Open novels, and the sense of an ending: My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing...

In third section of Patricio Pron's novel My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain, narrator begins to ponder why his father saved all these records about and got so involved in the search for the missing man in remote village - we know that the guy was murdered so that some thugs could collect money the Argentine government paid him in compensation for the disappearance and death 25 years back of his activist sister. We now begin to learn - as the narrator learns - that his father drew the sister into the leftist movement, that eventually led to her kidnapping and death- so he is expiating some of his guilt. But it doesn't explain why the father did not get involved with this man's life sooner, or why the intense almost obsessive interest in the case - or even why the son is so interested. But he does tell us it's his way of coming to understand his father - he is a very strange narrator and strange personality who approaches everything by indirection. The novel is very notable for its almost complete lack of dialogue and "scenes" among characters in the typical sense - it is composed entirely of fragments of thoughts (narrator's) and of found documents (collected by father). Narrator says some very wise things about writing and literature; he knows that the father seems to be trying to break away from his profession, journalism, and to take on the challenge of writing a novel, but as he notes it cannot in any way be a "mystery" novel - even though we can see how the many fragments could be composed into a mystery. But the narrator rightly says that mystery novels put reality into a frame and a reassuring context: crimes happen, they are solved, and everything's ok in the end, in the novel, and thus, we are led to believe, in life. But he - and his father - know that in life events never completely wrap up, that not all mysteries are solved, that life is ambiguous and messy and full of guilt and of unspent emotions. Novels have a "sense of an ending," which makes them in that way different from life. This novel takes on the challenge of being more "like life" (not lifelike), so it intentionally is presented in fragments, with many missing pieces and ellipses. In this sense, I think Pron will not be able to resolve all the strands of the novel, but the open-endedness of this novel points perhaps to a more profound and intriguing design - a novel as unresolved as life.