2666 on stage

Roberto Bolaño's posthumously published novel 2666 is more than 900 pages long, and it's broken up into five individual books that are only tangentially interrelated. In a sense, each of the five books is a standalone novel, though some characters—and, more importantly, many themes—recur. And, like nearly all Bolaño's works, it adamantly refuses to resolve neatly, either at the level of the individual book or as a complete novel. When I reviewed it for the Seminary Coop bookstore back in 2008, I wrote,

We close the book wrung out, strained, confused. And what are we left with? What, after all, is this novel? On the one hand it is, as I’ve described above, an investigation of violence, and specifically of male violence, bound up as it often is with another primal force, sex; it is about the hiding places we offer for savagery within our societies and ourselves, the veneer of civilization that only hides the horror because we are complicit in its deceit. And, like The Savage Detectives, it is about the tenuousness of human life—about how the only thing we can be sure of is that all those we love will some day disappear, and whether it’s into the wider world or into the void we may never even learn.

How could this giant, deliberately shaggy mess of a book possibly be staged? That was the question Robert Falls and Seth Bockley took upon themselves when the Goodman Theatre committed to making the attempt, and the result, playing now, is, if imperfect, nonetheless an astonishing piece of theater, one that does honor to the book and to the essence of Bolaño's bleak, horror-filled, yet powerfully vibrant vision. The staging is inventive, the performances remarkable, and the whole an unforgettable night of theater.

To squeeze 900 pages into even the five-and-a-half hours the play runs of course requires pruning and alteration, and much is lost. Some of the losses are simply a result of the shift in form: the most compelling of the novel's five books, "The Part About Amalfitano," which offers an excruciating close look at the mind of an academic and father who is slowly losing his sanity—and fighting tenaciously to hold onto it long enough to get his reckless teenage daughter to safety away from the violence of their hometown of Santa Teresa—can only be approximated onstage. Even remarkable performances by Henry Godinez as Amalfitano and Alejandra Escalante as his daughter can't overcome the fact that in shifting from prose to stage necessarily costs their story a level of intimacy and access.

Other losses are understandable, if nonetheless painful. The greatest of those for me was the removal of the more cryptic, hermetic aspect of Bolaño's story. The novel is full of references—to nightmares, shipwrecks, deserts, and, especially, to the unexplained mystical year of 2666 toward which all things seem in some vague way to be tending, perhaps catastrophically—that tie it in overt and oblique ways to the rest of Bolaño's oeuvre, and give the violence that suffuses the book a near-mythological, fatalistic tinge. Though the staging does a remarkable job of replicating that atmosphere of inescapable doom, I missed the more mystical element, such a fundamental part of Bolaño's obscure cosmography.

At the same time, the staging of the novel improves it in unexpected ways. The most straightforward comes with the third book, "The Part about Fate." It's the least successful in the novel, primarily, I suspect, because it deals with two things—crime fiction and African American culture—that are in themselves incredibly potent and distinctive, and Bolaño seems less sure-footed with both than he is, say, with tales of Mexican bohemians or the tropes of horror. But on stage, that book comes to life, told through a mix of film footage (some of it flat-out frightening) and live action. Whereas African American reporter-turned-unexpected-detective Oscar Fate never quite convinces on the page, when we see him portrayed on stage by Eric Lynch, we buy him completely. And from there, we begin to buy the framework of his obsessive, wayward investigation.

More impressive than that, however, was the way that the compression of the story for the stage—the fact that it's experienced in less than six hours rather than in the week or more of reading the novel—enabled me to see linkages and themes and recurrences that had previously passed me by. I thought I knew the novel well, but as I watched the play, I felt that, perhaps for the first time, I was beginning to understand how Bolaño intended the pieces to fit together, how he meant for his ideas to ripple through the whole, reflecting and amplifying one another as the contexts changed. And it was an effect that was enhanced by the standard theater technique of having actors double roles. Seeing the same face and body in a wholly different situation, acting and talking differently but confronting remarkably similar problems of human violence and death, in scene after scene had a powerful effect.

I can't imagine going into the show having not read the book. But for someone who has, and to whom Bolaño's work speaks, I can't imagine missing it. I came out of it, well, like I came out of the novel: wrung out, strained, confused. But also exhilarated, and incredibly glad people had been willing to take a dare this big, and that I'd been there to watch it.

