2666, Roberto Bolano

Here are five thoughtful reviews of the five books of 2666, authored by a blogger who – from circumstantial evidence, like a title quotation to do with snow, a penchant for Victorian lit and knitting, and the use of an Emily Climbs bookcover in her avatar – sounds like a kindred spirit:

Part 1: The Part About the Critics

Part 2: The Part About Archimboldi

Part 3: The Part About Fate

Part 4: The Part About the Crimes

Part 5: The Part About Amalfitano

Here is the running list of things I jotted down on the back of a sales receipt during my first reading:

- I think every sentence is perfection.
- The characterization shines.
- I enjoy the summary, even dismissive introduction of Liz Norton: “Liz Norton, on the other hand, wasn’t what one would ordinarily call a woman of great drive, which is to say that she didn’t draw up long -or-medium-term plans and throw herself wholehearted into their execution. She had none of the attributes of the ambitious. When she suffered, her pain was clearly visible, and when she was happy, the happiness she felt was contagious.” (pg. (The latter line reminds me of the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead “when she was good, she was very good; when she was bad, she was horrid.”) The lives of the critics, though, which center around Liz, render her a very enigmatic female.
- I was fascinated by Archimboldi’s Lola: her breadth of experience, her whole life story which has panned out because she was seized by passions, and the political and societal ramnifications of the geographic areas she lands in, or the people she encounters
- Bolano’s microscopic eye – I like all the revealing details, descriptions of people, places, thoughts. It is all showing, a presentation of scenes: no overarching analyses or telling. Part I is a series of moments, Part II the minute illustration of Archimboldi’s life. In Part III – juxtapositions of absurd events, Part IV returns to minute documentation. Only in Part V is there a traditional, kind of inverted fairy-tale like narrative pace.
- I can’t help but wonder: what propels Bolano to include certain elements in a scene? Do smaller objects play a symbolic role for a larger them?
- All this illustration is also highly subjective: the character’s emotions, always portrayed, are intimate and incredibly hyperbolic
- There is so much revelation of different characters, different human beings

Here are the quotations I tagged:

Probably the most famous quotation from this book, no doubt resonant with a generation of book-fiend fans:

“Leaving aside the fact tha A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial… and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afriad to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or waht amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle agaisnt that something, that something that terrifes us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” (pg. 277)

Disregarding all the aspersions this casts on the characters’ attitudes towards the killings, this is also a very accurate assessment of (what can be considered) literary “masterpieces.” Middlemarch, Atlas Shrugged, the Harry Potter series, and even 2666 itself are all flawed. Their authors are capable of more minor, “perfect exercises.”

“When poor people make money, they should admit publicly to having made only half as much. They shouldn’t even tell their children how much they really have, because then their children will want the whole inheritance and won’t be willing to share it with their adopted sibilings.” (pg. 249)

!!!

This brutal statement, delivered by Seaman, characterizes the black preacher. Perhaps it does more. I can’t help admiring that this sentence was crafted by the single poetic mind we met in earlier chapters.

“Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You can’t rape that many people. It’s mathematically mpossible. It’s too hard on the body… They might have gotten some results if htey’d been capable o raping their own mongrel children and then their mongrel grandchildren and even their bastard great-grandchildren.” (pg. 288)

The theories people come up with, in a drunken tirade!

“A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world,” said Fate, ” a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake.”

“Reportage?” asked his editor. “Is that FRench, nigger? Since when do you speak French?”

“I don’t speak French,” said Fate, “but I know what fucking reportage is.”

“I know what fucking reportage is, too,” said the editor, “and I also know merci and ua revoir and fair l’amour, which is the same as coucher avec moie. And I think that you, nigger, want to coucher avec moie, but you’ve forgot the voulez-vous, which in this case ought to hvae been your first move. You hear me? You say voulez-vous or you can get the fuck out.” (pg. 295)

I’m inadvertently struck by the crude, it seems, but talk about elegant speech amongst intelligentsia!

“Sometimes, especially on his days off, Inspector Juan de Dios MArtinez would have liked to go out with the director. That is, he wanted to be seen in public with her, eat at a downtown restaurant with her, neither a cheap nor a very expensive resaturant but a normal restaurant where normal couples went and where he would almost certainly run into someone he knew, to whom he would introduce the director naturally, casually, coolly, this is my girlfreind, Elvira Campos, she’s a psychiatrist. … The perfect happiness, goddamn it, thought Juan de Dios Martinez. But Elvira Campos wouldn’t even hear of a public relationship. Phone calls to the psychiatric enter, yes, so long as they were short. Meetings in person every two weeks. A glass of whiskey or Absolut vodka and nocturnal landscapes. Sterile goodbyes.”

