Reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño – The End

And so I come to the end of the Group Read of Robert Bolaño’s very long novel, 2666. I’ve been thinking of how I can describe how I feel about it.

A long time ago I went to a special exhibition, at the Saint Louis Art Museum, of the paintings of Max Beckmann. Beckmann is generally classified as an expressionist. SLAM has the largest public collection of Beckmann paintings in the world, probably because Beckmann taught art here at Washington University during the last years of his life. They were exhibiting the works they owned and, I believe, other works lent for the exhibition.

Three of us went to see the exhibition: me, my long time friend Leslie and my sister CB. Leslie is one of those people who has a natural eye for art. Her dad was a professional photographer and Leslie always had the ability to notice and appreciate small details in art that eluded me. She really enjoyed the exhibition and I was glad to have her along because she pointed out things to me that I might not have noticed on my own. My sister, CB, on the other hand did not enjoy it. We found her, at the end of the galleries, sitting on a bench in the center of the room with her eyes closed. “This gave me a headache,” she announced. “Can we please get out of here.”

I could understand how the art gave her a headache. It was harshly colored and portrayed ugly people doing ugly things. I sympathized with her. It didn’t give me a headache but I was more than willing to leave. Leslie thought the art was great. Me? I was glad I could appreciate it better because of Leslie’s insights but on the whole I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. It wasn’t my style. I didn’t regret seeing it, though, because I had learned about it and I had learned I didn’t like it and I could put it behind me. Walking out of the museum that day I found that I was in the minority. The people leaving seemed to fall into either Leslie or CB’s camp. They loved it or hated it.

I’ve never intentionally gone into the Beckmann galleries at SLAM again.

It seems to me that the reactions to 2666 are similar to our three reactions to the Beckmann exhibition. For a lot of people, it seems to have given them a metaphorical headache. During the group read I saw people talking about how many people just couldn’t take it, especially the Part About the Crimes. Some of the people who started reading with the group dropped out. Others proclaimed that this novel “rocked my world”.

Me? Like the Beckmann exhibition, which I don’t think I would have gotten much out of without Leslie, I’m glad I read it while others were reading and discussing it. I don’t regret reading it because I learned that, whatever style or genre this is, I don’t like it. I don’t see what the others who love it see in it. There was nothing in it that gave me a headache that made me want to run from it. But I don’t need to read anything like it again.

Before I began reading 2666, I didn’t want to know anything about it. I like to come to novels without a lot of preconceived notions. I don’t like spoilers. The only thing I knew about it was that it had won an award and it had something to do with the murders of a lot of women in Mexico. Now that I’ve finished it, I decided to go read what the critics had to say about it.

The reviews that I find are uniformly good. A “masterpiece”; “complete, achieved and satisfying”, “a difficult novel to shake off”. Most of the time they admit that it was unfinished when Bolaño died. The other day I read that a sixth part was found among Bolaño’s papers. If that is true then I don’t see how anyone can really definitively interpret this novel as it was published. Because to interpret it as it is now would require you to say that Bolaño intended there to be no “real” ending. Perhaps that’s true or perhaps the new Part Six will show otherwise.

What I find very odd, however, is that almost none of the critics say what I think is obvious about this novel. It’s a mess. This is novel written by someone who died before it was finished and it really needed the author to have lived through the editing process. That didn’t happen and it shows. I really can’t take reviews seriously that don’t even mention this. Obviously the critics think this novel works despite the mess. Or maybe it works because of the mess. Maybe they are right; maybe they are wrong. But I don’t see how you review this novel without stating the obvious mess that it is.

Of course, Bolaño himself didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the critics he created as characters for his novel. So I see no reason why I should defer to the real critics. This is an unfinished novel and it shows.

Perhaps I should have started with a different Bolaño novel, but I started with this one. I intensely disliked the way he wrote women (although I should say that in the last section he creates a wonderful woman character in Lotte). I was bored by all the diversions into side stories. I didn’t like his verbose style which pervaded every section except The Part About the Crimes which was my favorite section. He never made me care what happened to the characters. No, not a single character. I gave up thinking that the novel was going to “go” anywhere and by the last section was reconciled that he had no intention of letting anything really be wrapped up or come together. Throughout the read I watched the other readers who were carefully documenting lists of the deaths and other details – as thought it would all be relevant at some point. I wondered if it would all come together at the end and I would want to go back and see how the puzzle fit together. But by the last section I knew that wasn’t going to happen. It was like Bolaño threw a bunch of puzzle pieces in a box but they weren’t necessarily all to the same puzzle so you were never going to be able to see the picture.

The darkness of the story did not bother me. The seeming pointlessness of it did. And what really bothered me about it was … I never thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. It just did not grab me intellectually. I think that’s why I was never even tempted to try to go participate in any of the discussions about it. I just didn’t see the point in spending a lot of time trying to figure it out.

So now it’s over and I will put it behind me. I wonder if I will think about it again.

Reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño – Weeks 13 and 14

We are up to week 14, and have finished through page 830, in the Group Read of 2666.  Only one more week and 62 pages to go.  That’s good because if, for instance, there were another 300 pages I would be giving up.  That’s partly why I’m cheating and doing two weeks at once – last week’s and this week’s.   Because I’ve grown tired of this novel and am having a hard time forcing myself to think about it.

A few thoughts.

1.  Hans Reiter changes his name to Benno von Archimboldi in this section.  It occurred to me to wonder if the name Reiter is pronounced “Writer” or “reeter”.   In any event, Hans Reiter has written a novel and found a publisher and taken a nom de plume.  His girlfriend speculates that it is because he expects to be famous some day.   He says it is because he escaped from an American POW camp after the war and he is still eluding them.  He then ponders the fact that the people he knows are famous are people like Hitler. 

2.  Reiter has been fighting for Germany in the East during the war and for a while finds shelter in a strange town that is deserted.  The original residents were Jews and now they are gone.  At first Reiter seems indifferent to this.  But then he finds a notebook of one of the residents who had been a big believer in the communist revolution but gradually became disillusioned and then returned to the village where he was probably taken away to be killed.  This affects Reiter.   Later, in a POW camp Reiter meets a man named Sammer who had been responsible for arranging the mass murder of hundreds of Jews, but who seems to feel no real responsibility for it.  Reiter killed no one during the war.  But he murders Sammer.  That’s another reason he thinks he’d better change his name.

3.  Reiter seems to have been deeply affected by the atrocities committed by Germany.  When he hears a story about a German who killed himself because of some slander perpetrated by Hermann Goring against him Reiter says: '”  So he didn’t kill himself because of the death camps or the slaughter on the front lines or the cities in flames, but because Goring called him an incompetent?”  He goes on to say: “Maybe Goring was right.”    Reiter’s publisher, Mr.  Bubbis also is deeply affected by the actions of the Germans.  He is appalled that so many writers whom he published before the war joined the Nazis.  Escaping to London, he watched the Blitz from his window without even bothering to take shelter.  It seems to me that Bolaño is comparing the horror and the sense of responsibility that Reiter and Mr. Bubbis feel for what happened in their country with not only the other Germans but with the people who hear about the murders of the women in Santa Theresa and do nothing.

4. There was one part of this reading that I enjoyed.  Reiter needs to rent a typewriter to type his manuscript and he pays a man who says he used to be a writer.  This man gives him advice about writing and he says (I hope I get this right) that the difference between a good book and a masterpiece is that the masterpiece is written by the writer and the good book is written by someone else even though they are written by the same person.  In other words, the masterpiece is the truth that comes out of the writer but the good book is not a masterpiece because it is avoiding the truth in some way or obscuring the truth.   He says:   “Jesus is the masterpiece.  The thieves are minor works.  Why are they there?  Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”    Maybe this is why I liked The Part about the Crimes.  The brutal laying out of the crimes for page after page after page – Bolaño was trying something new as a way to get to the truth.  Not the truth about who did it.  But the truth that most people don’t care and it’s easy to become numb to it.

And that’s about it.   Next week = The End.

Reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño – Week 12

We are in week 12 of the Group Read of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.  After finishing The Part About the Crimes we have now moved into The Part About Archimboldi. 

My thoughts:

1.  What to say?   I’m really at a loss.  I expected to like this section if only because I read, in multiple places, that the last Part was the best.  But after the spareness of The Part About the Crimes we are now back to what I consider the “normal” Bolaño style in this novel and I’m finding myself unable to concentrate.  I’ll read a couple of paragraphs and realize that my eyes have been moving across the page but I’ve taken nothing in.  All these words.  Ugh.  ( I feel like the Emperor in Amadeus:  “too many words!”).  But all these words and nothing to show for it.  Just like the first three parts.   I find myself thinking “this BETTER be going somewhere” which isn’t at all the attitude to take with a novel.

2.  This Part reminds me a bit of The Part About the Critics because it is a chronological telling of every minute detail of the life of a character.   But at least in The Part About the Critics we didn’t start with the birth of any character; we started with their introduction to the work of Archimboldi and progressed from there.  Here we are learning about the entire life of Hans Dieter in all of its incredible minutiae.  Assuming that Dieter really is Archimboldi, maybe Bolaño is trying to tell readers not to get to interested in the lives of novelists because you’ll be disappointed at how boring they are.  

3.  Again, no good women characters.  A teutonic baroness who has a lot of sex in Dracula’s castle which other characters watch through peepholes. Really.  I’m not making that up.  Another woman who likes bathtubs.   A one eyed mother (that’s the only thing of interest about her, that she’s blind in one eye).   Maybe she’s supposed to be some symbol of mythic fate?   I think it was the fates who only had one eye between them and they passed it around.  But if she is, it isn’t apparent to me. 

By the end of this section of reading I decided that I am never reading another Bolaño novel based solely on his inability to write credible woman characters. Which may not actually be completely fair because he doesn’t always write credible male characters.  I’m certainly not finding Hans Dieter credible.  A small child who wants to stay underwater all the time?  But at least Bolaño writes a few male characters in a way that makes them seem like fully developed characters and not caricatures.  His women characters are atrocious.  It’s not just that the men treat them like one dimensional beings – THAT may be a point of the novel that is worth considering – but that Bolaño doesn’t write them in any way that makes them more than caricatures.

