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.

"A library is total generosity," or, Roberto Bolaño speaks!

Fans of Roberto Bolano who can't read Spanish have it remarkably good right now. Though we have had to adapt our reading to the structural pace of the publishing industry, for the past few years each season's list from New Directions has brought a freshly translated edition of one of his old novels. And while this requires patience, it seems clear that eventually we'll have them all--something that can't be said about the work of many other great novelists who wrote in languages other than English.

And now we even have a collection of interviews, pulled together into a slim volume by Melville House, Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview. Some of its contents have appeared in English before--most notably his final interview, with Playboy Mexico, which was published in Stop Smiling a few years back and the introductory essay by Marcela Valdes, which was originally published in the Nation--but it's great to have them all in one place, enhanced with explanatory notes that are a great help when Bolaño mentions writers who are little-known in English.

Without seeming disingenuous, the interviews feel like performances as much as anything: Bolaño throws out names, books, ideas with abandon, weaving a complicated tapestry of influence and Spanish-language literary history that it's easy to imagine taking a different form in another interview, conducted another day when he was in a different mood. Throughout, it's as if we're rushing through a giant library with Bolaño as our guide, his praise and damnation both driven by enthusiasm, as if he doesn't quite care if you agree with him--or even remember what he says--so long as you walk out the door with an armload of books.

While not as crammed with author names as many other answers, this exchange from a 1999 interview in Capital gives you an idea of the attitude Bolaño expresses toward books and authors:

RB:In one way or another, we're all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what's best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.

HS/MB: Nevertheless, literature is not purely a sanctuary for good sentiment. It is also a refuge for hatefulness and resentment.

RB: I accept that. But it's indisputable that there are good sentiments in it. I think Borges said that a good writer is normally a good person. It must have been Borges because he said practically everything.

Elsewhere, he hints at the outlines of his positions on larger literary questions, especially as they relate to his working methods; here, in an interview from 2002 in Bomb, he answers the question of how he chooses plots:

Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won't leave you in peace. Fortunately, that's not so important--the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there's no book, or at least in most cases that's what happens. Let's say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that's in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you'll see): It's not that I don't like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

I think that's the best, most concise description I've yet seen of the way that the relatively formal organizational structures of Bolaño's novels work to contain--or to fail to contain--the limitless sprawl of the forever branching stories within stories within stories that make up their plots.

The Last Interview is a slight book, but it's one that I'll be returning to as I keep reading my way through Bolaño's body of work--and it will make a nice stopgap while we wait for the collection of his nonfiction that Natasha Wimmer is currently translating. If only all international authors could be treated so well in English!

Like a visit from an old, strange, slightly creepy friend.

My regular wander through 57th Street Books yielded a very pleasant surprise on Thursday: The Skating Rink (1993), the newest volume in New Directions's ongoing Robert Bolaño translation project, which I'd not been expecting to arrive for at least a month.

I heard his deep, velvety voice, the one thing that hasn't changed over the years. He said: This is just the night for Jack. He was referring to Jack the Ripper, but his voice seemed to be conjuring lawless territories, where anything was possible. We were adolescents, all of us, but seasoned already, and poets, so we laughed.

Forty pages in, and it's already intriguing, vague, a bit ominous, and multivocal; everything I've been missing in the year or so since I last read Bolaño.

The campground was called Stella Maris (a name reminiscent of rooming houses) and it was a place where there weren't too many rules, or too many fights and robberies. It was frequented by working-class families from Barcelona and young people of modest means from France, Holland, Italy and Germany. The combination was sometimes explosive and would have blown up in my face for sure if I hadn't immediately adopted El Carajillo's golden rule, which consisted basically of letting them kill each other. His harsh way of putting it, which struck me as funny at first, then disturbing, didn't reflect a contemptuous attitude to the clients; on the contrary, it sprang from a profound respect for their right of self-determination.

Ah, it's good to be back in the Bolañoverse.

"As a thief as long as he can remember," or, A Question of influence

To prepare for a review I'm writing for the next issue of the Quarterly Conversation of Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi's new book My Floating Mother, City, I've been reading her best-known book, Seasons of Sacred Lust (1970). Comared to her newer work, it feels a bit dated, more obviously surrealistic and beat-influenced--while nonetheless remarkable at times, as in the poem "Tiger," whose opening gives an idea of how Shiraishi's images can function when deployed well:

All day long
A tiger kept coming in and out.
The room was falling into ruin and
Broken arms, legs, and chairs were
Crying at the sky.