"Great poets / foretell their own deaths in a single line"; I, instead, use up several on trifles

{Photos by rocketlass.}

The morning's snow is but a memory, the clouds that brought it now on their way to New York, leaving us with a cold sliver of moon . . . and what's that it illuminates? Oh, no--it's that lazy columnist's friend and succor . . . the Notes Column! Like a Rod Blagojevich press conference, this post is unlikely to offer any coherent theme or defense of its existence, but it might quote some poetry!

It's been months since I've resorted to one of these; how about this time rather than a numbered list, I tart the blog up as if it were a gossip column?

ITEM! I ventured to Chicago's Harold Washington Library on Monday to pick up some supplementary volumes for a review that is due now. {Note the italics. They're to remind me of what I ought to be doing right now rather than assembling this list. They're not, you'll note, working.}

I easily found the books I was after, but when I laid them on the circulation desk I hit a snag: according to the librarian, one of the volumes I had handed him, The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (1988), didn't exist. Or at least it didn't exist in their system; despite what the computer asserted, the physical book did to all eyes appear to be right there in hand.

I'm familiar with the frustration of looking on a library shelf for a missing book that the system assures you is there, but this was my first experience with its opposite. Could this be some tendril of the Invisible Library infecting an actual library?

Oh, and I owed an $.80 fine. Ed, do we levy fines at the Invisible Library?

ITEM! Speaking of looking for books on shelves: anyone who has ever worked in a bookshop has experienced the dreadful moment when, as you search the shelves in vain for a book requested by a customer, you realize that the customer looming at your elbow is the author of the book in question, attempting in a decreasingly subtle way to determine whether his fears of irrelevance and disregard are quite justified. It is a singularly awkward situation, for which the only remedy is the white lie, a suddenly recovered memory of the satisfied customer who left the store mere moments ago, beaming with joy, day made because you'd sold her that very book. You're sure you'll have another copy in any day now, in anticipation of another such customer.

Well, reading Fanny Burney's journals has confirmed my suspicion that authors were always so--as, fortunately, were quick-witted booksellers:

We amused ourselves, while we waited there, at a Bookseller's shop, where Mrs Thrale enquired if they had got the Book she had recommended to them. "Yes, Ma'am," was the answer; "and it's always out--the Ladies like it vastly."

ITEM! Speaking of the Invisible Library: this blog has been remarkably free lately of writing about that master of invisible book creation, Roberto Bolaño. My mind, on the other hand, has not: nearly five months after I read it, 2666 still staggers around in my thoughts. If you're having the same problem, you might as well go read what I think might be the best review of the novel yet, Sam Sacks's at Open Letters Monthly. More than anyone else I've read, Stark assembles a coherent argument about the book's aims, starting with this proposition:

But it must be reemphasized that, with one significant exception that I’ll look into later, every character, every occurrence, and every development of this book is brought into existence for the purpose of being negated. Nothingness is the single connecting motif of the five disparate sections, and it doesn’t bind them so much as drape across them like a shroud.

His overall assessment is a more harsh than mine, but it is forceful and convincing, one of the few writings on 2666 that I'm confident will stay with me and inform my eventual rereading of the novel.

Bolaño fans should also check out the appreciative review of his collection of poetry, The Romantic Dogs, that Ed Pavlic (author of the exceptionally good prose poem collection Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway) wrote for Verse. Pavlic opens with a quotation from the fragments of Empedocles that reads like an uncanny anticipation of Bolaño's fictions:

I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time it grew to be one only out of many; at another, it divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.

The Romantic Dogs has mostly been drowned out by the hubbub surrounding 2666, but Pavlic makes a good case for why it's worth taking a look at.

ITEM! Way back in June when I read The Savage Detectives, I unexpectedly found myself comparing the young, horny, violent infrerealists of Bolaño's Mexico City to Giacomo Casanova. Casanova's wonderfully amoral twelve-volume History of My Life frequently finds him reciting poetry, but always in an instrumental fashion: poetry is a marker of his refinement and sensibility, one of many tools that he uses in his neverending quest to get into women's pants. There is never a sense, as Casanova is recounting his recitation of a poem, of a poem truly affecting him; the reader--or at least the contemporary reader--gets the sense that he would have used whatever was to hand, that if knowing obscure facts about CC Sabathia or Dungeons and Dragons would have pitter-patted the hearts of the ladies, he would have been just as happy to deploy those.