I do keep coming back in my mind to the first part in which Bolaño had the woman critic, Norton, end up with the one man who actually listened to her and their relationship was not solely about sex.  I didn’t think Norton was a well written, well developed character.  But she’s the only woman in this entire novel who seems to have ended up with a man who tried to understand her and not have her fit into his own idea of what she was.

4.  Lots and lots of words.  Words that seem completely superfluous.  Descriptions of underwater plant life that go on and on.   And on and on.   Why?   Because Hans Dieter’s favorite book is a book about underwater plant life and he can’t stop himself from swimming around underwater.

5.  Now that the Part About the Crimes is over I find myself trying to construct the timeline of the novel in my mind and going back in time to the 1920’s just makes me frustrated.  But since Norton is the only character that ends well, I find myself hoping that her story is the end of the timeline.  This is probably a false hope since this is, so far, not a very hopeful novel.  But since some of the other readers have compared it to Pulp Fiction that is what comes to mind for me.  A lot of violence and death but some hope at the end.  If you can figure out where the end really is.

But on the whole I really can’t think of anything good to say about this particular week’s reading.  Except that it’s finished. 

I think part of the problem is that I liked The Part About the Crimes.  I didn’t love it.  It was horrific in some ways.  But despite the constant, repetitive descriptions of the murdered women it had a force, an energy about it.   It felt like Bolaño was excited to be writing it.   That he was trying things.  That he was trying something different.  I don’t think he succeeded, but he tried.  There is no way that The Part About the Crimes could be published by itself as a solo novel and be successful.  Most people wouldn’t get past the first 10 pages.  In some ways it is the contrast of the style of The Part About the Crimes with the style of the rest of the novel that gives it context, that makes it work to the extent that it works. But now we’re back to the same old thing.

The plain fact is that I just don’t get this book.  And I don’t like it enough to try to get it.  

I feel particularly whiny this week but I thought maybe the last Part would make it all come together and so far I’m not seeing that.  I feel … disappointed. 

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 11

And so we come to the end of The Part About the Crimes in the Group Read of Robert Bolaño’s 2666.  Only one part and four more weeks to go.

Here are my thoughts:

1.  This Part, which started as a slow, deliberate, chronological description of the murders of women in Santa Teresa ended in a cacophony.  That’s the only way I can describe it.  By the end of this part Bolaño was telling multiple stories all at the same time.  But like a the bass line below a frenzy of notes on the treble cleff,  the slow chronological telling of the murders of the unknown women continued.  And when the cacophony was finished we were left with a silence that didn’t bring any peace.

2.  As I said last week, this part gives a false sense of narrative flow in the sense that it feels like it is going somewhere and yet the reader can be fairly sure that it is going nowhere.  And the cacophony at the end enhanced this feeling that we were building up to … something.  And yet … nothing happened.

3.  The key character in this part is the reporter from Mexico, Sergio Gonzales who, against his better judgment, is looking into the murders.  In The Part About Fate, the female reporter from Mexico City tells Fate that the previous reporter working on this was killed and the reporter before that disappeared.  The killed reporter must be Sergio.  During the course of this part he discovers that a previous reporter who was covering the story has disappeared.  Sergio is, however, alive and well at the end of this Part.

4.  The drug trade and its possible connection (or maybe not) with the murders is finally introduced.  (I was wondering about that last week.) It is hard to believe that the cover up has nothing to do with the drug trade even if the serial killer isn’t a drug lord.

5.  Bolaño finally introduces a woman character that I felt was real.  Azucena Esquival Plata, “reporter and Congresswoman”.   Not that she seemed any more real than any of the other characters.  I mean, who says things like “At nineteen I began to take lovers.  My sex life is legendary all over Mexico …”?  Do people talk like that in real life?   And who talks incessantly, almost without interruption, for pages and pages and pages?  No one.  But that’s how all the people in this novel talk.  Bolaño doesn’t write realistic dialog for any of his characters so that wasn’t an issue for me.  The reason this female character seems real, I think, is because there really isn’t anything feminine about her, she’s a powerful woman, almost masculine in her power.  Truthfully, in reading her story, it wouldn’t have had to be changed much to come out of the mouth of a man.  So  Bolaño avoids the whole “writing woman” problem by writing her like a man.   But she at least seemed as real as the other male characters.   She tells Sergio the story of her friend Kelly who, it turns out, was providing women for drug trade parties near Santa Teresa and who has now disappeared.  She implores Sergio to investigate. That’s probably why Sergio is now dead.

6.  Haas continues to be intriguing.  He calls a press conference, against the wishes of his lawyer (another woman character who I don’t understand), to announce that he didn’t commit the crimes and to name the persons responsible, the identity of whom he claims to have learned in prison.   Are these the real killers?  Who knows.  We don’t find out, but reporters do start tracking them down. 

7.  There is also, simultaneously, the story of the visiting ex-FBI agent who comes to give a lecture and look into the murders.  His story is part of the cacophony but it goes nowhere.