Interesting, this intimate scrutiny into casual relationships, interesting, the divergence of the lover’s wishes, preferences, and weaknesses.

“She dreamed, for example… and then she dreamed about flying to Paris, where she would rent a tiny apartment, a studio, say between Villiers and Porte de Clichy, and then she would go to see a famous doctor, a wonder-working plastic surgeon, get a face-lift, get her nose and cheekbones fixed, have her breasts enlarged, in short, when she got off the operating table she would look like someone else, a different woman, not fiftysomething anymore but fortysomething, or better yet, just o ver forty, unrecognizable, new, changed, rejuvenated, although of course for a while she would go everywhere wrapped in bandages, like a mummy, not an Egyptian mummy but a Mexican mummmy, which would be something she enjoyed, walking to the metro, for example, knowing that all the Parisians were watching her surreptitiously, some of them even giving up their setas for her, imagining the horrible suffering, burns ,traffic accident, that this silent and stoic stranger hand undergone….and then someone brings a mirror and she stares at herself, she nods at herself, she approves of herself, with a gesture in which she rediscovers the sovereignty of childhood… I’m crazy about you the way you are, said Juan de Dios Martinez.” (pg. 535)

Who comes up with imagery like this?

“Her hands were tied behind her back with plastic cord, the kind used to tie up big packages. On her left hand she was wearing a long black glove, the kind used by the highest class exotic dancers. When the glove was removed they found tow rings, one on the middel figner, of real silver, and the other on the ring finger, workedi n the shape of a snake. On her right foot she was wearing a man’s sock, brand name Tracy. ANd most surprising of all: tied around her head, like a strange but not entirely implausible hat, was an expensive black bra. Otherwise the woman was naked and had no identification on her.” (pg. 575)

“The factory buildings were tall and each plant was surrounded by a wire fence and the light of the big streetlights bathed everything in a vvague aura of hast, of momentousness, which was false, since it was just another workday… Damp, fetid air, smelling of scorched oil, struck him in the face. He thought he heard laughter and accordion music on the wind.”

I like the commingling of loveliness and industrial waste in this scene.

“Hers [life story] had been mostly a disaster. She tried to be a theatre actress in New York, a movie actress in Los Angeles, tried to be a model in PAris, a photographer in London, a translator in Spain. she set out to study modern dance but gave it up the first year. She set out to be a painter and at her first show realized that she had made the worst mistake of her life. she wasn’t married, she had no childre, no family, no projects. It was the perfect moment to return to Mexico.” (pg. 604)

“When hans Reiter was ten, his one-eyed mother and one-legged father had their second child. It was a girl and they called her Lotte. She was a beautiful child and she might have been the first person on teh surface of the earth who interested (or moved) Hans Reiter… As far as Hans was concerned, his sister was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and many times he tried to draw her in the same notebook where he’d drawn different kidns of seaweed, but the results were always unsatisfactory: sometimes the baby looked like a bag of rubbish left on a pebbly beach, other times like Pterobius maritimus, a marine insect that lives in crevices and feeds on scraps, or Lipura maritima, another insect, very small and dark slate or gray, its habitat the puddles among rocks.

“In time, by stretching his imagination or tastes or his own artistic nature, he managed to draw her as a littel mermaid, more fish than girl… but always smiling, always with an enviable tendency to smile and see the positive side of things, which was a faithful reflection of his sister’s character.” (pg. 648)

I love the bizarre, ethereal, mad romance of Archimboldi and the madwoman Ingeborg:

” ‘I hate first editions and pyramids and pyramids and I hate those bloodthirsty Aztecs,’ said Ingeborg. ‘But the light of the stars make me dizzy. IT makes me want to cry,’ said Igneborg, her eyes damp with madness.” (pg. 831)

What I can glean from a first reading is scant. I really like the aforementioned blogger’s analyses of the book’s structure:

“The first three books tighten into an ever-more tense and surreal vortex, narrowing uncomfortably toward the mysterious wrongness in Santa Teresa, Mexico, which is related to the sexual homicides being committed there. Just as the third part reaches a climactic pinhole, the narration suddenly widens, becomes a stark, straightforward descent through a pile of dead bodies, the hardboiled chronicling of the female corpses of Santa Teresa, and of the inability of police, private citizens, detectives and seers to stop the perpetual appearances of more. As opposed to the increasing tension of the first three parts, I experienced the fourth part to be even throughout, tension released and stark reality confronted. Then, in The Part About Archimboldi, the narrative turns a sharp corner into something more like a traditional bildungsroman, in which a young boy grows up, lives his life and finds his calling: a calling which gradually curves toward the literary world of the first part, and a life which, even more tangentially, intersects with the Santa Teresa killings. “

I so love the perfection of the prose, that I will happily read it again and again. I hope there will be many more rereadings.