Porridge

When I first saw this artwork a few days ago, I couldn't help but be reminded of Archimboldo, though Archimboldo's compositions are built of more organic elements.

Genesis P-Orridge — now there's a name that takes me back — has an exhibition on at New York's Invisible-Exports Gallery until October 18, 2009. In an interview for The Morning News, Genesis P-Orridge cites his (and I use all pronouns herein loosely) discovery of Max Ernst and the art of cut-ups as kind of an epiphany.

(He talks also of a Sacred Geometry, which also brings to mind certain aspects of 2666. I wonder if one could assess 2666 in terms of cut-up or collage art...)

I can't say I'm particularly impressed by the art in this exhibition, but it's the intro to the interview that brought some hazy, near-20-year-old memories into focus. Apparently Genesis isn't a big fan of email interviews, as they take on the semblance of school assignments, so we are treated instead to about 3000 words explicating his concept. I recall Genesis having a peculiar attitude toward live interviews as well.

It was when Chris came up to see me for a couple days, and he brought his girlfriend, which was a bit odd, cuz I thought he liked me, but I guess this meant he didn't, which was for the best really. And it was all very spontaneous and all because of the Psychic TV show that night. The show had played the night before in Kingston — Chris had seen them and wanted to get an interview for his radio show, but he hadn't managed, so he came up to Ottawa looking for another chance. So Chris and — oh, I can't for the life of me remember her name...

Anyway, they show up on my doorstep mid-afternoon, (was I even working then? I couldn't've been studying... was it summer?) and I had a ticket for the show already (and I am so psyched — I'd had a ticket for their show the year before, but they cancelled), and the venue was just a 5-minute walk up the street, so we check it out straight away but nobody comes to the door and we can't figure out the back way, so we go for a beer across the street. And then we cross back over — it's still late afternoon, and it's really sunny — and we bang on the door, and then we bang on the door some more, and we ask around in the groundfloor bar (a separate and distinct establishment from the concert venue) but the inner adjoining door shows no signs of opening, so we go back out to the door on the street and bang some more, and after about 10 minutes someone comes to see what the racket's all about. Chris asks about the band, has the band arrived?, he'd love to get an interview, do you think he could have an interview? The guy tells us to hold on, he'll be right back. And a couple minutes later, Genesis P-Orridge opens up the door, and Chris tells him he loved the show in Kingston last night and does he have a few minutes for an interview. And Genesis says, no, he doesn't really feel like an interview, what he really feels like is a cheese sandwich, and the late afternoon sun is shining straight in his eyes, and his head is all fleshy and wet. And he thinks about it for a few seconds and tells Chris he'll give him an interview if he can bring him a cheese sandwich, and he closes the door and the three of us just stand there, not quite sure what to make of this.

And then their eyes turn on me, because I live there, and if anybody would, I should know where we could get a cheese sandwich. But when's the last time I ever had a cheese sandwich? So we check the adjoining bar, but the only food they have is those little packets of potato chips. We go back across the street to the pub, and the waitress says, do you mean like a grilled cheese? We just stand there looking at each other, we don't know, and we start to dissect our encounter; if Genesis P-Orridge meant a grilled cheese sandwich he would've said a grilled cheese sandwich, but then too, he's British, and we wonder whether the default semantics of a British cheese sandwich implied that it was grilled. I don't know why exactly, but we finally decide, no, he couldn't possibly want his sandwich grilled. I suggest we check out the bistro café on the corner — they serve a lovely bacon-tomato-cheese melt, but there's that melt factor again, which while it doesn't strictly speaking mean "grilled," it deviates from the default semantics we've already settled on. Besides which it was on a croissant, and we're all agreed this was an error on the side of too fancy and wouldn't do at all.

I run down the list of possible eateries on this stretch of street. There's the Spanish place, Indian, Moroccan, another pub, there's a Greek place too but that's already drifting further off than we'd like, and I can't think of anything appropriately deli-like, apart from the place in the market that I reserve for a Saturday afternoon excursion; that is, for this here and now and with our pressing need, it's too far away. I shrug my shoulders, why don't we just pick up some stuff at the grocery? it's just on the next corner.

So we pool our cash and pick out some nice fresh kaiser rolls, and some kind of wheat bread, and a slab of cheddar, some camembert, and some spiced gouda, and a head of lettuce, and a jar of pickles, and some paper plates and napkins, and a knife, and one of them say we need butter too but I don't understand why anyone would put butter on a cheese sandwich. And we head back to the hall and bang on the door some more. The same guy finally pokes his head around, we exclaim happily that we have cheese sandwiches! or at least the makings thereof! And he should let us in cuz Genesis P-Orridge said it was OK. So he does, and we bound upstairs, say hi to the band and spread out our bounty on the first table that presents itself. Genesis's face (and we all feel we're on a first-name basis now) radiates glee, and someone offers us a beer. Chris sets up his tape deck and I set about making sandwiches, I don't know what Jen's doing (that's her name — Jen!) but she's all tough and cool, pierced and tattooed, I think maybe she just starts making out with one of the guys, I don't know, and before you know it we're all really — I mean really — stoned and pretty happy about the whole thing, especially the wondrous and varied cheese sandwiches.