What made me sit up and take notice more than anything, however, were a couple of lines from book's long centerpiece, "Seasons of the Sacred Sex Maniac" (and oh, the disappointed Google searchers who are going to end up here because of that title!):

A black motorcycle runs
Tearing an August night right in two with its sound
The black motorcycle that runs up some raw flesh
Which is nobody
But myself
I'm a high holy master of the occult
A lewd detective that
Has mastered the art of self-division

I expect a lot of you are having the same reaction I did: Black motorcycles? Detectives? Hell, even raw flesh? These are images that immediately call to mind Roberto Bolaño's poetry. The black motorcycle turns up in a couple of poems in Bolaño's collection The Romantic Dogs: in the closing stanza of "The Last Savage"--

I'd gone to see "The Last Savage," and on leaving the theatre
had no place to go. In a sense I was
the character from the film, and my black motorcycle
carried me
straight to destruction.

--and in "The Donkey," where it is "like a donkey from another planet" and

A stolen bike, the last bike
Stolen to travel through the poor
Northern Lands, toward Texas,
Chasing an unnameable dream,
Unclassifiable, the dream of our youth,
Which is to say, the bravest of all
Our dreams.

Detectives, meanwhile, turn up throughout Bolaño's oeuvre, from the poetry--where they are frozen detectives, lost detectives, crushed detectives--to the title of The Savage Detectives to the criminally ineffectual police detectives of 2666.

Neither image, the black motorcycle or the detective, is so unusual that it's impossible to imagine the two poets hitting upon it independently. But their conjunction in "Seasons of the Sacred Sex Maniac" does make me wonder whether Bolaño might have come across Seasons of Sacred Lust as a young man in the early 1970s. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that Shiraishi's connections with the beats and her popular jazz-backed public readings could have brought her to Bolaño's attention, even if she wasn't translated into Spanish (which, for all I know, she might have been). And much of her imagery--sexual and violent, awkward and surreal--could easily be read as a precursor to and influence on Bolaño's startling, uncanny metaphors.

I don't have any sort of definite answer; I'd hoped that The Savage Detectives, with the staggering number of obscure poets it name-drops, might offer the key, but Shiraishi's name is nowhere to be found in its pages. Yet again, as has happened countless times in the past year, I find myself wishing that Bolaño's essays were already available in English translation--maybe, once they are, they'll offer a clue.

Until then, anyone out there know anything more about this possible connection?

"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.

"The thing is to console without telling lies."

For those of you stuck in the office one last day this week, I offer a distraction that Maud Newton dug up this week: a five-part interview of Iris Murdoch on YouTube.

Part one is below, and parts two, three, four, and five are at the embedded links.


If that's not enough Murdoch for you, you should definitely check out From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003), a collection of interviews spanning Murdoch's whole career, edited by Gillian Dooley. I've drawn on the book before, but last night as I was paging through it again, a couple of passages struck me anew.

The first one comes from a symposium at the University of Caen in January of 1978. Murdoch is in conversation with editor Jean-Louis Chevalier, and they're talking about the handful of novels she wrote in the first person:

There probably is a more direct emotional punch if the thing is written in the first person. On the other hand, the danger of this is that it's harder then to create other characters who can stand up to the narrator because they're being seen through his eyes. And I think my ideal novel--I mean the novel which I would like to write and haven't yet written--would not be written in the first person, because I'd rather write a novel which is more scattered, with many different centres. I've often thought that the best way to write a novel would be to invent the story, then to remove the hero and the heroine and write about the peripheral people--because one want to extend one's sympathy and divide one's interests.

It could be that I've simply got Roberto Bolaño too much on my brain these days, but does that last idea sound like a rough description of The Savage Detectives?

Actually, though at first blush Murdoch and Bolaño would seem to be wildly different writers, the snippets of interviews I've read with Bolaño remind me a bit of Murdoch's interviews: like her, he seems to have had a habit of making grand pronouncements that he didn't necessarily mean, or that flat-out contradict the evidence of his work. I get the sense that, like her, there's a coyness (if not a caginess) running through the persona he projects in an interview.

I'll leave you with one last bit that could I think have led, in a different world, to a productive conversation between Bolaño and Murdoch. This comes from an interview with Jack Biles in 1977:

Some sort of drama must belong to the theater, where everything is highly significant and rather poetic and where there is a definite shape.

It seems to me that in the novel very often the novelist quite properly is destroying this shape, because ordinary life doesn't have shape. Ordinary life is comic and absurd. It may be terrible, but it is absurd and shapeless, and the novelist very often attempts to convey the shapelessness by having a dramatic shape, which if he is telling a story, he usually has to have. At the same time, he is fighting against it and blurring it--even destroying it.

That struggle between plot (which Murdoch loved, and at the making of which she excelled) and character, like that between authorial control and freedom, runs through, and animates, the best of Murdoch's work.

A happy thanksgiving to you all. May your holiday feature far less drama than a Murdoch novel--and certainly less than a Bolaño one!