The infrarealists, on the other hand, while they certainly do use poetry as an aphrodisiac (part of the overly masculine atmosphere of the early part of the novel that would have turned me off were Bolaño's prose not so captivating). At the same time, however, Bolaño makes us believe that poetry also is a crucial part of their self-definition, and even their way of understanding the world. Of all the poses to adopt, they've chosen a relatively marginalized one, and the enthusiasm and vigor with which they enact it--especially late in the novel when the youngest of them, Garcia Madero, reveals an encylopedic knowledge of poetic form--is bracing. Poetry is an instrument for these young men, but it's not solely or merely an instrument; its roots and its effects run far deeper.

ITEM! Which reminds me: I promised you some poetry, didn't I? How about this, which Melville includes in the "Extracts" assembled by a "poor," "hopeless, sallow" sub-sub-librarian with which he opens Moby-Dick--and which thus, almost Ouroborically, brings us back to where we started, with libraries:

Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.

It's from Job, which I believe Blagojevich has yet to quote--but fear not, Rod! There's still time to work it in!

Whatever it is I think I see, seems like Roberto Bolaño to me.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Those of you who've heard enough about Roberto Bolaño lately should take heart: I've moved Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux to the top of my stack for this week, and if anything can help me detox from Bolaño's cryptic inventions and haunting weirdness, it's Trollope's general confidence in the things of the world and their proper places.

For now, though, I remain sufficiently dogged by Bolaño that even such relatively innocuous passages as this one from Patricia Highsmith's The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), encountered over the weekend, bring 2666 blazing back into my mind:

"You expect to meet the brother? And the detective?" Reeves laughed as if at the word "detective," as he might laugh at anybody whose job it was presumably to track down crime in the world.

If you're looking for writings on Bolaño of a bit more substance, you should check out the newest issue of the Quarterly Conversation, which just went online. I'm in there with a review of the new collection of Bolaño's poetry that New Directions has published, The Romantic Dogs, while Quarterly Conversation editor Scott Esposito turns in what is the most perceptive review of 2666 I've seen so far.

The Quarterly Conversation is also giving away a complete set of Bolaño's works in English; click here for details. Oh, and there's plenty of non-Bolaño content as well, including an article on William Gaddis and a piece by Barrett Haycock about freelancing alumni profiles, and what that did to his fiction writing; any writer who's turned out copy for a living will recognize the frustrations (and the occasional pleasures) that Haycock describes.

Speaking of work, you weren't really planning to get anything done at the office today anyway, were you? It's the end of a holiday weekend; you've got to ease back into this job thing; best to just go read the Quarterly Conversation until the coffee kicks in.

You may be done with 2666, but 2666 isn't done with you!

From Roberto Bolano's 2666:

Which in the final analysis was a good thing, because it's common knowledge that a conversation involving only a few people, with everyone listening to everyone else and taking time to think and not shouting, tends to be more productive or at least more relaxed than a mass conversation, which runs the permanent risk of becoming a rally, or, because of the necessary brevity of the speeches, a series of slogans that fade as soon as they're put into words.

The past week has seen a couple of worthy additions to the growing number of online resources for the reader of Roberto Bolano's 2666. First, Marcia Valdes, who has written before about Bolano's nonfiction, has a review of the novel in the December 8th issue of the Nation. Her review is unusual, less a description or assessment of 2666 than an account of how it came about: drawing from Spanish-language sources and interviews, Valdes offers insight into Bolano's research methods and sources, and the origins and growth of his obsession with the Ciudad Juarez murders. It's the sort of review I'd never recommend to someone who hadn't read the book yet--I think it reveals too much and, in the quantity of background information it offers, risks foreclosing a number of avenues of interpretation. But for a reader who has already grappled with Bolano's text, Valdes's review is a fascinating supplement.

A similar source of supplemental information is translator Natasha Wimmer's "Notes Toward an Annotated Edition of 2666", which Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading pointed out. As Wimmer's title would suggest, the notes are far from comprehensive, more tantalizing than totalizing. If what she's written already is any indication, should she ever decide to embark on a fully annotated edition of the novel, the result would be essential reading. Though I would disagree with some of her interpretations--as in her assertion that the characters in The Savage Detectives "endlessly plumb their inner lives" while the characters of 2666 don't--but her notes are a model of what notes to a contemporary novel can be, offering a mix of clarification, interpretation, and expansion, while drawing on a wide range of sources generally unavailable to the English-language reader.

Over the coming years, as more of Bolano's work--including, I hope, his nonfiction--is translated into English, the conversation about 2666 should only become more rich and informed.

There's nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty.

And the result of that emptiness is material for an endless conversation, even an endless argument. Time for everyone I know to read 2666 so that they can join in!

