The Elegance of the Bonsai

The Private Lives of Trees
By Alejandro Zambra
Translated by Megan McDowell
98 pages
Open Letter Press
July 20, 2010





When someone doesn't come home in a novel, Julián thinks, it's because something bad has happened. But this is not, fortunately, a novel: in just a few minutes Verónica will arrive with a real story, with a reasonable excuse that justifies her lateness, and then we will talk about her drawing class, about the little girl, about my book, the fish, the need to buy a cell phone, a piece of casserole that's left in the oven, about the future, and maybe a little, also, about the past.

Alejandro Zambra, born in 1975, has been acclaimed by his fellow Chileans as one of the greatest writers of his generation. He is also a poet, critic, and professor of literature at Diego Portales University in Santiago. The Private Lives of Trees (La vida privada de los árboles) is his second novel, following the widely celebrated Bonsái.

Julián is a university professor who dreams of becoming a writer. After several years' labor his novel of a man tending his bonsai has been pared and pruned from 300 pages to a mere 47, leaving him to wonder if what he has created is art or just a sheaf of paper. At present, however, Julián is giving his stepdaughter Daniela another installment of their improvised bedtime story about two trees in a park that are best friends. And his wife Verónica still hasn't come home from her art class. As Daniela sleeps, Julián will wait through the night, thinking about the history of his relationship with Verónica, the story of himself and ex-girlfriend Karla, and of Daniela's future without her mother.

Both of Alejandro Zambra's novels begin with the image of the bonsai, a tiny tree grown in a container and carefully cultivated to a certain shape and size. Says Zambra,

At one point, Chile was full of bonsais. I don’t know if I liked them, but they had rare beauty, this fragility. . . . At first, the only thing I had in mind was the image of someone who had a bonsai, took care of it, wanted it to have a certain form, and understood that it was a true work of art because it could die.

Human bonds are vulnerable as well, must be nourished over time, and always head towards an inevitable end - either the death of one or by simple dissipation. "The book goes on even if it's closed," Julián muses, but this book will only end with Verónica's return. Other stories will sprout from this one, of course: Daniela (Julián imagines) will go to college, maybe for psychology, and maybe she will have a boyfriend named Ernesto whom she will take to the bridge where she once stood with her stepfather. The elegance of the bonsai is that of living art which grows and flourishes only briefly.

The disappearance of Verónica also recalls the hundreds of disappearances that occurred during Chile's recent military regime. Julián remembers quiet evenings with his parents as curfew fell. He was the only one of his classmates "who came from a family with no dead, and this discovery filled him with a strange bitterness: his friends had grown up reading the books that their dead parents or siblings had left in the house." As such, The Private Lives of Trees can also be read as an elegy for Pinochet's victims and a portrayal of the initial effects of loss on the victims' families. The frailty of the bonsai and Julián's transformation of reality into a story - a form of detachment - acquire an even more poignant note.

Macedonio Fernández, a fellow South American author, tried to understand the existence of love and beauty in the face of death. His novel didn't want to begin, knowing full well that something that begins has to eventually end. Alejandro Zambra, by contrast, has written novel that doesn't want to end even though the present seems frozen in worried suspense. As the publisher's copy recommends, The Private Lives of Trees is best read in a single sitting so that reader's experience is analogous to that of Julián. We wait too, and move through the night with him, wondering what has happened to Verónica.

But what is with that ugly cover?!

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The one thing even the best of recordings on the best of sound systems lacked—all that movement. The weave of the baton, the stroke of the bow, fingers blurring on glittering brass. A symphony was a life lived in exaltation and killed with triumph. Eternity made the best of music monotonous, the best of lives meaningless. The performance was made wondrous by the fact that it would end. - Eugene Woodbury

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Review Copy

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"watching a parade of monsters go by"

"The historian's view is conditioned, always and everywhere, by his own location in time and space; and since time and space are continually changing, no history, in the subjective sense of the word, can ever be a permanent record that will tell a story, once and for all, in a form that will be equally acceptable to readers in all ages, or even in all quarters of the Earth." Sibelius, of course, is animated by intentions of an entirely different nature. In the final analysis, the British professor's aim is to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist seems to believe that "somewhere in time and space" the crime in question has definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalog it.

Nazi Literature in the Americas, by the late great Roberto Bolaño and translated by Chris Andrews, is a work of fiction though not a novel. It is a satiric encyclopedia detailing the lives of thirty-one imaginary writers of the right from the United States and Latin America, particularly Argentina and Chile. In a 2007 interview with The New York Review of Books, Bolaño stated that he was actually talking about the left as well and about the whole suspect enterprise of literature in general.

Nazis and their acolytes may be ridiculously easy to caricature (i.e. Downfall parodies and The Producers), but Bolaño resists the urge and instead describes thirty-one nuanced and somewhat sympathetic men and women devoted to their craft even in the face of ridicule and obscurity. Their works are sonnets, epic poems, experimental prose, conventional novels, science fiction, and literature as performance/conceptual art. Many sound quite interesting, despite the author's highly questionable political leanings. Bolaño seems to be challenging the reader here, asking us to consider whether or not art can still be appreciated and acclaimed as such, even when it promotes destructive or hateful ideas. According to Stacy D'Erasmo in the New York Times, Bolaño saw literary culture as, ultimately, "a whore."

In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. . . But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella “By Night in Chile,” that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it’s a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings.

Chile's Willy Schürholz (who died in Kampala, Uganda in 2029), for example, composed highly avant-garde poetry involving sentence fragments and topographical maps. His exhibit at a local university is revealed, belatedly, to consist of the layouts of several infamous Nazi death camps accompanied by instructions for their reassembly in Chile. Schürholz's friends insist that it's actually a critique of Pinochet's regime, although his later output indicates otherwise. So how are we to approach something like this? Bolaño wants to know. Do we censure it or recognize Schürholz's creativity or both? At what point does content overshadow form or expression?

You can also apply these questions to older works of literature that may be beautifully written but which also promote beliefs that are now condemned. Chinua Achebe wants Heart of Darkness ejected from the canon for its racism. I definitely see his point, but it's one of my favorite books! Conrad was a product of his time just like everyone else is! So which of us, me or Achebe, has the stronger position?