8.  All in all, I liked the Part About the Crimes the best of all the parts so far.  In fact, I would say that I’ve liked each Part a little bit better than the Part before, but we took a giant leap forward with this Part. I understand that others who have read or who are reading this novel find it hard to make it through this nonstop litany of murder, but I didn’t t see much difference between reading it and watching all three CSI shows week after week. As I’ve said before I thought it was the easiest part to read and it is the only part so far that had any narrative force for me.   On the other hand we didn’t learn much from it.   The murders started being noticed in the early 1990’s and by the end of the 1990s the numbers have reached incredible proportions.  The police investigate but because of ineptness (willful or otherwise) they don’t even have a composite portrait of the serial killer.  Haas is in jail for the crimes but since the crimes continued after his imprisonment he cannot be the killer or, at least, not the only killer.  Anyone who asks too many questions gets killed.  The crimes are taken seriously only by a few people, mostly women like the Congresswoman and the television psychic Florita (another odd woman character)  But even without the crimes, the atmosphere of Santa Teresa is poisonous for women.

And so we move on to the last Part which is called The Part About Archimboldi.  I doubt we’re going to see him “solve” the crimes so the question continues to be “where is this novel going”?  

I remain ambivalent about this novel.  I continue to not find it at all difficult to read my 50 pages a week and I never dread picking it up.  On the other hand I can’t think of a soul that I would recommend this novel to.  And recently when I’ve been at parties and have been asked what I’ve been reading, I’ve had the hardest time making this novel sound at all palatable.  It does not make me want to read another Robert Bolaño novel.  But I don’t feel my time has been wasted.   The biggest failure I think has been that I’ve had no real desire to discuss it with anyone, not even anyone doing the group read. 

But maybe my whole attitude will change in the next Part.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño Week 10

This post is really about Weeks 8, 9 and 10  in the Group Read of Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666 because I took my birthday hiatus and didn’t post about it the last two weeks.  This is unfortunate because I’ve pretty much lost my thoughts for week 8 and 9, at least as separate thoughts. 

But here goes:

1.  It is also unfortunate that I haven’t been posting because this section, The Part About the Crimes, has been my favorite section so far even though … nothing has happened.  I think that by telling the story as a chronological summary of the women who died and the status of the investigation Bolaño creates a sense of narrative flow, even though there really is none.  Reading this, I still have no sense if this novel has a narrative or not.  In other words, at the end will I be able to see a beginning, a middle and an end to some story (maybe not the story I even think I might be reading)?  I have no idea what to expect. 

2.  This false sense of narrative flow seems appropriate for this section.  The police of Santa Teresa are not solving the crimes, they don’t seem to be working very hard to solve the crimes and yet they give the impression of moving forward with investigations.

3.  Bolaño created a compelling character in Klaus Haas.  Not a likeable character (not remotely a likeable character) but a character that compels me to read on and find out more about him.  The fact that he is mostly unmoved by the violence in the prison around him makes him a dangerous character, one who certainly could have committed the murders.  On the other hand, the murders have continued since Haas was imprisoned and so he either isn’t the murderer or isn’t the only murderer. 

4.  In other parts of this novel Bolaño creates characters who are aware of the murders but don’t really focus on them, in this part he has characters who are aware of the drug trade but don’t really focus on it.  Certainly the serial killing might not be by anyone connected with the drug trade, but you would think the police would look into it.  They don’t.   And the little hints that have been thrown that the top police are connected with the drug lords might mean that Klaus Haas was set up to be put in prison for all the murders to take the heat off of whoever is doing it.   It doesn’t seem that the women are connected with the drug trade but someone connected with a drug lord might be a serial killer   A family member perhaps?  Haas certainly seemed guilty of the murder he was investigated for (although a good lawyer might have been able to raise reasonable doubt) but he almost certainly isn’t the actual serial killer.  But he makes a good fall guy to take the heat off of someone else, at least for a while.  I’m interested in the periods during which there are no killings.  Is there someone connected with a powerful person who is out of town during those times?  Or “grounded” and forced to stay inside?  Ah, but I am falling into the trap of thinking this novel is a police procedural and we will find the murderer.  It isn’t.  We might not.  In fact, right now I’d bet that we won’t.

5.  I think one of the reasons I like this part better than the others is because there are so few women in it.   Sounds odd, doesn’t it?  An entire part about the killings of hundreds of women that  doesn’t have women in it?  But the women who are killed are corpses so I don’t count them. Their stores are written in such a procedural style that I can’t think of them as characters.  The family members left behind (if they are known) have some women but we don’t get to know them; we just witness their grief from the outside.  That leaves the insane asylum doctor as the only real women character (although at the end of this week’s reading another woman has been introduced but it isn’t clear if she’ll stay in the story yet).  And the doctor is an enigma.  I continue to think that Bolaño can’t (or won’t) write women.   We never really understand them the way he tries to make us understand his male characters.  And since I find that so frustrating, I find this part, which has no women, a relief.

