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. 

Small Solutions?

All of the discussion this week about digital publishing and paperbacks vs. hardbacks vs. Kindle just keeps running through my mind making me wonder whether to buy a Kindle or an iPad and use the Kindle app. I even considered downloading the Kindle app to my iphone and trying it out to see what it was like. One of my colleagues at work did that last year and she loves it.

Isn’t it too small to enjoy, I wondered? She says she doesn’t have a problem with the smallness. She just likes the portability and the fact that she didn’t have to buy another device. I think I would find it too small.

I was, however, interested to read a piece that Howard Hill wrote in this week’s Guardian about how his iphone helps him to read. Howard is dyslexic.

I'm reasonably well read but I read slowly; books have always been a struggle. I read one sentence, which sparks a thought, maybe causing my eyes to flicker, and I lose my place.

Then he bought an iphone and downloaded an app that let’s you read classic books online. He realized he hadn’t read many of them so he chose one at random. When I read he chose “The Count of Monte Cristo” I thought “wow, that’s a pretty long book to choose for your first try.” I was amazed that he finished it

The first title I selected was The Count of Monte Cristo. I raced through this on my iPhone in just over a week, my wife asking why I was continually playing with my iPhone. When I'd finished I enjoyed the story so much that I went to buy a copy for a friend. In the bookshop I was amazed. It was more than 1,000 pages! Had I been presented with the book in this form I would never have read it. It would have been too much like climbing a mountain.

He analyzes why:

So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don't get lost on the page. Second, the handset's brightness makes it easier to take in words. "Many dyslexics have problems with 'crowding', where they're distracted by the words surrounding the word they're trying to read," says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. "When reading text on a small phone, you're reducing the crowding effect."

I’d like to see some real research into this.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I finished Simon Mawer’s Booker Prize nominated novel The Glass Room a few weeks ago and I’ve been debating whether I wanted to write about it. I had pretty much decided not to but then I read Danielle’s review over at A Work in Progress.  That got me thinking about it again.

This is a novel about a house.  Although the characters in the novel are fictional, the house is based on a real house:  the Tugendhat House, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Brno, the Czech Republic.  Here it is:

When Mies van der Rohe left Europe in the 1930’s he settled in Chicago.  Mies van der Rohe buildings, and buildings “in the style of” Mies van der Rohe, punctuate the skylines of cities here in the Midwest.  I’ve always found them cold and, truthfully, ugly.  So the idea of reading a novel set in a Mies van der Rohe designed building was not largely appealing to me.  On the other hand, I was reading my way through the Booker Prize nominees and this was one of them.  And it was, after all, a novel, which meant the house would only be a setting.

How wrong I was.  The house was the main character of this novel.

I’ve tried to decide if my dislike of Mies van der Rohe architecture caused me to not be engaged in this novel or if it was simply difficult for me to identify with a house as a main character.  In Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, the house was certainly a character.  But the human characters who interacted with it were established at the beginning of the novel and didn’t change throughout the novel.  It was the story of the interaction between specific characters and between them and the house. 

This is the story of the house.  The original owners, who designed and built it, appear to be the main characters for a while.  Even after they are forced to abandon the house at the start of the war, we follow them to Switzerland.  Mawer then interweaves their story with the story of what is happening to the house they left behind.  But then they realize they must leave Europe and go to America (they are very wealthy so this isn’t as impossible as it was for others) and we lose them as characters.  We do not see them past their train journey through occupied France. We do not see their trip to Cuba.  We do not see them settle in New England.  We do not meet them again until years later.  In the meantime the story of the house goes on.  But the people who occupy the house are not particularly likeable. And the house is never used as a home again.   That just didn’t work for me because I didn’t really care about the house.

Where Mawer excelled however was in describing the loving design of the house and the hopes and dreams that were poured into it.  The relationship between the couple, Leisel and Viktor, who commissioned the house and the architect who designed it is rendered very well.  It is Viktor, a wealthy Czech industrialist, who is committed to the idea of building a modern home but it is his wife Leisel, the child of a traditional, wealthy Czech family who gets caught up in the idea.  When Viktor waivers it is Leisel who insists that they will build their dream.  It is Leisel who ends up working closely with the architect and their relationship is a true meeting of minds and is fully believable.  As I read this portion I thought that Nancy Horan, the author of Loving Frank, would have written a better novel if she had been able to capture the same relationship between Mamah and Frank Lloyd Wright. 

The other thing Mawer was successful with was giving me an idea of the hopefulness of modern architecture. I’ve never thought of modern architecture as hopeful.  I’ve always thought it was somewhat depressing.  All those big spaces to be filled, all that hard glass and those stone floors and walls, all those big windows that give you no privacy.  Modern architecture seemed to me to be a metaphor for the hard, cold, impersonal 20th century.

But this house is a building full of hope.  Czechoslovakia was, in the 1920’s, a new country.  Cobbled together out of parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a new country, full of hope.  After the carnage of World War I, it is a time of peace and calm.

Space light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor, travertine, perhaps; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome. The elements moved, evolved, transformed, metamorphosed in the way that they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were: der Glasraum, der Glastraum, a single letter change metamorphosing one into the other, the Glass Space becoming the Glass Dream, a dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.

And as Hitler rises in Germany, the people ignore the danger.  And the house? 

The Glass Room remained indifferent, of course.  Plain, balanced, perfect; indifferent. Architecture should have no politics, Rainer von Abt said.  A building just is. Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark like a relic of a more perfect golden age.

But the house is taken by the Reich and used in the performance of it’s pseudo-science.  It’s purpose is converted and perverted.  It never regains it’s original luster.  It is never used as a home again.  At best it will be a museum.  