Bolaño also takes us deeper into his fictional universe, as previously visited in 2666, The Savage Detectives, and Antwerp. In addition to a reference to Eugenio Entrescu, who was murdered by his own men in "The Part About Archimboldi," there is that enigmatic darkness that permeates even the buoyancy of The Savage Detectives. Bolaño was a fan of Georges Perec (who is also referenced in Nazi Literature), and his narratives often take the form of lists, similar to those that characterize Life: A User's Manual. In 2666, nearly the entire "Part About the Crimes" is a litany of dead bodies, while the center part of Detectives is one first-person account after another from dozens of individuals all over the world. Nazi Literature is much closer to Perec in this respect.

His characters are usually based on figures from the Civil War and sometimes even bear their names . . . ; the action unfolds in a distorted present where nothing is as it seems, or in a distant future full of abandoned, ruined cities, and ominously silent landscapes, similar in many respects to those of the Midwest. His plots abound in providential heroes and mad scientists; hidden clans and tribes which at the ordained time must emerge and do battle with other hidden tribes; secret societies of men in black who meet at isolated ranches on the prairie; private detectives who must search for people lost on other planets; children stolen and raised by inferior races so that, having reached adulthood, they may take control of the tribe and lead it to immolation; unseen animals with insatiable appetites; mutant plants; invisible planets that suddenly become visible; teenage girls offered as human sacrifices; cities of ice with a single inhabitant; cowboys visited by angels; mass migrations destroying everything in their path; underground labyrinths swarming with warrior-monks; plots to assassinate the president of the United States; spaceships fleeing an earth in flames to colonize Jupiter; societies of telepathic killers; children growing up all alone in dark, cold yards.

(And don't you just want to read some of those stories, even though it's been established that J.M.S. Hill admired Hitler and that shows up in his work?) Both Perec and Bolaño reveal a vast knowledge of myriad disparate subjects, which gives Life and Nazi Literature a real density and a broader range than initially expected.

I found Nazi Literature in the Americas to be a quick read and an amusing one despite its subject matter. "Halfway there she crashed into a gas station," one entry concludes. "The explosion was considerable." Much as I hate to say it, this book about neo-Nazis was a lot of fun and reflected a side of Bolaño I hadn't seen before. Recommended for anyone who likes intelligent and creative snark.

Click here for Richard's review and here for another great review.

Stray Sentences

Antwerp
By Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
78 pages
New Directions
April 30, 2010





All I can come up with are stray sentences, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences. Desolation must be something like that, said the hunchback. "All right, take him away" ...

Roberto Bolaño wrote Antwerp some twenty-five years ago during the Barcelona phase of his global wanderings (as fictionalized in The Savage Detectives). In the preface, he explains that he wrote Antwerp for himself as a collection of loose pages that he would play around with and reread from time to time. He finally decided to publish it in 2002, having previously felt that any publishing house would simply slam the door in his face.

At this stage in his life, Bolaño says he was still reading more poetry than prose. As such, Antwerp is best thought of as a series of loosely-connected prose poems. The setting is a dreamscape where odd little phrases and fleeting visions drift in and out of Barcelona's abandoned lots and empty houses. There are several references to a woman with no mouth or a whole corridor of them. Disembodied clapping is occasionally heard. Along with Bolaño's consistent use of the present tense, it is as though we are viewing either a slideshow or a disjointed film sequence.

"Reality is a drag." I suppose all the movies I've seen will be useless to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be useful, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies. Scenes of an empty commuter town, old newspapers blowing in the wind, dust crusted on benches and restaurants.

We glimpse a hunchback living in the woods, an ephemeral Englishman, fragments of the itinerant life, a campground, and a drug-dealing teen who fucks narcs. There's not much plot to speak of beyond several reappearing characters and references to a dead body and a detective looking for someone.

But there is still that sense that hidden forces are at work here, akin to what Bolaño would later expand upon in 2666. The gritty and violent sex scenes, the murder, allusions to homelessness and unemployment, and the looming presence of law enforcement clearly form a pattern, although what this means exactly is never developed. We are watching a drama unfold through a hazy screen and we're not quite sure what it is that we're seeing. Overall, Antwerp is an unusual, half-formed little book. Still, it has its appeal, especially to Bolaño fangirls like me who love his cryptic atmospheres. It is best read alongside The Savage Detectives and 2666, as the three works seem to compose a loose trilogy. According to Publisher's Weekly, Roberto Bolaño is apparently "doomed to have all of his scribblings published" (they didn't like this book) but that's just fine with me.

A big thanks to Frances for sending me this ARC as a surprise along with her extra copy of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo! I will be reading that next.

The Savage Bolaño

And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.





I have fallen in love Roberto Bolaño and he is dead. *weeps*

The Savage Detectives is my second Bolaño novel, following my participation in the 2666 read-along. It is a semi-autobiographical work, disguised as fiction, concerning the exploits of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, a wandering pair of ragamuffins who may be the last true poets on Earth. The sprawling narrative is book-ended by the adventures of a naive 17-year-old hanger-on in Mexico City in 1976; in between are hundreds of oral testimonies recalling the speakers' encounters with either Belano or Lima or both in Mexico, Spain, France, Austria, Israel, Morocco, and Liberia from 1976 to 1996. Beyond that, it a truly awesome story of literature, idealism, and life on the edge.

The Savage Detectives is regarded as one of the seminal works of contemporary Latin American literature. By the time of its publication in 1998, Latin American authors were divided between those indebted to the Boom generation of the 1960s - which produced an explosion of talent such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa - and those who rejected its influence. Bolaño fell in the latter camp. Many of the Boom writers depicted a region where the mythic past overlapped with the modern, oppressive present. Bolaño and his group, however, felt that García Márquez, et al were simply churning out exotic stereotypes - i.e. dictators, whores, magic - for foreign consumption. Furthermore, Latin America had changed. Democracy had taken root, along with globalization and the drug trade.