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.}

"People who return in dreams from the dark regions where they've drifted," or, The two novels that have defined my summer

{Warning: I suppose there might be spoilers in this post. I'll admit to not being a good judge of these things--I do reveal some details of the end of the second novel under discussion, so if that sort of thing bothers you, you probably should skip today's post.}

My reading summer has been defined by two novels, Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (1998) and Gary Indiana's Do Everything in the Dark (2003), both of which have been impossible to dislodge from my thoughts or my conversations with friends. They're quite different on the surface, but they quickly reveal themselves as spiritual kin, serving as acts of commemoration, honor, and preservation for lost or disappearing communities, friends, and ways of being.

Though the world of the bohemian poets described by The Savage Detectives (about which I've written quite a bit already) is long-lost and almost entirely forgotten, the elegaic qualities of the book's oral histories are never overwhelming, always carefully balanced by the vibrancy and inventiveness of Bolano's prose. Because Bolano aims to all but bring that world back to life, to recreate what it felt like, moment to moment, to be so alive and so free in that time and place, The Savage Detectives never seems to be anything but a young man's book, starting its full-throated song on the first page and barely pausing for breath for 500 pages thereafter. This world, like Bolano himself, is gone, but for the hours you're engrossed in it, it's impossible to believe anything could be more alive.

Do Everything in the Dark, on the other hand, reads like the book of an older--if not flat-out old--man, the work of a writer who sees the days shortening before him and, possibly surprised that he's made it this far, is beginning to look around to see who and what he's outlasted. Gary Indiana's earlier novel Gone Tomorrow (1993) hinged on the arrival of the AIDS epidemic, which, occurring in the space of a chapter break, put paid to the hedonism and games of the 1970s and replaced them with creeping dread and an inescapable awareness of mortality. By the time of Do Everything in the Dark, the red tide of AIDS has mostly subsided, and this book concerns those left standing on the shore, surviving and no longer shell-shocked, but still capable, on the wrong day and at the wrong time, of seeing Greenwich Village as a cenotaph.

But it's not just AIDS they've survived. Drugs, alcohol, success, failure, even time itself--all have laid low their share, and even those still standing have suffered their ravages. In William Boyd's Any Human Heart, a writer notes in his journal, "Living this hard in New York takes its toll"; what Indiana shows us is what's left of those who've paid it. The narrator gives the sense of being very like Gary Indiana himself: a writer who, though never quite making it even to the mid-list, has managed to carve out a life for himself in New York that, if not prosperous, is at least sustainable, even in the go-go days of the turn of the twenty-first century. "It's my destiny to collect any evidence that everyone's life hasn't been a hallucination, even if it feels like one," he tells us, and in brief chapters he performs that duty, recounting the lives of a group of friends, nearly all artists or writers, in the course of the summer of 2001, hopping from character to character and mind to mind, but never losing the sense that behind all of this, guiding our perceptions, is his own thoughtful perspective.

And so we meet women and men, straight and gay, successes and failures, users and used. There's Denise, who "no longer took drugs, except ones prescribed for her by an admittedly liberal-minded physician" and who eventually has to decide whether to cope with or run from the schizophrenia of her heroin-addicted partner; Anna, who is "between enough things that I can't get my bearings. I'm not here, I'm not there," and solves the problem with mind-boggling amounts of drugs and sex; Jesse, who feels that "the world has become too twined, to insalubrious with suffering, to float through it, as if one had the right to be anywhere," and who therefore puts himself in ever-greater danger by picking up rough trade; Miles, who "had satanic good looks" and had been "hardwired to expect betrayal from those close to him"; and many more. We watch these people circle one another, help or betray one another, give and take from one another. There are furtive fucks in doorways; ghastly, cruel dinner parties; exhibitions of wildly expensive and utterly false art. We see the detritus of both success and failure, talent and hackery, and are reminded that the links between those pairs are often close to arbitrary.

Throughout, the narrator serves as a solid, reliable node for all these circling misfits. He's not in a relationship (and we get the sense that it's been a while since he was), and while he's ruthlessly clear-eyed about people's failings, including his own, he's also deeply sympathetic. He's the one people call for late-night advice or don't bother to call for months, the one whose couch they crash on, the one whose support they take for granted ("As far as Miles was concerned, I owed him everything and anything, and always would."), the one who performs even such simple tasks as serving as the older guest that the father of a younger friend can relate to at a dinner party. He can be wry, even mordant, about the people he knows, as in this description:

Millie Ferguson got ambushed by mirrors, stuck to them like a pinned butterfly, and who wouldn't if they looked like her? People wanted either to be Millie or fuck her, or both.

He can also be piercingly epigrammatic:

He sounded like one of the Beat era's antique raconteurs, frozen in the dead past, who greeted every new person he met with the same stale bouquet of self-glorifying memories.