The Part about What Doesn't Fit in a Review

{Photos by rocketlass.}

After all that dithering, I finally wrote a review of Roberto Bolaño's posthumous brick of a novel 2666. It's up at the Front Table blog of the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore (the bookstore of choice for our incoming First Family!).

Since I finished my review, I've read a handful of other reviews, and what's been most striking is the way they collectively demonstrate the capaciousness of the novel: each emphasizes some different aspect, and hardly any of us draw on more than one or two of the same quotations in the course of describing and appraising the book. All of which makes me think a brief collection of odds and ends, half-formed thoughts that didn't make it into the review, may be warranted.

1 Adam Kirsch is right in his review for Slate:

It is a shame for a reviewer to have to reveal even the outlines of these stories: The best way to experience 2666 is without warning, as in a dream in which you find yourself on a road that could lead absolutely anywhere.

So if you're a Bolaño fan, I recommend bookmarking this and the other reviews to read when you're all done. And have rested.

2 More than in any others of his novels I've read, Bolaño in 2666 explicitly takes up and repudiates the idea of the detective novel--a form that I assume he must have loved. Throughout the novel, we get hints that Bolaño is eventually going to offer us answers to the many questions he raises, and, more important, a solution to the murders at the center of the book. Anyone who's read Bolaño before knows deep down that such a resolution is unlikely--incompleteness is his metier--but, especially when in the company of a couple of characters who fancy themselves detectives, we again and again find ourselves sucked into the delusion that the world can be put to rights if only we can find the answer.

Which, in a way, is similiar to Bolaño's greatest overall achievement as a writer, the sense he gives that his entire fictional universe, big and messy and incomplete, could just maybe be understood if only we could find the key, tilt our brains at the right angle, peer through the right scrim. We can't help but imagine that it's like what one of the critics from the novel's first section found in his hotel bathroom:

In Pelletier's bathroom the toilet bowl was missing a chunk. It wasn't visible at first glance, but when the toilet seat was lifted, the missing piece suddenly leaped into sight, almost like a bark. How the hell did no one notice this? wondered Pelletier.

But as Bolano himself is always at pains to remind us, "Behind every answer lies a question." The reverse is never true, is it?

2 The novel's fourth section, "The Part about the Crimes," is unquestionably the dark heart of the book, its reason for being. I write about it at length in my review, arguing that it's a challenge to the reader, a demand that we not turn away from evil, madness, and suffering. In its depiction of brutality and horror, "The Part about the Crimes" is the direct opposite of something like the Saw franchise: films like that challenge us not to be squeamish--to tamp down our natural reactions and feelings enough to keep watching atrocities; 2666 asks us to fully feel, yet look anyway, because this is the way our species lives.



3 In his review of 2666 for the New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Lethem notes,

Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules, against dream sequences, against mirrors as symbols, against barely disguised nods to his acquaintances, and so on.

To that you can add his repeated violation of the overplayed "show-don't-tell" dictum. Bolaño loves to deliver thumbnail sketches of characters, often assembled with a bit of whimsy, telling us essential and pointless information all in a jumble, but leaving us at the end with a good sense of the person he's invented. This passage, introducing one of the literary critics from the novel's first part, is a particularly good example:

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 wholeheartedly 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. She was incapable of setting herself a goal and striving steadily toward it. At least, no goal was appealing or desirable enough for her to pursue it unreservedly. Used in a personal sense, the phrase "achieve an end" seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.

He also likes to relate the impressions characters make on one another, with this account of Amalfitano, the madman of the book's second part, offering a good example, giving at the same time a hint of the apocalyptic language that suffuses the book:

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was , a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-North American border.

4 Individual lines jump out of the 900 pages of the book like true jewels, epigrams cryptic, gnomic, savage, and unforgettable--too long to Twitter, too short to leave drowning in the sea of the novel. Like this frozen moment from the time when Amalfitano's wife was slowly, repeatedly deciding to leave him:

Another time he found her sitting on a seafront bench at La Concha, at an hour when the only people out walking were two opposite types: those running out of time and those with time to burn.

Or this metaphor to explain metaphor, tinged as it is with crazy:

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life-jacket. And remember, there are lifejackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it.

Or this seemingly personal statement on authorship:

Every minor work has a secret author and every secret author is, by definition, a writer of masterpieces. Who writes the minor work? A minor writer, or so it appears. . . . The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece.

2666 is a novel whose length, detail, and relentlessness force the reader into a sort of trance-like submission for stretches--but then without warning Bolaño jerks us back to full attention with a moment of flawless craft. He has created the inverse of a horror film, where the horror is constant enough to numb and the release comes in the occasional pulling back to the possible perfections of a moment, embodied in the craft of language. "A horror film," thinks one character, "where everything has come to a halt, and it comes to a halt because it knows it's lost."