I find myself thinking of Isabel Allende, whose writing Bolaño described as "anemic" and compared to a person on their deathbed. It's been awhile since I've read her, but much as I've enjoyed her stuff, I can nevertheless see Bolaño's perspective. The House of the Spirits, written in the early '80s, comes across almost as a litany of Latin American tropes: the magic realism, the domineering patrón, the haciendas, the revolutionaries, the dictatorship. Same deal with the Eva Luna books. (Daughter of Fortune, meanwhile, was one of my examples of the "anachronistic feminism" found in many historical fiction novels.) After awhile Allende's novels all seem like variations of the same story. I'm not sure how representative she is of contemporary Latin American literature but I can discern a definite chasm between Allende, on the one hand, and Bolaño and Jorge Volpi, as post-Boom authors, on the other. Though much of Allende's fiction is concerned with politics and society, there is also that sense of whimsy that comes with magic realism - the quirky incorporation of paranormal tidbits into everyday life and the overall sense of detachment from reality.

(A question too big for me to answer: what role, if any, could gender play in this? Bolaño disparaged both Allende and Ángeles Mastretta, both of them famous for their strong female characters. Is it possible some of Bolaño's criticism of Allende comes from the more feminine themes of her works?)

Though Bolaño certainly can be said to take a "speculative" view of reality, his sense of the preternatural takes the form of conspiracy, of dark forces at work behind the scenes. 2666, says one review, "is another iteration of Bolaño’s increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes. There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book’s title, a date that is referred to in passing in The Savage Detectives as well)." Something I got from both Bolaño and Volpi's Season of Ash was a sense of humanity and our contradictory drives to both transcend and destroy. Whereas Volpi took a hardline realistic approach to his characters and their moment in twentieth-century history, Bolaño seems to suggest something intrinsic to society that eats it from within. 2666 is a big, black brick of a book. The Savage Detectives, though unmistakably Bolaño, is also something else.

Both The Savage Detectives and 2666 exhibit that undeniable element of the uncanny, although it's not so much "magical" or supernatural as it is atmospheric. "In it," says translator Natasha Wimmer of 2666, "the dread that flickers in Bolaño's earler fiction is concentrated, the essence made visible. If The Savage Detectives is a journey outward, then 2666 collapses in on itself." As Bolaño had been diagnosed with a fatal liver condition in 1992, both novels were written in the shadow of death. I don't know how he planned his works, but I saw 2666 as The Savage Detective's sequel. Lima and Belano's search for Cesárea Tinajero, a lost poet from the 1920s, and one of the few threads binding the overall work together, echoes the critics' search for the lost novelist Archimboldi. Lima and Belano even travel to Bolaño's fictional Santa Theresa (based on the real-life Ciudad Juarez) seeking her. A former acquaintance of Tinajero recalls her as a woman slowly going mad - not unlike Amalfitano - who offered a mysterious prophecy of "times to come" and the year 2600. Her cryptic drawings are even reminiscent of Amalfitano's weird little diagrams. And both works are international in scope, perhaps mimicking the recent forces of globalization whose seedy underside is explored in 2666.

At the same time, however, The Savage Detectives exhibits an exuberance and idealism utterly absent from 2666. Although, in typical Bolaño fashion, darkness and menace are very present, the work is also a celebration - of youth, freedom, creativity, nonconformity, of the bonds between strangers, and the passion for the written word. 2666 was like a punch in the face. The Savage Detectives, by contrast, feels like liberation, and an embrace of life in all its highs and lows. Comparing it to 2666, you wonder how much Bolaño's impending death clouded his viewpoint. "A vast pain is communicated, a blank-minded recognition of death, but nothing else," says one critical review of 2666. " . . . There is no doubt that in writing 2666 Bolaño was struggling mightily and bravely with that which is most terrifying. But his struggle was intensely personal - it was not artistic. The bleakness of Bolaño's vision radiates out, but so little understanding comes with it." I don't want to say 2666 is the more mature of the two books - in fact, its relentless focus on death, madness, and violence feels very one-sided when set against motley canvas of The Savage Detectives. But both novels do represent a development, of Bolaño as a writer and Bolaño as a human passing from health and independence to illness and its accompanying restrictions, and finally to death itself.

Being more familiar with Boom and Boom-style works - i.e. Allende, Vargas Llosa, Like Water for Chocolate - Bolaño, as well as Volpi, is definitely a departure from earlier literary styles. As evidenced by Allende, being stuck in one mode of representation really doesn't do the artist any good. It's been said before but I think it's worth repeating: the end of a life isn't always entirely tragic. Did Bolaño's health crisis ultimately lead him to a different perspective, albeit a darker one, as evidenced by 2666? What would Bolaño have written if he had lived?

I would've loved to know the answer to that. But, alas.



Click here for tuulehaiven's review.

2666: The Part About Archimboldi (continued)

Several days ago, I came out with a rather clumsy post (mostly written during my lunch break) comparing "The Part About Archimboldi" to a novel by Jakov Lind called Landscape in Concrete. Basically, it was one of those things where you have an intuitive grasp of a concept but you can't quite articulate said concept into a coherent argument. I'm not sure how much sense I made or how cohesive my post was.

What I was trying to do was interpret the relationship between life and art. Art is a uniquely human product. Even the most intelligent of animals, though they may be capable of using tools or feeling complex emotions, cannot think in abstract, symbolic, or creative terms. Dean Koontz expresses this thought very poignantly in his sci-fi/horror thriller Seize the Night, which deals with genetically engineered animals and a looming apocalypse. One night, the human protagonist spies a group of enhanced rhesus monkeys enacting what appears to be a primitive religious ritual, and subsequently finds himself ruminating on sentience and metaphysics:

I believe the monkeys are hostile toward humanity because we created them but did a half-assed job. We robbed them of their simple animal innocence, in which they were content. We raised their intelligence until they became aware of the wider world and of their place in it, but we didn't give them enough intelligence to make it possible for them to improve their lot. We made them just smart enough to be dissatisfied with the life of a monkey; we gave them the capacity to dream but didn't give them the means to fulfill their dreams. They have been evicted from their niche in the animal kingdom and cannot find a new place to fit in. Cut loose from the fabric of creation, they are unraveling, wandering, lost, full of a yearning that can never be mended. . .

. . . Perhaps this wasn't a game that I was witnessing, not play but ritual, a ceremony with symbolic significance that was clear to these rhesuses but was an impenetrable mystery to me. Ritual and symbol implied not only abstract thinking but raised the possibility that these monkeys' lives had a spiritual dimension, that they were not just smart but capable of brooding about the origin of all things and the purpose of their existence.

This idea disconcerted me so much that I almost turned away from the window.