The few authentically educated, earnest people in the art world wake up contemplating suicide five mornings every week.

To answer that you would need to define what a good person is, and whether purity of heart requires having only one reason for doing anything.

Boredom can be viewed as a kind of fossil fuel, poured into inertia and ignited with fabulous results, but I am skeptical of this view, which reeks of unempirical optimism.

But ultimately, despite all he's seen, his primary characteristic is simply caring, earnestly and powerfully wanting to believe that our failings need not trap us in our solitary hells. "I could never summon the right words, the right help. I could never save anybody," he says, but he keeps trying nonetheless, even as he also tries to maintain a brutally realistic view of life:

This is how it was, or how I was, that summer: I wanted to accept the world in its true condition, as it hurtled to its stony end. To meet it on its own filthy terms. Even force some pleasure out of it, though I couldn't.

His care and concern for his friends, even as they infuriate and damage him and one another, is electric and unforgettable.

The novel ends with a funeral in lower Manhattan, a memorial for a character whom we've realized was doomed from the start, but whose eventual end still comes as a surprise. The service is strained by being both a public event for the arts world and a private event for his friends, and the vampires of culture batten onto it and try to make it their own. But when their cruelties are ultimately overwhelmed by real, human grief, the effect is astonishingly powerful--so much so that when we realize that the funeral is happening on September 10, 2001, the date, unbelievably, doesn't feel like a cheap shot. Rather, the lessons we've learned about love and loss from this novel are so strong that they force us to acknowledge and think anew about the horrors that will descend the next day and throughout the ensuing years--the way that no loss, no matter its cause, can never really be made good.

For those are ultimately the twinned points of Do Everything in the Dark: love and loss. As well as any work of art I've encountered, it makes clear how love can transcend, even thrive in the face of, the most grotesque faults; how it can be richer, deeper, stronger than the forces, external or internal, that are always tearing away at it. It's Forster's age-old "only connect": our love may not be able to save anyone--hell, death guarantees that it can't--but it's all we have to offer, so try we must. The narrator counsels a friend, "This is the only life we have, and it's short. Very short." Of such brevity is the fierce urgency of Gary Indiana and Roberto Bolano made; of such love and loss they make their indelible memorials.

Short stories

In a recent e-mail exchange, a friend who occasionally teaches writing asked me if I had any recommendations of great short stories that he might add to his syllabus. Though I have certain favorites--Flannery O'Connor, Kafka, and J. F. Powers, for example--my general preference for the capacious strangeness of the novel makes me a relatively poor resource when it comes to the short story. Especially when set against my friend's classroom-honed knowledge of the form, I figured initially that I didn't have anything to contribute.

Then in quick succession, I thought of three stories . . . one of which, despite its perfection, I can't really recommend for a writing teacher, while the other two aren't actually stories. Clearly I was on to something!

I've written about the first story already: it's "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots," from Georgi Gospodinov's And Other Stories (2007). Running to a mere three pages, it's spare and starkly emotional, shot through with loss and the cruelties of fate--yet it shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a writing class. A bare-bones summary, draining the story of its careful language and unexpected perception, will I think make clear the reason: A man and a woman meet in an airport for a couple of hours, during which time they realize that they're soulmates who simply never found each other until that moment, a moment that must inevitably end forever when the woman gets on her plane. See what I mean? My own history as a fiction writing student tells me you're likely to get plenty of that sort of crap without in any way encouraging it. Read and marvel at the story, but please keep it far from any syllabus.

My second suggestion I've also written about recently: it comes from pages 222-24 of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (2007), an account by Joaquin Font of a day's thoughts as he sits in El Reposo Mental Health Clinic in Mexico City. Hypnotic and repetitive, larded with cryptic references, it barely delivers any information to help the reader place Font or the woman whose loss he's lamenting, yet in its obsessive tying of a tragic memory to the creeping progress of the slow seconds of painful thought, it achieves an undeniable power. Is it a short story? Not really, being an important part of a sprawling, 650-page novel--but I could imagine it serving as a bracing example of the possibilities of the form at its most compact.

Compared to my final example, the preceding one might as well be "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," for this last one is not in any conceivable way a short story. And yet . . . over the weekend, discussing PJ Harvey's best album, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), with rocketlass and our friend Carrie, I began to describe "You Said Something," the album's most memorable song (excepting perhaps the four minutes of towering lust that are "This Is Love") . . . and I soon realized that the account I was giving of the song was far more detailed than any straightforward reading of the lyrics would allow. Yet I felt that I was only drawing out what was already there, unsaid, perhaps, but deeply felt. Let's see what you think.