5 And then there's this:

"We've gotten used to death," he heard the young man say.

"It's always been that way," said the white-haired man, "always."

Though it's been more than five years since Bolaño's death, those of us who have only recently begun to explore his world are barely beginning to realize what we've lost. The white-haired man may be right, but he's also dead wrong.

The best-laid plans

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Entering the weekend, I had set aside today to work on a review of Roberto Bolano's 2666 that I'm supposed to turn in Monday for the Seminary Co-op Bookstore's blog. The book is so rich and impressive that I figured it would take me a whole day to write about it with any authority.

Then I made the mistake of reading the first couple of pages of Tom Rob Smith's Child 44. Hours later, I've written nary a word of the Bolano review and have about a hundred pages to go in Child 44.

This is why one should never allow crime novels to enter the house!

In which I demonstrate my ridiculousness in two ways, conveniently photographed (as is so much of my ridiculousness), by rocketlass.

Books do furnish a bag

That is a photo of the contents of my shoulder bag as they looked on my trip to work the first two days of this week. The sane will note that the mini-library pictured is a bit more comprehensive than round-trip commute of two hours would warrant. To which charge my only defense is that each morning as I packed the books I was telling myself that--all appearances to the contrary--I was merely dipping into, rather than actually re-reading, A Dance to the Music of Time, and thus needed to have a lot of other options to hand.

The reality, harder to escape with each turned page, was that of course I was re-reading Dance; fortunately, so far as self-deception goes, the consequences of this feeble pretense were relatively mild, felt only in my aching shoulders.

Flags do furnish a book

For this battered, beflagged galley copy of Roberto Bolano's 2666 I can offer no defense beyond a legitimate, somewhat fuddled effort to grapple with Bolano's talent. So much to note, so much that I might want to cite in my eventual review of the novel, such a mess my good intentions have made.

Which all leads me to this line from The Journal of Jules Renard, which is also somewhere in the shoulder bag:

Every time I want to settle down to work, literature gets between.

Ain't that the truth.

Homage to Czerny

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I'm planning to review Roberto Bolano's 2666 for the Seminary Co-op Bookstore's new blog. Well, my first review for them is posted there now. It's of a new novel published by the good people at Dalkey Archive, Gert Jonke's strange and wonderful Homage to Czerny (1977, translated in 2008 by Jean M. Snook), which at times reads like the work of a Thomas Bernhard who has become addicted to whimsy.

One passage I particularly liked, but didn't find an appropriate place for in my review, is this one:

Now everything started to happen very quickly, moving to its confusing end, the memory of it in my head is only fleeting and hazy, as though my stacks of orderly thoughts were somehow scattered violently, thrown up in the air, I was carried away, I don't remember exactly how.

Now that I think about it, that's a pretty good description of how I felt at the end of several hours of reading 2666 last night.

The sense of an ending, or, I think this is the shortest post I've ever written

{Photo by rocketlass.}

When I begin reading a novel, I always flip to the back to see how long it is, and as I read I'm always conscious of that looming final page: I'm a third of the way through; I'm halfway through; I'm nearly there. The knowledge of the distance to the end helps me keep my attention on the structure of the novel, on where its dramatic points and narrative shifts come, on what might still be possible.

I'm not doing that right now. I'm deep into the first of five utterly distinct sections of an advance reader's copy of Roberto Bolano's forthcoming 2666, which I'll be reviewing for the Seminary Co-op's new blog . . . and while I know how long the whole novel is, I have no idea where this section ends. Instead, I'm just along for the ride, willing to let Bolano take me where he will, for as long as he chooses. It's not just that I don't know: I don't even want to know. I'd rather dread.

I remember this feeling from reading The Savage Detectives: Bolano's narrative technique is strangely unmooring, propulsive yet at the same time somehow still seeming quotidian--the days and the anecdotes and half-anecdotes go by with little to suggest a pattern or a plan . . . yet dread builds, worry accumulates, my readerly desire to know what will happen fills the back of my mind, pacing and pacing and pacing as my more immediate, focused attention turns page after page after page.

If I can figure out how Bolano achieves that effect, I'll feel very smart indeed. And if 2666 sustains the force of its first 150 pages . . . well, I don't even quite know what to say.


{Photo of Roberto Bolano by Flickr user vonbergen.net, used under a Creative Commons license.}