In spite of their hostility toward humanity and their enthusiasm for violence, I had already felt sympathy for these pathetic creatures, was moved by their status as outcasts with no rightful place in nature. If they indeed possess the capacity to wonder about God and about the design of the cosmos, then they may know the exquisite pain that humanity knows too well: the yearning to understand why our Creator allows us to suffer so much, the terrible unfulfilled longing to find Him, to see His face, to touch Him, and to know that He is real. If they share this quiet but profound agony with us, then I sympathize with their plight, but I also pity them.

There's an idea that's been floating around for decades now about the relationship between myth and fiction. Narrative is how the human cognition organizes a world of contingency in a way that makes sense and can be engaged with. A group of humans perceives a meta-narrative that explains all things (basic spirituality), which is then further embellished by the human imagination, using a variety of surprisingly universal tropes.

Now on the one hand, such beliefs are a comfort when faced with the seemingly random nature of reality. (Why do bad things happen to good people?) But, when taken too far, myth (national, cultural, religious) becomes a bad conspiracy theory, which is a relatively modern variation of the meta-narrative that attempts to explain evil by whittling it down to the machinations of a singular, identifiable group (i.e. the Illuminati, the Freemasons, aliens, people in black helicopters, even the Jews - think The Protocols of Zion and Mein Kempf). There is an insidious "other" that opposes (a narrowly-defined) us and/or seeks to destroy us. It's a very paranoid, black-and-white worldview that is nevertheless reassuring in its easy categorization. Basically, you don't have to think too hard about complex issues.

That's part of what I was trying to get at with Wednesday's 2666 post. In comparing Archimboldi to Lind's Bachman - both of them German WWII veterans who witness atrocities - I discussed how Bachman is a dead end. He wants to believe in the Nazi myth and be faithful to the beloved Fatherland, but, as a result of this willful obedience, only finds himself being used, abused, and manipulated into becoming a monster. He wants something concrete (literally and figuratively) that he can faithfully rely on and hold onto. He does not want to have to process and try to comprehend the chaos of war and human society, and would quite frankly prefer that the entire hot mess be obliterated. It's an apocalyptic deathwish.

Archimboldi, as well as Roberto Bolaño himself, ends up doing the opposite. Archimboldi experienced the dark side of human nature and engaged it. He does not embrace the totalitarian mindset, as Bachman tried to. Archimboldi learns from individuals such as Ansky, a revolutionary bound to another totalitarian regime (Stalin's). He encounters war criminals and shell-shocked fellow veterans and the silent dead. In an overall genre-crossing novel, Archimboldi's tale is a bildungsroman, in which the protagonist grows into the sum of all his life, which he then translates into internationally renown prose. With 2666, Bolaño similarly tackles these sticky issues of hate, violence, sexuality, and misogyny. Obviously, we don't know what exactly Archimboldi wrote about (Bolaño only hints at it), but looking at 2666, my very first Bolaño novel, I get the sense of someone who wants to explore but not necessarily try to explain. He doesn't try to "solve" the Santa Theresa murders or any of the ancilliary questions of human brutality. He articulates. He exposes. But he doesn't try to offer us a resolution. Says Emily:

The whole of 2666 brings the world of reading and writing into contact with the world of violence, and it seems to me that they coexist, without negating each other. It doesn't seem to me that 2666 is asking "What is the point of art in such a fucked up world?" Often, this is the way the debate is framed, as if art must somehow overcome the world's darkness in order to validate itself. Bolaño, on the other hand, lets them exist simultaneously, each on its own terms.

That's what I'm try to get at as well, but I would also add that part of what distinguishes 2666 is that it just is. Bolaño, and maybe Archimboldi (if he is intended to be partially based on his creator), is the absolute polar opposite of Bachman. His (Bolaño's) narrative resists categorization (there really aren't any good guys), never attempts to prove any ideology or particular worldview, and never tries to offer any consolation or possible solution to the madness. It's a rather dangerous position - I think with that type of nihilism (for lack of a better word) you can potentially turn out like Dean Koontz's angry, intelligent rhesuses. I don't mean literally inclined to violence, but maybe feeling utterly hopeless in the face of an implacably amoral universe. But I also think there's a purpose to this type of dark-toned art. You really can't confront something without articulating it first. And you certainly can't ignore subjects like mass murder and social injustice.

(Somehow I don't think Mr. Koontz approves of Bolaño. In The Darkest Evening of the Year and The Face, he gets all worked up over novelists who don't write books that are ultimately uplifting and basically condemns them as closeted sociopaths. Dean, I love you, but please lay off the moralizing.)

But I don't mean to say that 2666 is just this bleak book that leaves the reader feeling totally down. There is also a lightness to Archimboldi's story that is not present in the rest of 2666. As Claire put it in her own analysis:

I felt a deep affinity for Archimboldi. His fierce and quiet love for Ingeberg made him more human amidst his supposed indifference, his seaweed-like nature of merely floating about life. A perfect depiction is the night in the village at the mountain when Ingeberg wandered out in the snow and Archimboldi, upon finding her, threw his arms around her. With her he appeared to have a hopeful energy, which we don't see before nor since. It's one of the more unforgettable scenes to me, when they were surrounded by the past, the night sky, of light cast by stars hundreds and thousands of years ago.

I had the same reaction. Out of everyone in 2666, Archimboldi is the only one who seems to feel genuine love for other human beings: Ingeberg, Lotte, and, to an extent, Mrs. Bubis. The critics all claimed to love each other, but there was that eerie wrongness to it that characterized most of the human relationships in 2666. (Both myself and Steph argued that Liz Norton seemed to function solely as the receptacle of the male critics' sexual release. Her character is also described as more emotional and less stable - unconscious sexism on Bolaño's part?) Amalfitano and Rosa felt like two detached people who just happened to live in the same house and share a genetic link. Rosa and Fate were more or less thrown together and didn't seem like they had any real permanency as a couple.

Archimboldi, the only character who ever creates anything (the critics can only critique), is also the only character who is truly sympathetic. Who doesn't come across as somehow innately corrupt. Who never articulates any belief system other than the written word, which he puts forth with such power that famous intellectuals swoon over him even though they know nothing about him. Maybe Bolaño is offering a nugget of hope - that true art cannot exist without some positive impetus. That love still exists even when it shouldn't. That love and creation are intertwined. That love is tangible even in a violent, contingent universe.