The show itself was pretty anticlimactic, although we did all get to dance onstage, toward thee infinite beat.

The part about Archimboldi

2666, by Roberto Bolaño, is difficult. It's rich with imagery and ideas, most of which feel connected but which connections are near impossible to describe meaningfully. To offer any kind of summary is like saying, Here's this stick figure I drew of the Mona Lisa. By which I mean to say that 2666 is a masterpiece, but not at all like the Mona Lisa — more like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Or something from Archimboldo.

This fifth and final part of 2666, The Part about Archimboldi, reads like part fairy-tale, part dream, with bits of nightmare and dark myths thrown in.

I basked in the beauty of this section, but it's taken me quite some time to come to the realization that in fact I did not like Archimboldi. From the outset there is something creepy about him. I thought for a while that this impression was merely a lingering effect of all that came before, the 600 plus pages of sinister mood. But with a little distance, and upon closer examination of some sections and my reactions to them, I'm quite confident in pronouncing: I do not like Archimboldi. I do not find him sympathetic.

Is he a hero? He is the character that figures most prominently in the book. It starts with him (though he is never on stage, he is undeniably central) and ends with him (the whole last section is devoted to his biography), and there are several references to him in between. One might argue that he overcame great adversity to achieve his status as a critically acclaimed obscure author — his family circumstance, his physical oddity, an inability to communicate, war, war, war, hard times, etc.

But.

1. I don't believe he was active at all in putting all this behind him. He simply let things happen, and he came out on the other side. (Is he a hero of inaction?)

2. His status and the merit of it are entirely questionable. Bolaño posits artist as hero throughout the novel and if he had a definitive stance on the issue it is a contradictory one. If the artist is a vessel through which the divine is manifest, or if he is naturally talented, how much can the artist take credit? The toil of mediocrity is more commendable a virtue. And I rather think Bolaño did fashion Archimboldi as a vessel.

(Note: For those who haven't been reading along, Hans Reiter takes the pen name Benno von Archimboldi, inspired by Benito Juárez and painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.)

Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion — so vague, so malleable, so warped — of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

This (p 661) feeds my sense that Hans is not fully healthy, or he would flee the diseased. And if he is somewhat diseased, his words — his literary work — is worth something, or so goes the argument by Bolaño’s logic. What is this "diseased man's sense of time"? Is it time more palpable, more real, when framed by mortality? (Did the diseased Bolaño's sense of time make him a better writer?)

But Archimboldi often finds himself outside of time (p 662):

They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, and eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who’ve just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn’t more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich.

(Doesn't that just take your breath away?!)

(In the desert of boredom, this oasis of debauchery — I return to the novel's epigraph from Baudelaire. Is Archimboldi a horror? The abyss as an oasis, revelry in mortality.)

That night, as he was working the door at the bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi's only wish was never to inhabit either. [p 800]

Then there's this whole discussion (p 664-6) about the 4th dimension and how it is expressible only through music. Which brings us to the 5th dimension and how the perspective from the 5th of the 4th would to denizens of 4 dimensions be beyond their ability to conceive let alone fathom. All of which reminds me of Flatland. And Infinite Jest, which also references Flatland, with its problem of the wraith and at what speed he exists and how he processes time or whether he is outside time.

("[F]ive pairs of eyes lacked spatiotemporal coherence" (p 782) — there should only be three pairs. Who belongs to the other eyes?)

My very favourite passage of this section (p 704), a propos of nothing, really, though it too describes an abyss of sorts:

One night, in the trenches, Reiter rose up to his full height and gazed at the stars, but his attention, inevitably, was diverted toward Sevastopol. The city in the distance was a black mass with red mouths that opened and closed. The soldiers called it the bone crusher, but that night it didn't strike Reiter as a machine but as the reincarnation of a mythological being, a living creature struggling to draw breath.

Why is young Reiter's speech garbled (p 646)? Does the tourist simply not understand the local dialect? Or is there a communication problem?

(Was Reiter struggling to draw breath? He twice almost drowns. He swims, is at home in the water — breath would be a struggle. Is Reiter, then a mythological being? Or does he picture himself as one? Is he condemned like Sisyphus, only to the abyss of daily life, keeping Thanatos in chains, so men might live free of the anxiety of time (p 821)? Reiter recreates himself as Archimboldi, who become a myth.)

