A challenging, complex story in current New Yorker:: Sevastopol

Short story in current New Yorker - Sevastopol, by Brzilian writer Emilio Fariai (his first in the NYer?) - is in the 2nd-wave Latin American tradition of Bolano et al., a somewhat challenging work focused on the arts rather than on politics or family or history; it's narrated by a 20-somethng woman (a bit unusual there - you don't find too many successful works by men written in the voice of a woman narrator) recenlty out of college and hoping for some kind of career in the arts. She is befriended by a 60-something theater director, at one time well known or at least a promising new talent but at this point obviously way beyond his prime: drug and alcohol soaked, working for nothing but the hope of box-office fees, writing a play that, it's obvious to all readers (though not to the narrator) that will surely flop. The narrator, taken on as an assistant by the director, is at work on a story, which she summarizes and which goes through three permutations (complete re-writes in fact) over the course of this story. It's somewhat difficult to pick up on a theme in the midst of these strands, but here goes: The director is developing play based on a (fictional) 19th-century artist who is working on depicting a battleground - though he does not (unlike, say, the U.S. Civil War photographers) go to the scene; rather, he re-creates the work from his imagination, in studio. There is a sense that the playwright, too, has avoided the battles and trauma of his continent in his experimental, and failed, theater exercises. As to the narrator's story, the one threat tying the 3 "versions" together is the opening moment of the story - a woman peering down from a tower or tall apartment building on a man who is waiting down on the street level with some kind of message for her (in one version they are lovers, in another she doesn't know him at all, and so forth) - so, again, there's a theme of the narrator being removed from the story, the family, the locale that she is trying to capture in her writing. In a sense, this is a story, then, about the disengaged, about the failure of art in abstraction, about dead ends: the playwright has reached his dead end, and, as he breaks from the young author, there's a hope that she will, on her own, find her voice and direction. (The title has little directly to do w/ the story line - but the story opens as a narrator receives a post card from the playwright, w/ a picture of Sevastopol on the face side and on the obverse a note that they have lots of work ahead of them: Yes, they do, but not together and not about someplace far away.)