Bolaño never offers a solution or a way out. He never promises things will get better. But there is always hope.

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Also check out:
Book 1: The Part About the Critics
Book 2: The Part About Amalfitano
Book 3: The Part About Fate
Book 4: The Part About the Crimes

Other participants:
Claire at kiss a cloud
Emily at Evening All Afternoon
Jackie at Farm Lane Books Blog
Frances at Nonsuch Book
Gavin at Page247
Lu at Regular Rumination
Richard at Caravana de recuerdos

Also: here is an excellent review of 2666.

And now onto Kristin Lavransdatter! Did I spell it right?

2666: The Part About Archimboldi

"I steal into their dreams . . . I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their most unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion."

I wonder if any of my fellow 2666-ers have read a German-language novel by Jakov Lind, written in the early 1960s, called Landscape in Concrete. Lind was an Austrian-born Jew who survived World War II by hiding his identity and working as a personal courier for the German Institute for Metallurgical Research of the Imperial Air Ministry of Traffic. He then spent several years in Israel, eventually settled in Britain, and worked various odd jobs throughout his lifetime. Beyond that, we have very little information about Lind. He is known by three different names in the records of several long-dead regimes.

Landscape in Concrete is a dark comedy and picaresque concerning the misadventures of Gauthier Bachman, a big, dumb German soldier who wants only to obey and whose willful obedience leads him to behave in ways contrary to his nature. What constitutes a criminal act depends entirely on context. ("Herr Bachman, do I look like a monster? Does a monster look like me? . . . I'm a human being myself, and, as the poet said, nothing human is alien to me.") Words and meaning are confused and jumbled, a demonstration of the cognitive dissonance inherent to the act of war. Bachman craves something solid and concrete that he can believe in, wholly and without reservation because its truth would be so undeniable. He wants the riotous variegation of nature and society bombed over and smoothed into soothing shades of gray and neverending flatness.

I wonder if Roberto Bolaño ever read Lind. "The Part About Archimboldi," the final book of Bolaño's masterwork 2666, reminded me very much of Landscape in Concrete, down to Archimboldi's friend Mickey Bittner, who launches into a vivid description of a battlefield bombing that turns Normandy into a wasteland more reminscent of the moon:

When the bombers have finished pounding the designated piece of earth, not a single bird can be heard. In fact, not even in the neighboring areas where no bomb has fallen, to either side of the devastated divisions, does a single bird cry.

Then the enemy troops appear. For them, too, there is horror in forging into that steel-gray territory, smoking and pocked with craters. Every so often there rises up from the fiercely churned earth a German soldier with the eyes of a madman.

I saw Benno von Archimboldi, real name Hans Reiter (as established in "The Part About the Critics"), as a kind of foil for Bachman. Bachman tried to run away, from the moral confusion of the Third Reich to an obliterated landscape (internal and external) where nothing existed anymore. ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.")

Archimboldi, by contrast, eventually makes his way straight into the heart of darkness, Santa Theresa, that epicenter of every theme present in 2666: creativity, madness, liberation, social justice, death, drugs, sexuality, obsession, violence, and all of humanity's tangled messiness. But even before then, Archimboldi is established as someone innately tied to the natural human landscape. Everything he is as a novelist arose from his experiences as a German soldier in World War II and its aftermath. He did not attempt to deflect, like Bachman, what he learned of war and human nature. Archimboldi, longtime lover of the sea (a common theme in his books), is a sponge: he absorbs the papers of Ansky, the events he witnessed, the places he went, and the myriad people he became acquainted with, from Ingeborg and her Aztec stories to a haunted German war criminal. Archimboldi is a recluse, but he is also the sum of his lifetime, which he has translated into prose with the power to drive respected academics to search for him in a violent city on the other side of the world.

Bachman erred in his desire for a form of non-sentience: a bland, gray, unnatural death. I think the totalitarian mind can be seen as a simplified variation of the normal human mind - incapable of dealing with the complexity that comes full human cognition. (The term "fundamentalist," for example, refers to a religious fanatic who boils their faith down to bare, basic fundamentals.) All is either black or white; you are with us or you are against us. Bachman tried to shut down because he just couldn't sort things into two concrete categories. It goes without saying that great literature can never come out of such a mindset. Archimboldi, on the other hand, is the greatest presence in 2666 outside of that of Santa Theresa and the murders. He is a part of the enivronment, a part of the literary experience. Bolaño never tells us what Archimboldi wrote about, but I think it's quite clear what Archimboldi's sources are. Wallace Stevens once said that "death is the mother of beauty," which I've always seen as an expression of the artist's ability to transform horror into a dark but beautiful creative work (like 2666). Bachman is a dead end.

Am I making any sense or am I just rambling? I'll be adding more shortly (in another post). I'm still sorting this book out.

2666: The Part About the Crimes

As I learned about other cases, however, as I heard other voices, my rage began to assume what you might call mass stature, my rage, when it allowed itself to show, saw itself as the instrument of vengeance of thousands of victims. The voices I heard (voices, never faces or shapes) came from the desert. In the desert, I roamed with a knife in my hand. My face was reflected in the blade. I had white hair and sunken cheeks covered with tiny scars. Each scar was a little story that I tried and failed to recall.

Big Bang.

Kind of.

Emily said it best:

All along, I had assumed that the root of the wrongness, that intangible thing that was nightmarishly "off" in Santa Teresa, WAS the murders. I had subconsciously assumed that to see the crimes themselves would be to come face to face with the mysterious wrongness. . . The Part About the Crimes deconstructs this assumption in just about every way possible, and its first method is to remove the sense of mystery, of intangibility, as soon as the crimes are revealed. It's as if the reader has been walking down a long hallway, as Oscar does in The Part About Fate, with a mysterious, tinted light at the end of it. Perhaps there is some distorted music playing in the distance. The reader brushes away veils, distractions, grotesque strangers met in the corridor, and eventually reaches out her hand, pushing the door inward to reveal the mysterious contents of the room...and right at that moment, someone flicks on the switch. The light is no longer sickly green, but plain, everyday white. The occupants of the room are not a sinister pair of businessmen and a femme fatale, but a team of bored cops performing a routine investigation. One of the cops walks over and hits a button on a boom box, and the atmospheric music clicks off. Everything is factual, mundane, even tedious.

I was having major brain freeze. I couldn't think of what to say regarding "The Part About the Crimes" but Emily nailed it. The first three books of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 were dark in tone and oppressive in atmosphere, as though some immense force was being held back, only to burst forth in occasional sparks (racism, mental illness, the brutal beat-down of the obnoxious cab driver). It makes me think of back in elementary or middle school, when the teacher taught you about Gustav Freytag's theory on dramatic structure, known more commonly as simply "the parts of a story":

Exposition (setting the stage) → Rising Action → Climax → Falling Action → Resolution

Despite its connotations of something rushing quickly to a big, final bang, the "climax" does not occur at the end of the narrative but instead occurs when the rising action finally coalesces into something exciting/explosive/major/decisive. It is the culmination of everything that has emerged from the exposition to compose the rising action. It is the turning point in which sides are revealed and the Grand Battle is finally fought. It is often the most dramatic moment of the play, short story, or novel. It's like sex: attraction, arousal, climax, "coming down," afterglow. (Emily also had an interesting afternote on feminist literary theory and "male erotic practice" as the standard narrative form of detective fiction.)

So arguably, "The Part About the Crimes" is the climax. That repressed force darkening and influencing the overall work is finally brought to light. Body after murdered body. A veritable litany of raped, tortured, mutilated women. On and on and on. Previously, the characters had been reacting to a certain buzz in the air. Something off-kilter - rather like Thomas Glavinic's Night Work, in which Jonas, who had woken up to find himself the last man on earth, is hounded by mounting paranoia, finding an extra coat in his closet, an extra picture on the wall, and his shoes pointing toe-to-toe when he knows he didn't leave them like that last night.

Or in Faye Kellerman's Sanctuary, an actual crime/detective novel: Peter Decker, an LAPD homicide detective, walks into the silent, immaculate home of a missing family. He notices something decidedly off about the foyer. "The house was taking on the appearance of an Escher drawing - lots of steps leading nowhere." Then, after a moment of puzzling, he zooms in on the breakfront. Two figurines are displayed at what seems like an odd angle, different than how you'd expect most people to position them. A clue?

But enough with the hints. Now Bolaño's characters are dealing with something tangible. Something you can pin down and name: the mass murders of young, poor women in the Mexican border city of Santa Theresa.

Bolaño had had you following all these disparate characters, wondering what it all meany, where it was going to lead. If all this weird stuff would ever be explained or at least tied together. Violence was becoming increasingly overt. And yet . . . "The Part About the Crimes" reveals nothing that we haven't already been aware of. We knew there was something wrong in Santa Theresa. We already knew about the murders. "The Part About the Crimes" is simply more graphic and in-your-face than the rest of the 2666 has hitherto been. It says nothing about Archimboldi and only adds more mystery. Like, what's the deal with the black cars? (Are they like the American conspiracy theorist's beloved black helicopters?) Did that one missing woman really arrange orgies for druglords out in the desert? What's with the psychic? What about that sheriff from Arizona who went all vigilante deep in Mexico, searching for the missing American woman - what became of him? Is Haas guilty? Partially guilty?

Is he connected to Archimboldi or is it just coincidence that they're both German? Is Archimboldi guilty? What about Haas's info about the Uribe brothers? Does it all go back to them?

Bolaño's sure got a lot of wrapping-up to do for "The Part About Archimboldi."

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Also check out:
Book 1: The Part About the Critics
Book 2: The Part About Amalfitano
Book 3: The Part About Fate

Other participants:
Claire at kiss a cloud
Emily at Evening All Afternoon
Jackie at Farm Lane Books Blog
Frances at Nonsuch Book
Gavin at Page247
Lu at Regular Rumination
Richard at Caravana de recuerdos (and parte dos, parte tres, parte cuatro, parte cinco - this guy is awesome)

2666: The Part About Fate

"I don't know how to explain it. More alive than an apartment building, for example. Much more alive. Don't be shocked by what I'm about to say, but it looks like a woman who's been hacked to pieces. Who's been hacked to pieces but is still alive. And the prisoners are living inside this woman."

I remember there was one reader who wasn't crazy about "The Part About Amalfitano," the last book of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 we covered in the read-along. Steph felt that "Amalfitano" was thematically disjointed, as well as out of sync with "The Part About the Critics" (which preceded it). Overall, she said, "I didn't really get much out of it." I disagreed, having enjoyed both the intellectual puzzles and the general weirdness of it all. But after finishing "The Part About Fate" I find myself with the same basic reaction: that I just didn't get much out of it. Not saying I hated it - in fact, it was very good reading - but for some reason, it just didn't click with me. Ironically, in a Chilean-Mexican novel with an international cast of characters, "Fate" was the first book to feature an American: a cynical black journalist named Quincy "Fate" Williams, who, still mourning the recent death of his mother, has arrived in Santa Theresa to cover a boxing match only to find himself embroiled in something far bigger. Along the way, Bolaño continues to develop the themes of art, madness, and violence, while adding onto the interlocking mysteries of the reclusive German writer Archimboldi and the dead women of Santa Theresa, Mexico.

"The Part About the Fate" is definitely closer to "The Critics" in that it's very plot-driven, whereas "Amalfitano" was more of a meditation on art and madness. Like both, "Fate" is also pervaded with an overall sense of dust, desert, poverty (economic and spiritual), and violence (physical and psychological). There is obviously some force building up, as there was throughout 2666, but what it is and what it's building up to is unclear. We know only that it has something to do with both Archimoldi and the hundreds of women murdered in and around Santa Theresa. Bolaño is (was) a skilled storyteller. The moods he evokes are subtle, with a menacing atmosphere that never comes across as too forced or self-evident. We know we are moving ominously forward; yet, there is a feeling of stagnancy, like the oppressive heat of high noon in the desert sun. The characters interact as ordinary (if slightly disturbed) people, while a train is running off the tracks somewhere in the background and barreling towards them and will smash them, and they just can't hear it, or they detect it but only in a subliminal sort of way. If that makes any sense.

"The Part About the Critics" dealt with a crazy artist who cut off his hand and attached it to his masterwork, in addition to two mild-mannered university professors suddenly going berserk and start whaling on an obnoxious cab driver. "The Part About Amalfitano" had crazy (or telepathic) Amalfitano, the crazy poet in the nuthouse, and Marco Antonio Guerra ("fucking apocalyptic mayhem"). In "The Part About Fate" there is violence as a horrendous series of unsolved crimes (the women), the drug-fueled and dissolute underworld (of Rosa and her friends), and sport (boxing). So clearly, violence is becoming more overt at the same time that Bolaño is exploring its different manifestations in art, athletics, love, hate, literature, and insanity. When is violence ever legitimate or at least accepted? Bolaño seems to be asking. Boxing is two men beating the hell out of each other before sportswriters and cheering onlookers. Creative geniuses are almost expected to be a little bit "off," so is self-dismemberment really so shocking when it comes from a famous artist? And what about the mass slaughter of hundreds of poor, marginalized, ethnic women in one city over the course of a decade? Does anyone care? Is that "acceptable" violence just like boxing and creative eccentricity?

So I can see what Bolaño was getting at with "The Part About Fate." The book definitely fit with the previous two books, especially with the reappearance of Rosa and Amalfitano. So . . . where did it go wrong with me? Well, maybe not "go wrong," but why didn't I like it as much as the other two books? Steph was able to articulate clearly why she disliked "The Part About Amalfitano," but I'm afraid I can't manage anything more than "it had a lot about boxing and I hate sports; plus, that Seaman speech went on for way too long about nothing that had to do with the rest of the story." Simplistic, I know. And, as was the case with Night Train to Lisbon, "The Part About Fate" deserves a much better analysis. If Bolaño had lived, I'm sure a good editor would have helped. I think that may have been the problem: editing. Did anyone really get anything out of Seaman? Do you think he took up too much room? I can't wait to read what the rest of you wrote. I wonder if I'll be alone or not!

(Interestingly enough, I'm told that the few negative reviewers of 2666 seemed to think "The Part About Fate" was the only part worth reading!)

Also check out:
"The Part About the Critics"
"The Part About Amalfitano"

Click here for a list of all the participants in the read-along.

2666: The Part About Amalfitano

I understand you. . . I mean, if I'm right, I think I understand you. You're like me and I'm like you. The atmosphere around us is stifling. We pretend there's nothing wrong, but there is. What's wrong? We're being fucking stifled. You let off steam your own way. I beat the shit out of people who or let them beat the shit out of me.

I am reading Roberto Bolaño's heavy brick of a masterpiece (translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer) at a considerably faster rate than one book per month, as outlined in Claire and Steph's challenge. (Actually, though I've been calling it a challenge, it's really more of a read-along.) A scant two days after my post on "The Part About the Critics," I started and completed "The Part About Amalfitano." Once again, I do not see how this section could function as a stand-alone novella, as Bolaño himself had initially intended to publish one 2666 book a year as a miniseries. Following his untimely death, his heirs, on the advice of a literary critic, decided to put everything together as one mega-novel that some have argued is too overwhelming to read all at once (hence, Claire and Steph's idea). It has certainly been a dark, dense story so far, and I can see how it might become suffocating. But I just can't put it down! Although participants in the read-along are encouraged to go at their own pace, I didn't want to hurry too much so I attempted to take a break with Joanna Scott's Follow Me, which, in terms of tone and content, couldn't be further away from 2666.

That lasted about a day. The disparity between the two nearly turned me into one of Poe's masochistic narrators, like the overwrought proto-emo in "Ligeia" who copes with the loss of his beloved by marrying her polar opposite just to be daily tormented by the contrast.

Okay, that was a bit much. Maybe I should resume my break from Bolaño's vivid and psychologically intense prose! Or maybe not. Hasn't subjective experience been a major component of art and literature since the Modernist movement over a century ago? The notion of a Faustian link between art and madness dates back even further, to the Greek tales of Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), patron god of theater and ecstatic abandon. (Unbalanced beauty is also a distinctive aspect of Poe's work.) Euripedes's great tragedy The Bacchae, more than anything else I've read, is a true synthesis of revelry and horror that must be truly frightening to see performed. My freshman year of college, I attended a school production of its twentieth-century postmodernist update, A Mouthful of Birds. It was both deeply disturbing and highly provocative in its meditations on society and gender politics. One scene that has never left my mind is that of the priest who literally lap dances people to death. (Seriously, that play is something else.) Happiness in insanity - the thought of something or someone you love driving you to the brink - that is the main concept I find myself reflecting on as I progress through 2666.

In "The Part About the Critics," the protagonists' obsession with the reclusive writer Archimboldi has shaped their entire professional lives and now sends them to run-down city in a desert (Santa Theresa, based on the real-life Ciudad Juárez) on the other side of the world. There was also a subplot about a famous English painter, now confined to the nuthouse, who cut off his own hand and included the severed member in his great masterwork. In "The Part About Amalfitano," mental illness and the need for release are even more prominent. This time, we have a Spanish poet in the insane asylum, although the real focus is Amalfitano, a Chilean-born professor whom we met as a supporting character in the previous book. After his wife leaves him for a life of freedom on the road in Europe and a chance at love with the crazy poet, Amalfitano moves himself and daughter Rosa to Santa Theresa, where he finds himself having conversations with a voice no one else hears and unconsciously drawing esoteric diagrams with the names of philosophers. He becomes weirdly fixated on an obscure self-published book he finds in his belongings that he doesn't remember ever purchasing, a little volume that claims Bernardo O'Higgins, Chile's George Washington, was an Araucanian-trained telepath who was also taught how to read messages in the movement of tree branches. And lastly, there's Marco Antonio Guerra, the son of one of Amalfitano's colleagues, who finds solace only in "fucking apocalyptic mayhem" at "bars you can't even imagine." (Guerra, of course, is Spanish for "war.")

Whoa.

While mental and emotional unrest lurked beneath the surface of "The Part About the Critics," now, in "The Part About Amalfitano," things are overt. Pelletier and Espinoza's near-spontaneous beat-down of an obnoxious cab driver was a singular event that left them guilt-ridden; here, the presence of young Guerra foreshadows violence on a larger and more shocking scale. Something is building here. I have deliberately avoided reading anything about 2666, except posts by other challenge participants, for fear of encountering spoilers. But I still see destruction and madness starting to overtake creation and the intellect. Amalfitano's mind, the source of his joy in learning and livelihood in academia, has twisted into a parody of itself, hallucinating and seeking knowledge in a disorganized work of fringe scholarship. It is like Heart of Darkness: a journey deep into the human psyche, but without the corresponding physical journey (we already arrived, via plane, in Santa Theresa in the last book).