Later in Ansky's farmhouse, when he recognizes himself in the mural (who could've painted it? why would Reiter figure in it?), Reiter remembers "that in those days he hadn't yet recovered his voice" (724), having been shot in the throat.

What about Ansky's seaweedlike extraterrestrial (p 719)? (Is this Reiter? Did he appear in the past, by means beyond our current understanding of the physical world, and inspire this character? Or is he retroactively inserting himself into the text, as any reader might relate to a character?) The conversation he has with the boy is often unintelligible.

Ansky's characters also seem to travel through space and time in a manner that defies physics.

(There are many examples of "supernatural" communication throughout all the parts of the novel. Telepathy in various forms, dreams, a seer, communication via the whisper of leaves, a book on a clothesline airing its contents. All these ideas floating around in the ether (some of them evil) — they have to settle somewhere.)

What is culture, the Germans debate (p 683). General Entrescu claims it is life, that art "couldn't hold a candle to the dream of a single illiterate Romanian peasant." He knows this because he knows his men:

"I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion."

How does he do it? Is this why his men crucify him? Is he a demon or a saviour?

Reiter argues that "Sammer was just a civil servant of no consequence" (p 776). Then why did he kill him? (Is this the act of a hero?) Or else he is lying.

After much thinking about the concept of semblance, as Ansky had put it forward, Reiter concludes (p 741) that "Only Ansky's wandering isn't semblance, he thought, only Ansky at fourteen isn't semblance. Ansky lived his whole life in rabid immaturity because the revolution, the one true revolution, is also immature."

I think we're meant to see Reiter as immature also, emotionally immature, or emotionally distanced, or un-self-aware.

He remembered that in those days he hadn't yet recovered his voice. He also remembered that in those days he had ceaselessly read and reread Ansky's notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky. And he accepted the guilt and happiness and some nights he even weighed them against each other and the net result of his unorthodox reckoning was happiness, but a different kind of happiness, a heartrending happiness that for Reiter wasn't happiness but simply Reiter. [p 742]

I am certain (how can I be certain?) that Reiter/Archimboldi plagiarizes Ansky. He memorized his notebook we’re reminded (p 796), and Ingeborg notes the speed with which he writes. His authenticity is called into question. It is kinder perhaps to say he gives Ansky’s notebook a voice. But does he do so with any motivation other than to defeat boredom?

In Ansky's view, Archimboldo's painting technique was happiness personified (p 734), even though he produced a couple what could be described as horror paintings.

There are several Archimboldo-esque descriptions throughout the novel, starting with those of seaweed and culminating in this, recognizing a family resemblance (p 866):

One night Lotte saw shadows listening to the radio. One of the shadows was her father. Another shadow was her mother. Other shadows had eyes and noses and mouth that she didn't recognize. Mouths like carrots, with peeling lips, and noses like wet potatoes.

I keep thinking of Archimboldo paintings, and the seaweed image, as something organic, but not fully sentient.

When Lotte reads parts of Archimboldi's The King of the Forest to him, why does Klaus's expression change (p 888)? What does he recognize? Klaus who demonstrated some affinity with the Flora's book. It was Flora who was reminded of the shepherd boy Benito Juárez (p 431), before he was a great man and Archimboldi borrowed his name (p 809). Facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery and Benito Juárez had done it (p 433). Had Archimboldi done so? By taking up writing?

There's so much more to say. But I don't know what else to say.

Excerpt (part 1): Separate and interminable suburbs.
Part 1: The part about the critics.
Part 2: The part about Amalfitano.
Excerpt (part 3): A walk on the beach.
Parts 3 and 4: The parts about Fate and about the crimes and a vast introductory digression in which I compare and contrast 2666 and Infinite Jest.

Consult the list of other readers who've posted thoughts on this book.

How do you say, "thank you"?

With books, of course!

To share some of the awesome literary love I've been experiencing lately, I'd love to give away a couple of books to a couple of readers: The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño (in the newly released 1-volume paperback format).

Both books are brand new, fresh from the publisher (Picador). They have been thoroughly sniffed and have the feline paw of approval (the cat's a bit of savage detective herself). Since I already have well-worn copies of these, I'd like to pass these on (but I'm keeping the cat).

Here's a non-exhaustive list of some of the awesomeness that abounds:

The ARCs I've been receiving as a result of Twitter announcements and contests — I actually don't really understand Twitter, or how people use it, or how I should best make use of it, but will love it for now for at least this thing. The contest I won at Bookeywookey (Ted has weird and wonderful literary interests, happily sometimes intersecting with my own). The love from Susan at Pages Turned. The great group of people I stumbled upon who have been reading 2666 this summer, and their respective blogs. The dramatic spray of raspberry pink gladiolas on my kitchen shelf, which has nothing literary about it — I just love them and they make me happy! The Infinite Summer and how it (along with the subject of its attention, Infinite Jest) has sparked heartfelt conversations in both blogland and real life. The book drive I kind of got roped into organizing at work after I not so seriously proposed the idea, never expecting anyone to actually like the idea, as a means of not only raising some money for charity but also clearing some much-needed closet space; the fact that coworkers are bringing in their books to contribute to the cause (and I am trying very hard not to judge them by their cast-offs); the fact that other coworkers are actually buying these books; the fact that, being that I'm kind of in charge, I kind of get first dibs, and in this way I came to have an unread copy of Geek Love, which a bunch of people say is like their favourite book ever and now maybe soon I'll maybe be in a position to understand why; the fact that it turns out that Tony is not representative of my coworkers' mentality when he says, "Are you guys only selling, like, reading books?" (by which it turns out he meant something like, "as opposed to reference manuals"); the fact that it seems more coworkers read, and think, and breathe outside of this office space than I previously imagined; the fact that I had a conversation with a near stranger about Anna Karenina. Also, the fact of Generosity, by Richard Powers, the reading of which brought on my own kind of quasi-spiritual breakdown in recent days. Thanks, you crazy, messed-up world — even when I feel like I'm getting the raw end of the deal and times when work is stupid crazy and times when I want and can't have just 10 quiet minutes all to myself and times when I wish my sister lived around the corner so we could go out for wings and beer, somehow everything always turns out OK. Rather mysteriously, really.

If you are interested in receiving either The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, or 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, state your preference in the comments section and tell me why you want to read it for your name to be entered into the drawing. This giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere. You have until midnight, October 2, 2009, to state your case. I'll announce the recipients shortly thereafter.

By that time, I should be finished reading my own copy of 2666! I fully endorse both these books as being worth the time and effort.

The Savage Detectives
Comments.
Excerpt: Stars like holographic projections.
Excerpt: Two islands.
Comments.

2666
Excerpt: Separate and interminable suburbs, with comments.
The part about the critics.
The part about Amalfitano.
Excerpt: A walk on the beach.
The parts about Fate and about the crimes and a vast introductory digression in which I compare and contrast 2666 and Infinite Jest.

Thanks!

The parts about Fate and about the crimes and a vast introductory digression in which I compare and contrast 2666 and Infinite Jest

I left off from Roberto Bolaño's 2666 in order to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest along with a couple thousand other people in the Infinite Summer reading group project. Plus, I really needed the breathing space, after all the rape, murder, and mutilation of part 4.

Weirdly, there are various unpleasantnesses to contend with in IJ as well. But they are deeply human and emotional, and so kind of cathartic. The murders in 2666, on the other hand, are numbing.

Right. So. I'd actually started in on the next and final part, and wanted and still want to speed ahead. But this is a weird little exercise in restraint for me, cuz I'm more about the go with the flow whatever feels right when it comes to reading, yet I want and feel it's important to think a little about what's going on in 2666, to figure it out, to draw it out — not in the sense of prolonging the experience but rather more to engage in conversation with and see it become itself. And it feels right to do so, so I'm going with that.

Also a bit weird w/r/t reading 2666 interlaced with IJ is this urge to compare and contrast these 2 books, or at least the experiences of reading these 2 books, when really they're almost not at all alike apart from their size. As part of an Infinite Summer roundtable, Kevin Guilfoile said, "During the Tournament of Books I said about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that in order for a novel to be a masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible. I said that with some tongue in my cheek, although compared to Infinite Jest I found 2666 to be a lot less ambitious and a lot more terrible." I found myself feeling a bit defensive about this, being as I was pretty fresh off a deep immersion in 2666 and at that point still well behind the IJ schedule. But I've had a very different kind of engagement with the books. And I'm temporarily thinking he may be right.

There was a tipping point with IJ: there came a page when something clicked, it made some kind of sense, I got it, and everything that came before was richer and being informed by what came next. I am still waiting for such a point in 2666, fully expecting it never to come. 2666 is definitely the more cryptic of the 2 novels. It started with a fairly heavy mood, and this has been maintained to the two-thirds mark, which is what necessitated my need for a little breathing space away from it; something hangs over this book, some impending doom, and that's fine — great actually — it's lofty and poetic and mysterious — but to what end?

Where does this leave me? Recognizing that the ambitions of these books are different (I think). Apples and oranges. Un cheval, une patate.

They are both, I realize now, somewhat surreal — in that kind of slippery, Lynchian sense of the word — and dreams figure quite prominently in both, with that vaguely nightmarish hint of something slipping between the known realm and someplace generally left untapped. Ironically (and let's ignore whether I'm using that term correctly), while IJ is set in the near future, or an alternate now, I found it much easier to relate to, to accept these characters as real; 2666 is based in our world (and inspired by true events), yet I'm not connecting with the characters, our view of which is quite controlled, filtered, distant (and the same could be said w/r/t its plot) (and this distance serves its own purpose — I merely comment on the fact of it).

Also, a Lovecraftian horror, as Jonathan Lethem pointed out:

As the four become sexually and emotionally entangled, the puzzle of their devotion to a writer who declines their interest — declines, in fact, ever to appear — inches like a great Lovecraftian shadow over their lives.

In IJ there's a face in the floor, and the black, billowy triangle-ish shape of horror, as easily attributable to Lovecraft as to Lynch.

IJ has earnestness, and a fair bit of humour. 2666 has... I want to say poetry, but I don't think that's quite true, not the way the language in Bolaño's short novels sings with awe about our nobler purpose or the dirt under our fingernails. But, OK, it has this "quality" about its language, and this other admirable thing I can't think of any other way to describe but mood.

The Part about Fate
I didn't much like The Part about Fate, being part 3 and one of the smaller parts of 2666. There's some good stuff in there, which I'll get to in a minute, but this is the way I feel about this part and let me see if I can figure out why that is.

It's not about fate as destiny; it's about American Oscar Fate, whose real name is Quincy Williams, and I don't know why they call him Oscar Fate at work, but they do — maybe it's his chosen pen name as a journalist. Well, maybe you could say the whole thing really is about fate, the name must've been chosen deliberately, symbolically, and I wonder whether it was Fate in the original Spanish or whether the name was translated.

It starts with the death of his mother. Then there's the death of a coworker. He has odd dreams, and starts to occasionally vomit, here and there fairly randomly. Aggressive snippets of movies, of television, or other people's conversations seem to accidentally infiltrate his consciousness, which for the most part is pretty blank, or maybe numb (with grief? exhaustion?) or lost. Something about rap music and suicide and misogyny.

Fate is on assignment to interview Barry Seaman, a former Panther who did some serious prison time and published a book of ribs recipes. Seaman now mostly gives lectures, one of which Fate attends, and it discusses Danger, Money, Food, Stars, and Usefuleness in a fairly random, disconnected way; Seaman stretches to segue very clumsily from one topic to the next — it's almost a stream of consciousness, and I have the impression some of his audience may perceive his mental workings as profound, but I think it's merely primitive. Seaman has the air of a prophet about him, and I don't mean to diminish how "interesting" his speech is, but the lecture as a whole doesn't really fit together; as is the case with many prophets, maybe it's for the audience to find their own significance in it. Seaman does, however, profess an apreciation of metaphor and love for reading, with a deep fondness for An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire.

Fate is reading The Slave Trade. He heads to Mexico to cover a boxing match, the story his dead coworker was supposed to be on. Fate witnesses a couple of Camaros (which I now know figure in the part that follows) and starts hearing about the killings in Santa Teresa.

In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. [...] Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. [...] [They] weren't part of society [...]. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same.

Absolutely Santa Teresa is the fringes of society. (Fate wants to do some reportage about the situation, but his editor's not interested.) So this, finally, is the heart of Bolaño's ambition: to reveal the avoidance.

(As I'm sitting here rethumbing these pages, I realize how many hints there are of things to come, characters and scenarios we will meet again. Of one personage, a suspect: "He has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who's dreaming at great speed. A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams." I'm suddenly seeing all sorts of commonalities with IJ — the fragmentation of the narrative, a cubist view, an other-dimensional perspective, the problem of the speed at which we process experience. This part about Fate is in fact much more vital to the whole than I'd initially given it credit. Oh, and: both writers reference David Lynch quite extensively.)

They talk about the end of the sacred, which I take to mean something like intimacy and connectedness in the way we engage with our world.

And so Fate is immersed in the seamy underbelly of Santa Teresa. I'm not sure whether the boxing match serves a purpose other than as a plot device to bring this journalist to Mexico.

I see now that The Part about Fate begins with its end:

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts.

(Aztecs turn up again on page 473: “The Aztecs cooked posole with pieces of human flesh.”)

The Part about the Crimes
The Part about the Crimes is a grotesque and fairly disjointed inventory of the gruesome crimes occurring in Santa Teresa.

The following passage is from early on in this lengthy part. I love the way it dances around the space, the focus flitting from the two people engaged in dialogue to the figurants (a word I would not have used before having read IJ) in the room, wafting through the subject of the conversation itself and describing (the way you describe a geometric figure) the relationships within that space.

What is sacrophobia exactly? Juan de Dios Martínez asked the director. Teach me a little about it. The director said her name was Elvira Campos and she ordered a whiskey. Juan de Dios Martínez ordered a beer and glanced around the bar. On the terrace an accordion player, followed by a violinist, was trying to attract the atention of a man dressed like a rancher. A narco, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, although since the man had his back to him, he couldn't say who it was. Sacraphobia is fear or hatred of the sacred, of sacred objects, especially from your own religion, said Elvira Campos. He thought about making a reference to Dracula, who fled crucifixes, but he was afraid the director would laugh at him. And you believe the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia? I've given it some thought, and I do. A few days ago he disemboweled a priest and another person, said Juan de Dios Martínez. The accordion player was very young, twenty at most, and round as an apple. The way he held himself, however, made him look at least twenty-five, except when he smiled, which was often, and then all of a sudden it was clear how young and inexperienced he was. He doesn't carry the knife to hurt anyone, any living thing, I mean, but to destroy the sacred images he finds in churches, said the director. Shall we call each other by our first names? Juan de Dios Martínez asked her. Elvira Campos smiled and nodded. You're a very attractive woman, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Thin and attractive. You don't like thin women, Inspector? asked the director. The violinist was taller than the accordionist and she was wearing a black blouse and black leggings. She had long straight hair down to her waist and sometimes she closed her eyes, especially when the accordeonist sang and played. The saddest thing, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, was that the narco, or the suited back of the man he thought was narco, was hardly paying any attention to them, busy as he was talking to a man with face of a mongoose and hooker with the face of a cat. Weren't we going ot call each other by our first names? asked Juan de Dios Martínez. You're right, said the director. So are you sure the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia? The director said she'd been looking through the archives at the asylum to see whether she could find some former patient with a case history like the Penitent's. She hadn't come up with anything. If he's as old as you say he is, I'd guess he's been institutionalized at some point. The accordion player suddenly started to stamp in time to the music. From where they were sitting they couldn't hear him, but he was making faces, working his mouth and eyebrows, and then he ruffled his hair with one hand and seemed to howl with laughter. The violinist had her eyes closed. The narco's head swiveled. Juan de Dios Martínez thought to himself that the boy had finally gotten what he wanted. There's probably a file on him in some psychiatric center in Hermosillo or Tijuana. It can't be such a rare case. Maybe he was on medication until recently. Maybe he stopped taking it, said teh director. Are you married, do you live with anyone? asked Juan de Dios Martínez in an almost inaudible voice. I live alone, said the director. But you have children, I saw the pictures in your office. I have a daughter, she's married. Juan de Dios Martínez felt something release inside of him and he laughed. Don't tell me you're already a grandmother. That's not the kind of thing you say to a woman, Inspector. How old are you? asked the director. Thirty-four, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Seventeen years younger than me. You don't look more than forty, said the inspector. The director laughed: I exercise every day, I don't smoke, I drink very little, I eat right, I used to go running every morning. Not anymore? No, now I've bought myself a treadmill. The two of them laughed. I listen to Bach on my headphones and I almost always run three or four miles a day. Sacraphobia. If I tell my colleagues the Penitent is suffering from sacraphobia, they'll laugh at me. The man with the mongoose face rose from his chair and said something into the accordionist's ear. Then he sat down again and teh accordionist's mouth screwed up into a pout. Like a child on teh verg of tears. The violinis had her eyes open and she was smiling. The narco and the woman with cat face bent their heads together. The narco's nose was big and bony and aristocratic looking. But aristocratic looking how? There was a wild expression on the accordionist's face, except for his lips. Unfamiliar currents surged through the inspector's chest. The world is a strange and fascinating place, he thought.

The Penitent is a desecrator of churches, probably unconnected to the murders, but it's all connected, isn't it? I bookmarked this passage when I first read it more than a month ago, but I think it might highlight yet another theme, which is somewhat illuminated, I see now, by the conversation in part 3: What is sacred?

But the murders! Bolaño took as his basis for 2666 real events in Ciudad Juárez: According to Amnesty International, as of February 2005 more than 800 bodies had been found, and over 3000 women were still missing. Bolaño gives us a repetitive forensic detailing. I lost count of how many murders (rather, murder victims) he describes, but there are many. To read this was a mind-numbing experience. I found myself more than once thinking, oh, another murder, just like all the rest, I'll just skim this bit, it's just another body, which is kind of the point Bolaño is making, that these women and girls have been dehumanized, by their killers and by the authorities, not to mention the society as a whole that brought the bulk of them to live on the fringes of society in the first place, and it's a startling revelation as a reader to realize that I also am guilty for failing to see each victim as uniquely human.

Bolaño at least offers us occasional glimpses of the lives they led when they were last seen. He is giving them a kind of voice. (It is the lot also of Florita Almada, television seer, to be giving the girls of Santa Teresa a voice. She appears alongside a ventriloquist.)