I'll respect Harvey's copyright enough to point you to this site rather than reprinting the full lyrics here; it's probably best if you read them before you continue reading this. The song is only twenty-six lines long, seven of which, repeated, form what there is of a chorus, so the simple summary is easy: the singer finds herself on a rooftop in Brooklyn at one in the morning with a friend, looking out over Manhattan. As one does on a rooftop at night, they lean out and take in the view, "acting like lovers"; later (or perhaps another night) they take his car to Manhattan, where they do the same. And somewhere in there, the singer tells us, her companion says something "that I've never forgotten."

Pretty simple, right? But, oh, how much is conveyed by those few facts, by the tone and mood they set, by the minimal details on offer! The setting--late-night Manhattan viewed across the East River--is inherently romantic, but it's not until we get to the line "acting like lovers" that we're sure what's going on: these two are friends . . . but there has always been the tense awareness that more might be possible, and this wee-hours climb has ratcheted up that tension considerably. Even as they both sense what's going on they're leaning against the railings, trying to pretend all is as usual--yet the singer finds herself holding her breath, waiting--and we can't help but share her shudder of anticipation and guilty excitement. It's possible that they've both got other commitments, of which parts of their brains are trying to remind them, and yet here they are, together, drawn inextricably into one another's orbit.

Then the song moves on: they journey to Manhattan, and the singer tells herself, "I'm doing nothing wrong / riding in your car"--the sort of attempt at denial only necessary when patently untrue, a self-deception guaranteed to fool no one, least of all oneself. They take the elevator to the eighth floor, singing all the way to the radio they've just left behind in the car, the singing a nervous yet companionable way to avoid the very real risks posed by speech at that moment, risks topped only by those of the physical proximity that they can do nothing about. On the rooftop again, alone together . . . he says something.

And there the song ends, defying our expectations and in the process nearing the sublime. In her chorus, the singer has told us again and again about her companion's statement, which is "really important" and which she's "never forgotten"; given its place in the structure of the song, we assume we'll learn what he said--yet by denying us that satisfaction, Harvey both highlights the spareness of her story and gives it an undeniable verisimilitude. It takes a rigor that's beyond me to believe that this isn't an account of a real incident in her life; she's willing to turn it into a song, yet unwilling to sully the essence of that moment by sharing--and thus betraying--the private words of her friend. What we get instead is the mood and the feel of an encounter, the frisson generated by the lies we tell ourselves when we're considering doing something we know is wrong. Sung over a churning 6/8 beat, led by a guitar figure that rises, then falls in an embroidered refraction of itself, the lyrics convey that unforgettable feeling of surrendering--almost willfully--one's moorings to what one tells oneself is an inexorable pull.

Perhaps it's the Nick Jenkins in me overpowering whatever tiny bit of Lord Byron I also embody, but I tend to think that what her companion said stopped things where they stood, that this friendship stayed just that. The alternate reading is less convincing: the ensuing events surely would overwhelm that moment of speech, make it ultimately forgettable. But part of what's glorious about this song is that very ambiguity: Harvey offers us just enough to make us wonder, without closing off the wide range of possibilities.

So no, "You Said Something" is not a short story--but it carries many of the glories of the form, elliptical yet forceful, evocative rather than explicit, suggestive and stark. If one of the characteristics of art is that it opens rather than closes interpretation, leads to questions rather than offers answers, then "You Said Something" certainly qualifies.

"of all stars the most beautiful"

From Sappho fragment 24a, translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (2002)

] you will remember
] for we in our youth
    did these things


yes many and beautiful things
]
]
   ]

Reading those lines, I couldn't help but think of Roberto Bolano and the herculean work of preservation and regeneration he accomplished in The Savage Detectives, reviving and remaking a long-lost culture of poetry and bohemianism and lust and vagabondage. The world he shows us is suffused with the ardors and energies of youth, yet--because within the novel we are hearing about the events later--tinged with the inevitability of loss.

Contra Sappho, I in my youth did not really do these things--I was always too staid and uncertain to even truly want to live a life of extravagance or emotional abandon--but I thrill to Bolano's reminder that yes, others did, with all their hearts, these many and beautiful things.

Regresando a Bolano

Some follow-up thoughts on Roberto Bolano and The Savage Detectives, about which I wrote at length last week.

1 In that post last week, I wrote:

[O]ne of the most interesting aspects of The Savage Detectivesis that, much as long stretches of it are about living a bohemian poet's life in Mexico, the country itself is in an odd way not that central to the novel. . . .[U]ltimately Mexico is simply another stop on the anti-bourgeois world circuit of crummy apartments and beater cars and bad neighborhoods that serve as the unwilling refuge of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and their ilk, from Paris to Israel to Liberia to San Diego. Mexico City is perhaps more compelling, more unforgettable than those other places because the poets' circle of compatriots and enemies is ultimately concentrated there, woven into the very fabric of the streets and cafes. But the book--like its subjects--is too big for Mexico alone; it is determined to encompass the world.