Hmmm. Where is Señor Bolaño going to take us next?

A side note on art/id: Edgar Allan Poe actually disputed the Romantic image of the artist/writer as some kind of mystic whose creations arise from an altered mental state. Here is "The Philosophy of Composition."

2666: The Part About the Critics

I can identify with Claire of Kiss a Cloud on dreams. I don't usually have nightmares, but one book, following a three-hour reading marathon, did have me waking up the next day going WTF was that??? What exactly transpired in the nightmare inspired by Dan Simmons's The Terror eludes my memory, but I remember it as more violent than disturbing. "Disturbing" is definitely what characterizes the dream sequences in the first book of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, "The Part About the Critics." Claire says her own nightmares arose from a Stephen King phase and that she has since sworn off horror novels and movies. As someone who does read and watch horror (and I do recommend The Terror, by the way, because Dan Simmons is a serious genius), I found that statement funny! 2666 is shaping up to be by far one of the most disquieting books I have ever read.

Although I had planned on reading 2666 eventually, I was inspired to do so now by a challenge I had read about on the Nonsuch Book blog in which participants were to cover one book of 2666 per month. It is being hosted by Claire and Steph of Steph and Tony Investigate! and will run until September. They have both laid out a series of questions for other readers to think about.

From Claire:

How effectively did you click with Bolaño's writing? Did you feel it was overly descriptive?

I loved his writing style! I didn't think it was overly descriptive at all. It felt very immediate, if that makes any sense.

Do you believe Archimboldi is real or a pseudonym? Could he be Mrs. Bubis?

No, I definitely think he's real, although just what he is, I have no idea. Is he human? An idea? Or something . . . metaphysical? The plot of 2666 is so vague and I'm not far into it yet, so I really have no idea what could end up happening.

How do you see the development of the critics' friendship and their involvement among one another?

That part was rather odd. Steph wrote that she was uneasy about what she perceived to be Bolaño's sexism - like Liz Norton simply functioned as the recipient of the male critics' sexual release. And it bugged me right from the start that her personality is described as less ambitious and more emotionally-driven. But the four critics - Norton, her lovers Pelletier and Espinoza, and the Italian Morini - never come across as well-developed characters with distinct personalities, which I think Bolaño did deliberately. The violence they commit, the sexuality they display, and their collective obsession with Archimboldi are what compose them as human beings. Like Steph, I believe there was some irony intended here - kind of a satire on sexism, base instinct, and the "progressive" academic.

Do you think that Pelletier and Espinoza's violent act towards the taxi driver is a foreshadow of things to come?

Possibly. It demonstrated what the two of them are capable of. Of course, it's not like the taxi driver was entirely innocent. You can't verbally assault a strange woman in the presence of two men she has a relationship with and not expect to get your ass kicked. But the violence sure was excessive. Afterwords Pelletier and Espinoza wondered if their actions had expressed a subconscious xenophobia (the taxi driver was Pakistani). Again, I wonder if that was more satire directed at the caricature (beloved of conservatives) of the oh-so-liberal professor.

What sort of feelings did the dreams evoke in you? Were you able to catch all the symbolisms?

Symbolism? Nah, I just though the dreams were really cool and creepy. Especially Norton's nightmare involving the two mirrors in her hotel room. Whoa!

Did the ending answer some of your questions? Do you feel that this can be a standalone novel or not?

If this had been a stand-alone novel, it would have felt very incomplete. So they're still in that depressing city in the desert? And - ?

How eager or how hesitant are you to move on to the next books?

VERY eager! Where is it going? What does it all mean???

From Steph:

Did you feel this section could stand alone as its own published work?

Again, no.

What did you like best about this section? What did you like least?

I liked the overall creepiness and suspense. I actually can't think of anything I didn't like!

Any surprises for you as a reader thus far?

I had no idea what to expect from 2666. Judging from the cover art, I knew it was going to be intense. So I guess it matches my expectations so far.

Hazard a guess and tell me what you think Bolaño’s getting at in Part One.

There was so much madness and violence and general unrest going on beneath the surface. It feels like something is simmering. When you juxtapose those dark elements alongside all the talk of art and literature, it definitely feels like Bolaño is making a statement on the relationship between creation and destruction. Salman Rushdie explored similar themes, albeit in a very different manner, in his 2003 novel Fury. (Henry Miller tackled this as well in The Tropic of Cancer, but I can't stand that guy.) In Rushdie's words (also quoted in my Miller post):

Life is fury. . . Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! . . .This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise – the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb.

How have you responded to Bolaño’s take on sexuality and violence? Do you feel the cab scene was an isolated incident or does it foreshadow things to come?

I think he links sex and violence as twin/dual aspects of human passion. The two can build one one another or one can inspire the other.

Can anyone make sense of the numerous dream sequences for me?

Nope. Sorry.

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Larry of OF Blog of the Fallen is currently reading 2666 in its original Spanish. In my initial post about Claire and Steph's challenge, he left a comment wondering how the "direct rawness of [Bolaño's] Spanish prose will appear in translation." Unfortunately, despite my penchant for international literature, I remain sadly monolingual, so I really can't compare the Spanish Bolaño wrote in to the English I am reading him in. But Larry's right in that there is a real rawness to 2666, and I don't think it is entirely a result of the prose. The subject matter is also very visceral: there's the destructive nature of human passion (be it love, sex, or art - all acts of creation - or the violence arising from them) laid out in full force alongside the haunting images found in the darkest dreams and a background mystery involving hundreds of murdered women in a dusty Mexican border town. A painter cuts off his hand for the sake of his work and goes insane. Four literary critics are so obsessed with a reclusive German writer that they will travel halfway around the world for him like some lovesick hero in a bombastic romance novel. Although there clearly is a plot (at least, to "The Part About the Critics"; I don't know about the rest), the story still feels rather vague and meandering. So far 2666 is shaping up to be a novel of ideas and sensations, and I love it. And onward!

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Update: Check out this great post on "The Part About the Critics" from Gavin of Page247, another read-along participant. She picks up on a few things I hadn’t considered, such as the critics’ isolation in their own little tower of academia with its conferences and scholarly quarrels, and how violence and madness still seep in through the fortress walls.