6.  Still a lot of questions.   Does the fact that Klaus Haas is a tall German mean he is at all connected to Archimboldi?   He is too young to be Archimboldi himself.  But we seem to have lost sight of Archimboldi since The Part About the Critics.  The Part About Amalfitano seemed to take place during a period before Archimboldi allegedly came to Santa Teresa.  It is unclear when The Part About Fate took place but there is no mention of Archimboldi.  This part takes place  before the critic’s visit to Santa Teresa.  But perhaps Klaus Haas will provide an answer to why Archimboldi came to Santa Teresa (I looked at the table of contents, the next part is The Part About Archimboldi). 

7.  Toward the end of this week’s reading we really start getting hit with what a terrible place this is for women.  The sexist jokes told by the police that go on for pages.  The history of Lalo’s family in which almost every birth was the result of rape (although the women seem completely indifferent to the rapes.  Is this because they are strong women or is this because he can’t write women?).  The statistics given my Yolanda (the new woman character) about the number of rapes in Santa Teresa.  It’s astounding.

That’s about it.

Except for a little bit of humor.  Darryl over at Infinite Zombies says we should stick with the book because it gets really good after this section is over:

I don’t remember a whole lot about the final section from when I read it a year ago, but I do remember that it was during that final part that I began to see why people thought this was a good book. Hold on for two more weeks, my friends, and things will get better. The best writing, if I remember correctly, is yet to come.

In other words, once you finish the first 636 pages it’s really great!.  

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week Seven

This week in the online read of 2666 we reached The Part About the Crimes and read the first 50ish pages.

I admit that I was not looking forward to this.  There was so much foreshadowing in the first three parts of the novel that I thought we would be seeing graphic details of the dead women.   It was like watching a movie with lots of atmospheric music; I just knew something was coming.  I usually put my hands over my eyes in those kinds of movies and watch through my fingers.  So I expected to be reading this section that way. 

I also didn’t go into this section with much momentum.  This novel just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.  So the idea of reading graphic violence in pursuit of … nothing?   Didn’t appeal to me.

The first 50 pages wasn’t so bad.  It kept my interest.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week Six

This week the online read of 2666 finished The Part About Fate.  At this point we are finished with more than a third of this novel.  In most novels the first third is the set-up, so I suppose we should expect to move into the main part of the story now.    And, sure enough, the next section begins the part about the murdered women.

I’m not really looking forward to that.  It’s a depressing topic and I don’t really have any momentum moving into it. 

A few thoughts:

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 5

This week the group read moves into the third part of 2666 – The Part About Fate  -- and the venue shifts to the United States and we gain a new character.  

2666 by Robert Bolaño – What to think; What other People are Thinking

Now that we’ve finished two parts of the novel it seems time to start making some judgments, but I find myself at a loss.  I’m not really liking this novel.  But it isn’t a difficult read and I don’t dislike it.  I may be more tolerant of it than I am of most novels  because I only have to read 50ish pages a week.  That’s a light schedule, so I can read plenty of other things.  I might resent it if I was spending more time on it.  On the other hand, if we didn’t have a schedule, I might also be hundreds of pages further into it and have figured out what it is about. 

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 4

For this coming week we were to read all of Part 2 – The Part About Amalfitano. And at last I felt that I understood this novel. At least, I think I understand this novel. I hope I understand this novel.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño – Week 3

The assignment for this coming week was to read to page 159 which brought us to the end of “The Part About the Critics”. Thank god. I was getting really tired of the critics.

Guess what? Liz Norton ditched Pelletier and Espinoza and ended up with …. Morini. What a surprise. Not. He was the only one who treated her like a person. Why wouldn’t she prefer him even if he was wheelchair bound?

We did end up in Mexico finally. Searching for the elusive Archimboldi. We didn’t find him. Well, of course we didn’t find him. If we had found him the novel would be over.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolaño -- Week 2

For the coming week we are supposed to have read up to page 102 in the Group Read of 2666. (Yes I copied the above “Bolaño” from the site to get that little squiggly thing above the n. Windows Live Writer should give us a way to make it ourselves.)

I can’t say that I have any great insights into this novel at this point but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing in a novel this long. It would be like having great insights into your typical 300 page novel at about page 30. On the other hand, the introductory remarks said that RB wanted to publish each part of the novel separately. If so, I’m more than halfway through what would be the first novel (novella?).

It isn’t like anything I’ve ever read before. I can’t at this point compare it to other long novels I’ve read.

I still think it isn’t that difficult to read. I mean this in a very simple sense. It is certainly a difficult novel to understand. But the physical act of reading isn’t difficult. The structure, while it contains some flashbacks, isn’t confusing. In some ways it has been too linear, too much a history of the relationship of these four academics in chronological terms. The lookbacks mostly occur only when one academic needs to be filled in on something that occurred when all four weren’t together. Sometimes I’ve felt that the story hasn’t really started yet. These pages have had the feel of background and I keep expecting that, at some point, we will reach the present and the story will begin. I’m ready for the story to begin.