Via e-mail a few days later, Scott Esposito, editor of the Quarterly Conversation, argued that the role of Mexico in The Savage Detectives is a bit more important and complicated than I'd made it seem:

I think what you say about the Mexico in the book is true--it being one of the many bohemian destinations on Ulises' and Arturo's paths, and the political aspects not taking very overt form--but I also think the place holds special meaning for Bolano. To me, this comes out most in the final part when they're off in the desert looking for Cesaria. This Sonoran landscape, the utter bleakness mixed with these sunbleached villages, seems to have fascinated Bolano greatly and I think is tied up in this search for purity and fathers that is so central to his books. Of course, part of this reading is based on 2666, in which this Mexican landscape plays a far more central role. For what it's worth, I lived in Mexico for about 14 months, and Bolano's descriptions of that country seem completely accurate to me, not only in the way things are described, but in the parts of Mexican society Bolano chooses to highlight as meaningful and/or idiosyncratic. They're always exactly the things I would be telling my friends about whenever I discussed Mexico.

I love that both Scott and Bolano, a transplanted Chilean, hit upon the same aspects of Mexican life as being noteworthy. And he's definitely right about Bolano's fascination with Mexico; I didn't write about this before, but for all of Bolano's attention to people and their peregrinations, he also offers, here and there throughout the novel, effective and even lyrical descriptions of the cities and landscape of Mexico, accounts that are can only be the product of careful, even loving attention.

Now I'm even more excited about 2666. Must be patient. Plenty of other things to read.

2 If, after all my raving, you're still not sure that The Savage Detectives is for you, try this test: go to your local bookstore (or, if you're too lazy to put some pants on, to Amazon, where you can use the "Search inside the book function"), turn to page 222, and read the testimony of Joaquin Font from El Reposo Mental Health Clinic in Mexico City. It begins:

Sometimes I think about Laura Damian. Not often. Four or five times a day. Eight or sixteen times if I can't sleep, which makes sense since there's room for a lot of memories in a twenty-four hour day.

And it gets sadder from there.

Font's account runs about two pages, and, plucked out of Bolano's six-hundred-plus-page novel, it can stand on its own as a compact and powerful short story, impressionistic and moving. (I know because I couldn't help reading it aloud to rocketlass.) Set in context, it becomes wrenching and almost unbearably sad. If, on reading it in the bookstore, you aren't impressed, this book is not for you.

3 In my earlier post, I pointed out that though it's entirely possible that Bolano invented some of the many books mentioned in The Savage Detectives, the sheer number of unfamiliar titles was going to prevent me from adding any to the ever-growing catalog of the Imaginary Library. I'm confident enough about the spuriousness of one book, however, to go ahead and add it: The New Age and the Iberian Ladder, by Hernando Garcia Leon. A three-hundred-fifty-page account of a religious dream vision, it appears in a section at the end (one of the book's few ineffective sequences) where Bolano lets a handful of writers--successful and unsuccessful, artists and hacks, collaborators and resistors--tell of their careers.

If the author's relatively brief summary of his vision is anything to go by, The New Age and the Iberian Ladder must be at least as awful and unreadable as its title, a book that is likely to sit forlorn on the imaginary shelves of the imaginary library and grow imaginary cobwebs for a very real eternity.

Two tiny bits of Bolano for your weekend

Not much time tonight, but since--if my conversations the past few days are anything to go by--it's Roberto Bolano weekend, I want to share a couple of memorable lines. First, I loved this metaphor from Amulet (1999, translated into English in 2006 by Chris Andrews)

Hold on, let me try to remember. Let me stretch time out like a plastic surgeon stretching the skin of a patient under anaesthesia.

I often think of narratives that stretch time as somehow tricking it or distracting it--pulling one over on it, in a sense. Maybe they were anaesthetizing it all along?

I've just started Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996, translated into English in 2008 by Chris Andrews), which is striking because Bolano's prose is cast in a completely different register from the cascading first-person narration of The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Amulet; instead, this collection of biographies of imaginary fascist writers is composed in imitation of the detachment of an encyclopedia. I've only read a couple of entries so far, but one passage jumped out at me, its wry deadpan evoking the casual cruelties of Waugh or Nabokov:

As the second child of Edelmira Thompson, Juan realized at an early age that he could do whatever he liked with his life. He tried his hand at sports (he was a passable tennis player and an appalling race-car driver).

The precision and balance of that line--the bouncing consonance and assonance of "passable tennis player" and "appalling race-car driver"--are so strong that I want to go find the Spanish, learn how much of that perfection belongs to Bolano and how much to Chris Andrews. If I'm able to track it down, I'll be sure to share it.

