, technology, love, and lust are all at play in interesting ways.
February 23, 2011
Found this book hard to read, the story sounded interesting but something about it didn't flow with me. I never could get interested in the story. To bad i was looking forward to the San Diego setting.
January 27, 2012
Overall, this just wasn't my type of book. As such, I don't have much to say on it other than I found the story to be too hard to follow and the writing style not engaging. I'm sure others might find the story interesting, but I just couldn't get into it.
November 15, 2010
This is a complicated story that weaves border history, longing, violence, and technology into what feels at time as the main character's waking dream life.
July 9, 2011
Gauzy and ethereal, at times hard to follow. Beautiful imagery.
July 16, 2011
A luminous border dream, a meditation on mediation and memory. A bit too ethereal for my taste, as the plot ran off the ranch a few times. But, lovely language and imagery. Stellar styling.
April 6, 2014
Interesting idea. Some really good writing, but could have been edited down maybe 100 pages.
Read
February 19, 2015Eerie. Surprisingly unalarming.
May 7, 2011
Here is my review: http://cms.colum.edu/thereviewlab/201...
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews