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.

Winners Circle

I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, I’ve just been busy and sort of brain dead.  In my free time I’ve been (finally) watching the last season of The Wire.  I’ve been putting off watching it because I didn’t want it to end.  But my cousins who live in another state had worked their way up through season four and I said I’d watch season five with them when they got there.  We discuss by email.

I saw this today via Kottke:  #WireDerbyHorseNames.   Someone started thinking of naming racehorses after characters in The Wire and it was taken up by twitterers.

But of course, the beauty in naming Kentucky Derby horses rests not in actually naming them after characters from The Wire, but rather, naming them after catchy ideas and pithy quotes from the show. (There are exceptions. Like, Poot.) So that concept soon began to spread, and it wasn't long before the masterpieces rolled in, fewer than 140 characters at a time.

I liked “Always Boris”. 

Happy Birthday Nancy

I was away for a few days and I missed someone’s birthday. Nancy Drew is 80 years old.

It was 80 years ago yesterday [Wednesday] that the world was first introduced to the intrepid, titian-haired girl detective. On April 28, 1930, the first three Nancy Drew books – The Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase and The Bungalow Mystery — were released, opening up a world where girls could — and did — do anything. Nancy wasn’t relegated to the sidelines; she was the one leading the charge, usually in her cool roadster.

It’s been years since I’ve picked up a new Nancy Drew book so I don’t know what she’s like now. But, apparently, she’s still working:

Three hundred books, a dozen video games, five films, and two TV series later, Nancy’s still at it. These days, she drives a sky-blue hybrid and carries a cell phone, but River Heights still depends on her to prevent everything from identity theft to political assassinations. Her books don’t follow any of the hot trends in young adult fiction: Nancy fights no zombies, owns no designer clothes, and lusts after nary a vampire. Yet each new book has a print run of 25,000 and, cumulatively, the books have sold more than 200 million copies. It’s hard to imagine another cultural icon that could bring together Sonia Sotomayor and Laura Bush, both of whom cite Nancy as an inspiration.

I’ve already talked about how the first Nancy Drew book I ever read was The Witch Tree Symbol. In that story, Nancy and her friends solved a mystery set amongst the Amish. At 8 years old, I had never heard of the Amish so it was a whole new world to me. I think that was part of what was great about reading the Nancy Drew Series. One week I was traveling to Buenos Aires (The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk), the next week, after a brief stop in New York City (which might as well have been Timbuktu to me) I was in China (The Mystery of the Fire Dragon), the next week it was Hawaii (The Secret of the Golden Pavilion). One of my favorites was The Secret of the Wooden Lady which took place on board a clipper ship in in Boston Harbor.

I didn’t read the series in order, I read the books as I could get my hands on them. At some point I realized that the original versions of the first books in the series had been re-written at some point. Nancy had gone from being 16 to being 18. I didn’t care that there were different versions; it meant more books to read.

The thing about a Nancy Drew Mystery was that the mystery wasn’t solved by brute strength but by brains. And by lack of fear. Sometimes the talents that Nancy evidenced were a little hard to believe. Or, at least, they are hard to believe now that I look back at them. Nancy manages to compete in a figure skating competition (The Mystery of the Ski Jump). And she joined the circus as a stunt rider (The Ringmaster’s Secret). But I was willing to suspend disbelief.

So, Happy Birthday Nancy. You may be 80 years old, but you are still 18 to me.

Song Bursts

Frank J. Oteri at New Music Box, asks “Can Ordinary People Burst into Song?”   Over the last six weeks he has been interviewing John Kander:

Kander's first blockbuster, Cabaret (1966), happened after the ascent of rock, but in that score and in his subsequent output he has remained firmly rooted in earlier traditions. It works because the plots of his shows typically take place in other eras and locales, so it doesn't seem in any way unnatural for the characters to sing in earlier styles. But it is in no way an artistic volte-face from the present. According to him, rather, a convincing musical theatre work or opera needs to be at some kind of geographical or generational remove from the audience because, as he correctly points out, "Ordinary people during their ordinary day do not suddenly burst into song."

Well, they do in Glee.

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.

April is National Poetry Month

and I have not observed it.  I’m not sure why.  I like poetry.  But I just haven’t been tempted by poetry this month.

So, instead of a poem I’ll share this interview that the Yale Daily News did with poet Louise Glück.  Glück teaches two classes at Yale:  “Introduction to Verse Writing” and “Advanced Verse Writing”.   I haven’t read her latest work but I’ve read some of her earlier works and really liked them.

I’ll just share one part:

Q: How has being a teacher affected your life and your work?

A: It’s affected it profoundly, and as far as I can tell, entirely positively. When I was young, it seemed to me that [by teaching] I was presuming to confer what I did not possess. I also thought it was a distraction from my “sacred calling.” In my late 20s I found myself in the first of what would turn out to be many periods of prolonged silence. In that time, I did a reading at Goddard College. They suggested I come for a semester and teach. I was wary of teaching because I hadn’t myself completed college and because I feared that teaching would involve spending energies that should have been directed into my own work. But at the time I had no work. I had an epiphany: “I’m not going to turn out to be an artist. My dearest wish for myself will not be granted. And I’m going to have to figure out something better than secretarial work.” So I moved to Vermont four days before the semester started and took a room at a rooming house, and as soon as I started to teach, I started to write. The degree to which I learn from my students is almost impossible to communicate. I have never felt any conflict between teaching and writing. For me, they’re necessary companions.

It’s not a long interview but well worth reading.

Oh, and she doesn’t like National Poetry Month.

Oh heck, I won’t give you a whole poem of hers, but I’ll give you a sliver of one:

 

On Sundays I walk my neighbor’s dog

so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother.

The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter

we walk the same road, early morning, at the base of the escarpment.

Sometimes the dog gets away from me—for a moment or two,

I can’t see him behind some trees. He’s very proud of this,

this trick he brings out occasionally, and gives up again

as a favor to me—

 

I encourage you to read the whole thing.

The Children’s Book by AS Byatt

The Children’s Book, by AS Byatt, is a big, sprawling historical novel that begins in the mid 1890’s and ends with the end of World War I. It is no secret that I am a big fan of Byatt’s, although that doesn’t mean that I’ve liked all of her novels equally. I liked this one even though it wasn’t perfect. All of my favorite parts of a Byatt novel are in here: characters who think too much, social commentary, much emphasis on the role of women in society. Some of the things I regularly don’t like in Byatt novels are here too, fairy tale style stories embedded within the narrative being the biggest offender in my eyes.

Byatt almost bit off more than she could chew in this novel. Edwardian times and World War I have been written about so much that it doesn’t seem that there would be much need for exposition in a novel about that time. And yet, most people probably aren’t aware of the interconnectedness of many of the progressive leaders of the day and while everyone knows that World War I began with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, most people may not know that there were multiple assassinations of leaders in the years ahead of the war. At times Byatt gets a bit bogged down in the social history, much more than she did in Possession. But Possession was an intimate story and this is a sprawling tale. Also, half of Possession took place in modern times with characters trying to discover things about the Victorian characters. They could provide the necessary exposition. This novel takes place completely in the past.

I don’t intend to do anything like a formal ‘review’ of this novel. Truthfully I find writing those kinds of things somewhat boring because of the need not to give away anything important. Instead I want to just talk about the novel because I found it thought provoking. And I’ll probably talk about it over a series of posts. So if you don’t want spoilers, stop now.