The Meaning of Names and Masks

This thread follows characters who rename, conceal, or lose themselves, showing how identity in the novel is unstable and often shaped by power.

increasingBearing stren­gth in each eventdecreasing

Hans Reiter Becomes Archimboldi

A Name for Safety The Publisher’s Question Mr. Bubis challenges the name Benno von Archimboldi, asking for the writer’s real name. Reiter answers that the name is his, though the exchange exposes how constructed it is. A New Public Identity The pseudonym offers concealment and a literary persona. It does not erase Hans Reiter, but it makes the writer’s life harder for others to locate.

A Name That Carries History

Identity as Inheritance The Family Name Amalfitano studies the invented histories in O’Higgins Is Araucanian and begins to question the names and origins attached to national identity. A name may preserve history or fabricate it. Naming and Power The novel places official names, nicknames, and pseudonyms beside lives that institutions cannot properly record. Identity appears less like a fixed fact than a contested account.

The Detective’s Many Faces

Aliases in the City False Names Suspects, informers, workers, and criminals circulate under nicknames or uncertain identities. Police records often fail to establish who people are or where they have gone. Erasure The nameless victims and missing witnesses reveal how anonymity protects powerful people while swallowing the poor. Naming becomes both an investigative tool and a political act.

A Reporter’s Disappearance

The Missing Journalist An Unfinished Profile Josué Hernández Mercado disappears after reporting on Haas and the women’s murders. His colleagues cannot establish whether he fled, was killed, or simply vanished from their reach. The Reporter Becomes a Subject Mary-Sue Bravo tries to investigate his absence, but the facts remain thin. The person who records other people’s disappearances becomes another missing person in the story.

A Face Without a Name

The Unidentified Dead Bodies Without Records Many women are found without documents or relatives who can claim them. Their descriptions and photographs circulate briefly, then their cases disappear into files and public graves. The Limits of Recognition Even when a victim is identified, her life often remains reduced to a job, an address, or a suspected boyfriend. The novel treats anonymity as an outcome of social neglect, not merely a lack of clues.

After Reiter returns to Cologne from the war

During Amalfitano’s reflections in Santa Teresa

1994–1997, during the Santa Teresa investigations

1997, after the prison press conference

Throughout the recorded murder cases, especially 1993–1997