OMG isn't The Savage Detectives like the best thing ever ever ever?

The headline for this too-long post is the full text of an e-mail I sent earlier this week to the wife of an old friend, upon learning that, like me, she'd been reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and, like me, had been flat-out raving to her spouse about it. At that point, with only about thirty pages of 648 left to go, critical thinking was nearly impossible, a shriek of sheer astonishment all I could muster.

A couple of days later I'm still a bit gobsmacked. If you'd described the bare bones of Bolano's novel to me--young Bohemian Mexican and South American poets wander Mexico City and the world smoking, drinking, fucking, disputing about poetry, and cadging money to support those activities--I would never have imagined it to be my kind of book. I read On the Road at twenty-one and hated it, seeing in it little but the sort of feckless abandon that would have gotten me fired from any of the three jobs that were helping me stay in college. If you'd added a description of Bolano's rushing and tumbling prose style, the digressions within digressions, and the seeming formlessness of the first hundred or so pages, I would have quietly set the book down and walked slowly out of the bookstore. In fact, the hints of those characteristics that came through in the numerous laudatory reviews the book received on publication in English were--along with a reluctance to join the burgeoning Bolano bandwagon--enough to keep me away from the book for a full year.

Yet here I am, absolutely enthralled by what Bolano's achieved. I could try to explain it--how, in an act of preservation worthy of Proust, he resurrects a lost world of poets and failed rebels, presenting a milieu, an ethos, and a demimonde that weren't even ever well-enough known to be considered long-forgotten; how the chorus of voices he develops through the oral histories of the novel's middle section offers story after story about the ways people try to live with their art and their ideals in a world that cares little for either; how without being overtly political, he conveys the dread and danger of South America's 1970s collapse into totalitarianism and destruction; how he invests the book's two central (yet largely absent) characters, the elusive poetic champions Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, with a complexity and a mystery that renders their persistence in the memories of those who knew them completely convincing; how he wields his prose, especially at the end of each interpolated minor story, with the precision of a cruel neurosurgeon, eliciting gasps of horror, amazement, and simple, unadulterated empathy; how by simply not mentioning a character for four hundred pages he forces us to accumulate terrifying reserves of dread; of how he truly convinces us that poetry can matter--but others have described all that at length. If you want more of that sort of detail, Scott Esposito wrote well about The Savage Detectives in the Quarterly Conversation, Daniel Zalewski wrote about it for the New Yorker; and Benjamin Kunkel covered the book for the London Review of Books. And there's more where those came from.

Instead, as I continue to bob in the eddies of Bolano's masterpiece, I'm inclined to just share some disconnected thoughts.

1 I've long held to a theory--the sort that's quite fun to propound, so long as one is ready to simply fold under sustained critical assault at, say, a successful cocktail party--that when an American writer sends his or her characters to Mexico, a reader might as well close the book: nothing more of value is going to happen. Mexico as a symbol is just too tempting, serving as a crutch to help writers set up dramatic thematic oppositions, to force their too-civilized characters to confront their more elemental selves. In the heat and poverty of Mexico, where life is cheap and tequila cheaper . . . you get the idea. {Note: this does not apply to writers who begin their stories in Mexico. Thus The Adventures of Augie March, after its bravura opening half, gets chucked; The Power and the Glory does not. The only novel I can think of off the top of my head that escapes this trap is James M. Cain's Serenade--and it only squeaks by because its larger concerns are elsewhere.}

Obviously that rule wouldn't apply to Mexican (or, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think, South American) writers. But one of the most interesting aspects of The Savage Detectives is that, much as long stretches of it are about living a bohemian poet's life in Mexico, the country itself is in an odd way not that central to the novel: there's none of the sense of deep-rooted corruption and failed revolutionary ideals that one gets in Carlos Fuentes, for example, and while there are hints of the ghostliness of Juan Rulfo, ultimately Mexico is simply another stop on the anti-bourgeois world circuit of crummy apartments and beater cars and bad neighborhoods that serve as the unwilling refuge of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and their ilk, from Paris to Israel to Liberia to San Diego. Mexico City is perhaps more compelling, more unforgettable than those other places because the poets' circle of compatriots and enemies is ultimately concentrated there, woven into the very fabric of the streets and cafes. But the book--like its subjects--is too big for Mexico alone; it is determined to encompass the world.