While I can’t really recommend this novel as a novel, I do think there were parts that were worth reading. Others, perhaps, would have less of a problem than I did with the house as main character.  But I just couldn’t get past it. 

Important Confirmation Question?

I am sure that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are, even now, preparing lists of questions for the person that President Obama eventually selects to replace Justice Stevens.  Pundits everywhere will try to determine how this person will affect the balance of power on the court, what voting blocks will be reshaped by the new justice.  Will the new Justice be able to stand up to Justice Scalia as Justice Stevens is perceived to have done.

Here’s a little known fact (at least I didn’t know it); there was one area that Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens agreed upon:

And as the Wall Street Journal reported last year, the Supreme Court boasts some of the most prominent Oxfordians in the land. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has signed a "declaration of doubt" about Shakespeare's authorship. Justice Antonin Scalia has publicly acknowledged his belief that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays. So has Justice John Paul Stevens, who has been declared "Oxfordian of the Year."

On what side will the new justice fall on this all important question? Maybe this is something the U.S. Senate could flesh out for us in the confirmation hearings.  After all it couldn’t be any more pointless a question than most of the discussion that takes place at confirmation hearings.  And it would at least be entertaining.

Although the Senators shouldn’t rely too much on the answers.  The views of many Supreme Court Justices evolve over the years and their views on the law at the beginnings of their terms don’t always match their views at the end of their term.  Why, even Justice Stevens evolved:

A quarter-century ago all this was unimaginable. In fact, Stevens, along with fellow Justices Harry Blackmun and William Brennan, ruled unanimously in favor of Shakespeare and against the Earl of Oxford in a celebrated moot court in 1987. The objection to Oxford's authorship was obvious: Because he died in 1604, he could not have written, sometimes in active collaboration with other dramatists, 10 or so plays after that (including "Henry VIII," described by contemporaries as "new" when staged in 1613).

Shakespeare.  Appropriate to all settings.

By the way I found this story via The Valve, which also contained an interesting post entitled “Mrs. Astor and King Lear” comparing the real life Brooke Astor to the fictional king.   I recommend it.  But let’s hope that all of this Shakespeare doesn’t presage Senate Hearings that can be compared to a Shakespearen comedy.

Dialogue

One reason I’ve never even considered writing any kind of fiction is my dialogue-writing induced asthma.  Back in high school I took my one and only creative writing class and it was torture.  It didn’t help that I’m not very good at creating narratives, but that wasn’t the real problem  With a whole lot of effort I could come up with some kind of plot.  But dialogue.  No.  And since I dislike reading fiction without much dialogue (a problem I’m having with 2666) I wouldn’t want to create fiction without dialogue.

If my psyche was looking for a good nightmare scenario it would put me in a room full of screenwriters all staring at me, waiting for me to come up with some pithy bit of dialogue.  And as I opened my mouth, out would come toads. 

Because of my own limitations, I have respect for television and movie writers even when I’m making fun of the bad dialogue they have written.  After all, at least they try. So I was interested in reading Jane Espenson’s latest blog post (yes, she’s back) in which she talks about the early days of movies and the transition from silent films to talkies.  I never thought about who “wrote” silent movies.  I guess I assumed that someone came up with the narrative but I never thought much more about it.  I certainly never thought about whether novelists would be good at writing silent movie scripts.  But Jane has:

The skills of a novelist were very appropriate for this kind of screenplay writing, which was descriptive, evocative, and internal. By "internal" I mean that it was concerned with what the character was thinking and feeling.

But when the transition to talkies came and Hollywood was looking for writers who could write good dialogue, they expanded their universe of writers.  Who did they find was good at dialogue?  Journalists.

They had an ear for naturalistic dialogue and they knew how to write concisely and tell stories with clear-eyed details, not evocative prose. The novelists tended to write longer and more stylish (or stylized) speeches and descriptions. Beautiful stuff, but not as valuable as something short and potent.

It makes sense but is not something I ever thought of before.  So Jane’s advice is:

Think like a reporter -- pare the story down, find the bones of it, and listen to your characters talk in the language of whatever street they come from -- even if you let them ramble on a bit in the first draft, eventually try to find the succinct quote.

Dorothy Squared

DunnettCentral tweeted this video review of books by two of my favorite authors EVAH:  Dorothy Dunnett’s Game of Kings and Dorothy L. Sayer’s Strong Poison.

She talks about how she was so affected by the end of the sixth volume of Dunnett’s epic series that, with ten pages to go, she had to stop reading and go pull herself together.  I remember that at about 10 pages from the end I threw the book across the room I was so upset and it took me a couple of days to finally read the final ten pages. 

The first time I went to London I was in the middle of reading, for the first time, Dorothy Sayers’ mystery series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.  I remember riding around London in awe that some of the locations featured in the novels were right there in front of me.

I am not (remotely) the first person to note the similarities between the fictional families created by the two Dorothies.   Both feature a beautiful blond man who is smarter than the average bear.  Both men are the favorites of mothers who are smart and witty.  Both men are younger sons in a system where the older brother gets the title.  Both older brothers are …staid.  There is a sister.  Both men like to sprinkle their dialog with quotations in other languages leaving we the readers (and the other characters) to try translating without any assistance.  

Both are too smart for their own good.  As Dorothy Dunnet’s creation, Francis Crawford, says in The Game of Kings:

Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable.  You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular.  You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular.  But try all three and you’re a mountebank.  Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all around proficiency.

Of course, Francis Crawford is much more swashbuckling than Peter Wimsey, partly because he lived in a swashbuckling time and partly because Dorothy Dunnett created him that way.  As others have said, Crawford is more of a cross between Wimsey and a character out of Alexandre Dumas.  But the thing I like about both Peter Wimsey and Francis Crawford is that they grow, they evolve.  And you can’t ask more than that from a recurring character.

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.