I haven’t found the vocabulary difficult although the official read site has a post with a glossary so maybe some people do. In terms of a basic who, when, where, why and how I’m not spending any time trying to figure out the who, when and where. I consider that a mark of a novel that is an easy read; being able to focus on only the what, why and how is a luxury. In Hillary Mantel’s novel, Wolf Hall, I spent a lot of time working on the who because of her (apparently intentional) ambiguous use of the pronoun “he”. I’ve had trouble keeping track of who in the Russian novels I’ve read simply because the characters use multiple names. In science fiction novels the where is often unclear. And sometimes the when. Not in this novel. And the what is only unclear in the larger sense. There is no lack of clarity about what each character is doing at the time.

I wonder if other readers have had trouble with the where and when. The group read site has a person keeping track of locations and another keeping track of chronology. Maybe locations become more important later in the book. Maybe this is one of those novels that, when you get to the end, you must immediately re-read simply for structure and not plot elements. But so far I haven’t been confused, while reading, about where they were or when it was.

In short, these second 50ish pages went by almost as fast as the first 50 pages. I did, however, find myself flipping ahead a couple of times to see where my ending point was going to be. I’ll get to that later. And I can’t say at this point I like or I’d recommend this novel. But, again, we’re 100 pages into a 900 page novel.

Early on in this 50ish page segment, the Italian, Morini, decides to visit Liz Norton in London. Morini is not sexually involved with Norton, unlike the other two scholars Pelletier (the Frenchman) and Espinoza (the Spaniard). Morini is in bad health, he has multiple sclerosis, and he is in a wheel chair. He was involved in an unspecified accident that was referred to in the first 50 pages but never described.

That part went by fairly fast for me. Morini is my favorite of the four scholars and I think RB wrote him with that intention. Although I suspect that he only seems deeper than Pelletier and Espinoza because RB lets us into his mind less often than he does with Pelletier and Espinoza. Morini does, however, seem to have more common sense than Pelletier and Espinoza.

Norton has now broken off her affairs with Pelletier and Espinoza and they are even more obsessed with her than before. They are also intrigued by a new man who has appeared in her life. For pages (and pages and pages and pages, it seemed) they obsessed over him and what his relationship with Norton was. Finally they spill their guts to Morini who very sensibly suggests that they ask her. Truthfully, Morini is my favorite simply because Pelletier and Espinoza seem to me to be so transparently unreliable. Whenever the author is omniscient with those two I figure we’re being led down the wrong path. The author is seldom omniscient with Norton and is less omniscient with Morini. But he spends time describing Morini. The way Morini’s reactions to events are portrayed seem either more natural to me than the reactions of the others or, if not natural, worthy of investigation.

I find myself completely bored with Norton. I think that’s because I don’t trust Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s view of her (and their views are always sexual, whether they are thinking of her sexually or wondering if she is thinking of someone else sexually). I thought that when Morini finally visited London we would see the real Liz Norton. I don’t know if that happened. But, in any event, when she is with Morini she seems less interesting than him.

There were only two incidents in this segment that intrigued me. First, while Morini visits Norton she tells him the story of a painter named Johns who cut off his own hand, had it embalmed and incorporated it into one of his art works. Johns is now committed in an asylum. Toward the end of the 50ish pages Pelletier and Espinoza visit Norton and tell her that Morini has become obsessed with a painter named Johns who is in an asylum. They do not realize that Morini heard the story of the painter from Norton. Morini, with the aid of Pelletier and Espinoza, tracked down the painter and visited him in the asylum.

They describe the entire odd experience and how Morini disappeared without saying goodbye and didn’t appear for a long time. They were quite worried about him. Norton tells them that he came to London to tell her his theory about the painter. (She also tells them that she promised not to reveal this to anyone; so she is breaking that promise to Morini).

I have no idea if this part of the story has significance. While I was reading the part where Norton tells Morini the story of Johns (and Morini feels sick to his stomach as he listens) I didn’t find it that interesting although I found Morini’s reaction interesting. But I found it intriguing that Morini would actually track down Johns and I found his reaction to him intriguing. But as I say I don’t know if it has any significance other than as a look into Morini’s psyche.

It’s hard to know what, if anything has any significance, in this novel.

The other incident that intrigued me was a brief discussion that Pelletier and Espinoza had with the new mysterious man in Norton’s life. He tells them to watch out because she is a Medusa. They try to interpret this in their usual scholarly “let’s over-think this” way. Medusa was the only one of the Gorgons who was human and, therefore, could be killed, and if Norton is a Medusa they should feel sorry for her. When Medusa died the winged Pegasus sprang from her head and Pegasus is a symbol of love. I won’t go into the whole theory but let’s just say that it makes them feel tender toward Norton and sure that they are the key to her happiness. Or at least one of them is.

This is one reason I find them unreliable. Yes, all of these things are part of the Medusa myth. But Pelletier and Espinoza are obsessed with Norton and will interpret anything about her in the light that is best for their relationship with her. I found it striking that they didn’t even begin to consider the most obvious meaning.

A Medusa would be a danger to them because she would turn them to stone. Metaphorically. In reality their obsession would mean that they would cease acting – they would become unable to go forward with whatever they were working on. And in fact that is what happened to them. For a very long time they stopped doing much about Archimboldi and simply skated on their reputations. They obsessed about Norton. Each obsessed about his relationship with Norton. Each obsessed about the other’s relationship with Norton. Then Norton dumps them and they obsess about the new guy and her relationship to (or with) him. The story slowed down to a crawl. It was like it was turning to stone.