There are patterns, there must be patterns, but they are hard to discern. Then there are murders that break from the pattern and establish new patterns. More murders, they follow an old pattern. Newer patterns emerge that are a combination of previous patterns. It's clear no one person is responsible.

Surely some investigator must see patterns too. You'd think. (The very young and ironically named Lalo Cura — la locura, lunacy — is perhaps the clearest-seeing of the lot.) But no investigation lasts more than a few days. Most (all?) of the cases are shelved. No one seems to care.

Could all these men, could this whole culture of men, in separate and multiple incidents, of their individual accords, and maybe some of them conspiratorially, could they be killings their own wives, sisters, daughters?

Are the murders simply being ignored, or are they being covered up?

Adam Kirsch writes the following in his review, "Slouching Towards Santa Teresa: Roberto Bolaño's utterly strange masterpiece":

At the same time, Bolaño manages to suggest that the violence in Santa Teresa is something much more than a local crime wave. One of the characters who looms into individuality, out of the anonymous crowd of the dead, is Klaus Haas, a German-born American citizen who is imprisoned by the Mexican police as a scapegoat for the murders. He may or may not have killed a woman — Bolaño never lets us know for sure — but he is certainly not "the Santa Teresa killer," if only because the murders continue after he is arrested. Yet when Sergio Gonzales, a journalist reporting on his case, calls Haas in jail, Bolaño writes that over the phone line he "heard the sound of the desert and something like the tread of an animal." It is an understated but clear allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming," where the poet sees "somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man," and asks, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

In this indirect fashion, Bolaño hints that Haas is, if not an anti-Christ, at least a sign of the times: a beast whose advent signals some cosmic realignment. It is just one of countless moments in 2666 that suggest the metaphysical dimension of Bolaño's vision. The attentive reader will be reminded of a remark by a minor character in the novel's third section, some 200 pages earlier: "No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them." And then she might remember a strange dream that Espinoza, one of the critics, had in Part 1, in which "he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements — the movements of horses and riders — were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched from losing his mind."

While the title "2666" is often thought to refers to a year, this review reinforces my impression that the "666" portion of it is critical, as in a 2nd coming of 666.

Clearly Haas is a scapegoat, but he's also very creepy.

In his dreams he saw himself walking the corridors of the prison, the different cell block, and he could see his eyes like a hawk's as he strode that labyrinth of snores and nightmares, aware of what was going on in each cell, until suddenly he could go no farther and he came to a stop at the edge of an abyss (since the prison of his dreams was like a castle built on the edge of a bottomless abyss). There, unable to retreat, he lifted his arms, as if beseeching the heavens (which were as dark as the abyss), and tried to say something to a legion of miniature Klaus Haases, speak to them, warn, them, impart advice, but he realized, or for an instant he had the impression, that someone had sewn his lips shut. (p 488)

More dreams!

What are you trying to say to me? asked Sergio González. That here in prison they know I'm innocent, said Haas. And how do they know it? asked Haas. That was a little harder for me to figure out. It's like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious. Suddenly someone dreams it and after a while half the prisoners dream it. But the noise you hear isn't part of the dream, it's real. The noise belongs to a separate order of things. Do you understand? First someone and then everyone hears a noise in a dream, but the noise is from real life, not the dream. The noise is real. Do you understand? (p 450)

There's a psychic connection between Florita and Haas. I'm thinking the book she describes (pages 431-433) that faithfully depicts the shepherding experience was written by Haas (aka Archimboldi?).

Haas like to sit on the ground, against the wall, in the shady part of the yard. And he liked to think. He liked to imagine that God didn't exist. For three minutes, at least. He also liked to think about the insignificance of human beings. Five minutes. If pain didn't exist, he thought, we would be perfect. Insignificant and ignorant of pain. Fucking perfect. But there was pain to fuck everything up. Finally he would think about luxury. The luxury of memory, the luxury of knowing a language or several languages, the luxury of thinking and not running away. Then he opened his eyes and contemplated, as if in a dream, some of the Bisontes, who were moving around the sunny part of the yard, the other side, as if they were grazing. The Bisontes graze in the prison yard, he thought, and that calmed him like a fast-acting tranquilizer, because sometimes, though not often, Haas started the day as if his head had been pierced with the point of a knife.

There's some recurring imagery: the crater, the abyss.

Shortly after they left the ranch they passed an enormous black stone. On the stone Lalo thought he saw a Gila monster, motionless, staring into the endless west. They say that stone is really a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete. In a gully, farther to the north the Río Paredes curved, and from the road the tops of trees were visible like a green-black carpet with a cloud of dust hanging over them were Pedro Rengifo's cattle came to drink each afternoon. But if it was a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete, it would've left a crater, and where's the crater? When Lalo Cura looked at the black stone again in the rearview mirror, the Gila monster was gone. (p 399)

This oasis of horror in the desert ("The desert is an endless sea." p 559), as if by meteor a great evil embedded itself there in the earth.