2 The Savage Detectives is crammed with names of poets and their books, ranging from the well-known (the oft-derided Octavio Paz) to the lesser-known (Did Kenneth Fearing really write poetry? Apparently he did, and it was translated into Spanish.) to those who, to an English-speaking reader, might as well be made up. If I were slightly more energetic, I'd go to the trouble of making notes of all the names in order to determine whether any belong in the Imaginary Library; as is, I'll let them be, unknown and uncertain, a testament to Bolano's fascination with the failed and forgotten, the detritus--deserved or not--of literary ambition. {But the Imaginary Library is a collaborative project, so if anyone has the patience and time . . . }

3 Near the end of the novel, Bolano deliberately puts his book-long litany of lost poets into perspective by throwing out a similar list of forgotten bullfighters. Each art has its heroes and stars, but the obscure toilers are essential, too; one way to read The Savage Detectives is as one big tip of the cap, or a nearly futile valentine, to all of them. I'm awed by Albert Pujols, but there'll forever be a place in my heart for Miguel Mejia, too.

4 The constant wanderings of Bolano's characters give me the urge to get a giant map of Mexico City and map out their various paths and note important nodes. In his Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti did that for a batch of books, most notably Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, to great effect; I wonder what we'd learn from seeing a map of Bolano's Mexico City?

5 Or of the world--encompassing the characters' travels to Sonora, San Diego, Los Angeles, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, the Costa Brava, Tel Aviv, and unknown locations between. What would such a map show us about Bolano's vision?

6 The Savage Detectives also makes me want to write poetry. Which, if past performance guarantees future results, would be a bad idea.

7 And it makes me want to read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, some lines from which form the epigraph to Bolano's novel. Despite being grotesquely fascinated by Lowry's life, I've stayed away from his masterpiece because of the hardcore hatred of a couple of trusted friends--but Bolano may have sold me. We'll see.

8 It also makes me want to believe Bolano when he writes:

[C]onversations in bed do oscillate between the cryptic and the transparent.

and

Ah, what a relief to come into the the light, even when it's a shadowy half-light, what a relief to come where it's clear.

and

[N]o, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.

and

If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy, right?

9 Possibly more than all of these things, The Savage Detectives makes me want to give away copies, a project I've already embarked on, having just this evening given away my first copy to my friend Erin. If she enjoys it a third as much as I did . . .

Sorry, Helen DeWitt, but this book might (at least temporarily) replace The Last Samurai as my default gift to friends who are serious readers.

10 Finally . . . could there be a better book with which to kick off summer? Especially here in Chicago, where we skipped spring and went straight into, if I may steal a line from Scott at erasing.org, "atomic rainforest"? Summer reading--regardless of what the book review supplements would have you think--should be all-encompassing, unforgettable, world-changing, creating a sort of internal sweat commensurate with the external.

One usually ought to avoid harking back to high school, but when thinking of summer reading, one could do worse than to remember the vast changes in worldview that were possible over a summer when one was sixteen, the drama and force that could be packed into those three months. September rolls around, and you're a different--and, one hopes, a better--person.

Summer reading: aim high; read Bolano.

Sometimes you really do have to just put the book down.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Having taken Dr. Johnson to task a couple of weeks ago for his carelessness with books (which, as Jenny Davidson pointed out in a comment to the post, could more properly be called destructiveness, as he was known for breaking spines and even tearing out whole sections), I had to smile when I came across an incident of far more distracted and bizarre behavior in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (1998, English translation by Natasha Wimmer published in 2007). Ulises Lima, one of the mysterious pair of visceral realist poets around whom the whole novel rotates, is, like many of the characters in the novel, almost pathologically focused on literature . . . but even that didn't prepare me for the testimony of his friend Simone Darrieux:

He was a strange person. He wrote in the margins of books. I'm glad I never lent him any of mine. Why? Because I don't like people to write in my books. You won't believe this, but he used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. Almost all his books were wet. At first I thought it was the rain. Ulises was a big walker. He hardly ever took the metro. He walked back and forth across Paris and when it rained he got soaked because he never stopped to wait for it to clear up. So his books, at least the ones he read most often, were always a little warped, sort of stiff, and I thought it was from the rain. but one day I noticed that he went into the bathroom with a dry book and when he came out the book was wet. That day my curiosity got the better of me. I went up to him and pulled the book away from him. Not only was the cover wet, some of the pages were too, and so were the notes in the margins, some maybe even written under the spray, the water making the ink run, and then I said, for God's sake, I can't believe it, you read in the shower! have you gone crazy? and he said he couldn't help it but at least he only read poetry (and I didn't understand why he said he only read poetry, not at the time, but now I do: he meant that he only read two or three pages, not a whole book), and then I started to laugh, I threw myself on the sofa, writhing in laughter, and he started to laugh too, both of us laughed for I don't know how long.

When set against the image of someone taking notes in the shower, Samuel Johnson's destructiveness seems almost mild--and Gabriel Gudding's writing of his 426-page Rhode Island Notebook (2007) while driving seems almost sane.

Note to rocketlass: these examples serve to point out that I could always be worse!