Of course there are other interpretations. But they didn’t even really consider that Norton could be BAD for them. They also didn’t consider the interpretation that the only way to really understand Norton is not to look directly at her (her looks, her direct actions, her direct words) but to look at her indirectly. In other words, not to take her at face value. (Perseus defeated Medusa by looking at her in a mirror while he slew her. That way she couldn’t turn him to stone.) I don’t know if that’s a good interpretation because not enough about Norton has been revealed. She may, in fact, be a very simple person and her glamor (in the true sense of the word) may be something they have imbued her with because of their own competition.

And the whole thing might mean nothing because we know next to nothing about this mysterious man and he may just have been saying something he thought was insulting to Norton.

Other than that I found nothing too intriguing in these 50ish pages.

By the end we have finally gotten to Mexico, but only through a story related to the scholars about a person who met the mysterious Archimboldi there.

I was less tolerant of this 50 pages than I was with the first 50. There was a lot of ink expended on Pelletier’s and Espinoza’s obsession with Norton and, as I’ve said, RB hasn’t given me enough about Norton to understand this obsession. She seems ordinary and boring to me in all ways except that she was willing to carry on affairs with two friends simultaneously. And that just made me think she had bad judgment. Combine that with her story of her unhappy marriage to someone she describes as abusive and the obnoxious way that she allowed the mysterious new man to treat her in the one scene where they are together and she seems to have really bad judgment when it comes to men.

In any event, she isn’t actually in the many pages that are spent describing the obsession of Pelletier and Espinoza. RB spent pages (and pages and pages) on a long (I assume) digression about how they go whoring once she breaks up with them and the different effects this has on them. It was around this time that I started looking to see how many pages were left in this assignment.

I’ve never found stories of men’s obsession with sex and thoughts of women as sexual objects that interesting. I get even less interested in men’s thoughts about women they are using as sexual objects but whom they think they are interested in as a person. I can only get through this type of story if the writing is beautiful. I was, for instance, bored by the subjects of many of John Updike’s novels but I read them for his prose. A wonderful use of the English language will make me read novels about subjects that don’t personally speak to me (and not being a man, this subject just doesn’t speak to me).

In this case I have no idea if the writing is beautiful because this is a translated novel. As I said in my previous post the style seems clunky. So I really, REALLY hope that this entire novel isn’t going to be about the internal workings of the mind of men in the midst of sexual obsession. I think that’s why Morini seems interesting to me. If he has a sexual obsession it isn’t at all apparent.

At the main group read site, there is an interview with Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux who edited the translated versions. The last question and answer concerned me:

MB: Without going into too many spoilers, but looking at all the plotlines and characters, what would you say is the overall theme or main idea behind 2666? What is Bolaño trying to achieve here?

LS: If there’s an overall theme or main idea, I don’t know what it is. The murder of women in northern Mexico is clearly central to the book. More generally, 2666 strikes me as preoccupied with death–specifically, with the fear of death. One’s own death, the death of people one loves. That fear erupts throughout Bolaño’s work. It is a kind of existential terror. In most of the books it’s an undertone. But in 2666 those murders make the fear concrete.

No overall theme or main idea. In a 900 page novel. Not a good sign.

I am enjoying some of the posts on the official site and I suspect I will enjoy them more as we get deeper into the novel.

Reading 2666 by Robert Bolano

A few weeks ago I said that I was considering doing the group read of Robert Bolano’s novel 2666. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t as if I had been dying to read it. I knew nothing about the author or the novel except I knew that it won an award (I wasn’t sure which one) and I had a vague idea that it was about murders in Mexico. But even though I’m on hiatus from my own reading groups the idea of reading a novel at the same time (and same pace) as a group of other serious readers appealed to me.

I gave it some thought and decided I would read the novel along with the group but I would not officially participate. I could change my mind about either one of those decisions. (Yes, I have issues with commitment. You aren’t telling me anything I don’t know about myself.)

So first I finished An American Tragedy, which was the big novel I was currently working on. I needed to do that so 2666 could be my “work read” at lunchtime. Then I went out and got the novel. It is big. My paperback version is 898 pages long. (This would be the perfect time to try out a Kindle but apparently it isn’t available on Kindle.)

I didn’t read the back of the book so I still don’t know what it is about. The cover art is some strange religious looking imagery. There is a label on the front that says it won The National Book Critics Circle Award.

The group read begins the week of January 25 and the group is supposed to have read through page 51 by the beginning of that week. So I took it to work with me last week to read during lunch if I could. I ended up having two days free for lunchtime reading and that turned out to be plenty of time.

I thought before the whole group discussion starts I would post my initial thoughts so I could later compare them with what other people thought.

1. I flew through the first 51 pages. Compared to Tolstoy and Dreiser this is an easy read. I’ve been thinking about why and I can’t quite put my finger on it because the story is not as straightforward as theirs were and the writing style is also not as straightforward. Truthfully I think it’s because there are no chapters. I find chapters to be natural stopping points and sometimes I stop when I could very easily go on. Tolstoy has a lot of short chapters. Dreiser also had a lot relatively short chapters. RB has no chapters (I can’t make that little squiggly mark over the “n” in Bolano so I’m just going to call him RB).

2. For many pages I wondered if I had been confusing this novel in my mind with another novel because it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with murders or Mexico. But finally, on page 43, one of the characters (Morino) read an Italian news story about killings in Mexico. It is a two paragraph aside and so far has gone nowhere. I have no idea how the story is going to even get to Mexico since so far it is taking place in Europe.

3. The story (so far) is about academics studying an obscure author and I’m a sucker for stories about academics studying authors. This may be why I’m finding it an easy read.

4. I’m not sure I like RB’s style but I can’t decide if it is him that is the problem for me or the translator. I tend to stay away from books in translation and one reason is because of this very question. On the one hand, I think he was going for a somewhat conversational style. The narrator is not a character, yet the authorial “voice” is that of someone verbally telling a story. And just as people telling a story verbally ramble all over the place and have run on sentences and begin lots of phrases with the word “and” …. so does RB. I’ve never read any of his other works so I don’t know if this is typical of his style or if he chose it for this novel. Maybe this will become clear in the commentary for the group read.

An example: There is a sentence that starts on page 18 and I think it doesn’t end until page 22. It is a summary of a story that is told by a visitor and listened to (with bated breath) by the academics. It works perfectly in so far as that is how people really relate stories that they heard to someone who wasn’t there. On the other hand, I read novels because I’m looking for a bit more formality than I get in my everyday life. I found it annoying to a certain extent and I remember thinking in the middle of it that I certainly hoped this wasn’t going to be a regular occurrence. I assume this is RB and not the translator.

Another example: In one paragraph the word “paltry” is used twice and in neither case is it a word I would have chosen. “They spent the free time they had, which was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier’s opinion) sites of interest in Augsburg …” “… Morini wasn’t in the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health …” I probably wouldn’t have noticed the first paltry if the second hadn’t occurred two sentences later. Paltry health? Is this RB? Or is this the translator?

I dislike when word choices and structure choices get in the way of my enjoyment and twice in 51 pages is a lot for an award winning novel.

5. I really dislike the way RB writes women so far. There aren’t many women but there is one key woman character, Liz Norton. The peripheral women characters seem very stereotyped in a male nightmare or fantasy type of way (there’s even an older German woman with a Marlene Dietrich body. good god). Liz Norton has already become an object of desire for two of the other academics and she is carrying on an affair with both of them with full disclosure to the other one. Maybe men think this makes a female character interesting but so far I think it just makes her a stereotypical male fantasy. Add to that the discussion about the familiarity or not by the two other (otherwise boring) academics’ participations in a menage a trois and familiarity with the works of the Marquis de Sade and – well it all just seems like a fantasy created for a novel. We’ll see if RB redeems himself by doing something unexpected. If he doesn’t, this is going to be a real problem for me because my eye rolling is interfering with my reading.

By the way, the plot so far concerns a mysterious German author named Archimboldi (which, yes, doesn’t sound German) who is the object of study of the four academics. Archimboldi is, apparently, still alive but mysterious in more than a JD Salinger kind of way. No pictures, etc. RB has spent pages of detail going through the history of how these four academics (French, Spanish, Italian and British) began studying Archimboldi and got to know each other and become friends (and lovers). Lots of detail on all the conferences they attended and papers they gave. But although that could be dull I thought RB managed to make it work. Again, I have no idea how any of this relates to murders in Mexico.

6. I don’t know why this is called 2666, which doesn’t bother me. That will become clear (I assume). What bothers me is that I don’t know how to pronounce it. I realized this when I told someone I was going to read it. Do you pronounce each number: Two Six Six Six. Or is it Twenty-Six Sixty-Six? Or Two Thousand Six Hundred Sixty Six? Or Two Thousand Six Sixty Six? Or Two Six Sixty Six? You see the problem? Again, I assume all will become clear. But an online reading discussion isn’t going to clear up THAT point unless someone decides to write about it.

I look forward to reading the discussions next week. And despite my complaints about it, I’m still looking forward to the next 50 pages.

2666

When the entire world decided to read Infinite Jest together last year I demurred.  I just wasn’t interested enough to commit the time to it. 

Now there is going to be group read of Robert Bolano’s novel 2666.  I might try that.

The format here will be similar to Infinite Summer’s group read of Infinite Jest. There will be a schedule, a weekly recap, and some analysis from guides. There will also be a Twitter hashtag. Since this read is not limited to or sponsored by Infinite Summer, I propose #2666 instead of #infsum—partly because it’s one character shorter and partly because people are already using it.

Pages 1-51 are due the week of January 25th so I still have time to pick up the novel and keep on schedule.  And if I don’t like it I can always drop out, right?

If I do this I’m going to have to figure out how to make that squiggly line over the “n” in his name.    Or maybe I’ll just always refer to him as “RB”.   Yeah … that’s the ticket.   RB.