If it had been up to her, everyone around her, the shadowy figures on the edges of the photograph, would have disappeared instantly, and so would the room, the prison, jailers and jailed, the hundred-year-old walls of the Santa Teresa penitentiary, and all that was left would be a crater, and in the crater there would be only silence and the vague presence of the lawyer and Haas, chained in the depths. (p 591)

I lost track of many character's names and their backstories: druglords, reporters, government officials. In my brief re-skimming of this part a month after my first read-through, different portions are jumping out at me as significant. I suspect this truly would be a book much richer on rereading, being informed by the knowledge of how it all comes together.

A favourite sentence: "The scarred moon still shone in the sky" (p 401).

The part about Amalfitano

It's been some time since I read part 2 of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (I'm near the end of part 4, and reading some books alongside this one). I made some notes as I went along (from which most of the below is constructed), but this section, to judge by the vividness of it in my memory, seems not to have made as much of an impression on me as The Part about the Critics.

While this part has more "story" to it, it's also somewhat more surreal.

Memory
Lola has assimilated what she learned from Amalfitano into her own memory. She believes the poet is a former lover of hers, but it was from Amalfitano that she first learned about him.

It's never clear if her letters to Amalfitano relating her history with and her meeting with the poet are complete fabrications, or whether any portion of it is grounded in her actual experience.

Amalfitano himself becomes increasingly unreliable as a narrator, casting double doubt on Lola's story.

Greek
A handful of allusions again in this section, again that I'm unable to make anything of.

- "Sometimes she [Lola] felt like Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise in Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes [...]
- Other times the mother of Medon and Strophius
- Pylades, Orestes stand for the faces of many men

Amalfitano and Duchamp
Amalfitano finds a book in his possession and goes through some mental contortions to place it. (I can relate: Imagine finding a book that you have no inkling how it got there! It would drive me crazy!)

On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geométrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry."

Much the same could be said of 2666's first 3 parts, triangulating on Santa Teresa.

Amalfitano hangs the book out on a clothes line, in the spirit of a readymade conceived by Duchamp, who meant for the wind to go through the book and find (and deal with) its own problems or, as Amalfitano interprets it, to see if the book learns anything about real life.

It's Art, I guess, but I don't think Amalfitano's intentions are artistic ones, exactly. The act has the feeling of an I Ching. It seems to affect Amalfitano via osmosis, in that he starts producing drawings, quite unconsciously, diagramming, possibly, relationships between philosophers.

At which point it appears that Amalfitano is losing his mind. He considers that the voice in his head may be a product of telepathy.

Telepathy
Lola imagined she was establishing telepathic contact with the poet.

Amalfitano relates the voice in his head to telepathy and reads about the Araucanians, who had refined telepathy as a viable means of communication, as well as sending messages by the movement of branches.

Morini in his dream (in part 1) faced Norton "and she said: 'There's no turning back.' He heard the sentence not with his ears but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She isn't bad, she's good. It isn't evil I sensed, it's telepathy."

Literature
Mostly I think this passage is funny:

One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential words, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and tench.

However. There's something going on here: refusing to take on literature (or reality?) head on.

Magic
There's a lot of magic in this book, in different forms. The magic of dreams, telepathy, superstition, art and literature.

Boris Yeltsin — "last Communist philosopher" — appears to Amalfitano in a dream, with wisdom to impart:

And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:

"I think it's time for a little drink."

(This dream sequence really stood out for me, and weirdly, there's a bit in part 4 that I just read that makes reference to it: a highly respected serial killer profiler "dreamed of a crater and a man pacing around it. That man is probably me, he said to himself in the dream, but it didn't strike him as important and the image was lost." So I'm thinking it's not the identity of the man that matters so much as the existence of the crater (or latrine — Amalfitano considers that it may be a latrine), some void left by a force of destruction, something blatant, which still they circle, as if to stare into that abyss, or acknowledge it, would negate their existence.)

Summary
Lola spends her time circling the poet, daring to meet him only twice (or was it more than that? either way, I think my point stands). She seems always to be waiting for a sign (sign of her friend Imma) before taking action, or taking for signs some mundane thing to justify her action. Amalfitano has his own disconnect from reality, circling round his career, his daughter, the city he lives in without daring a head-on confrontation. Is he waiting for the book to give him a sign? Or the voice? Bolaño certainly is circling round the murders at Santa Teresa.

The epigraph of 2666 comes from Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." I'm beginning to see what this means.

A walk on the beach

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

The part about the critics

I'm greatly enjoying Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

By sheer coincidence, of which I have the luxury, I stumbled upon a bloggers' discussion, cohosted by Steph and Tony Investigate and Kiss a Cloud. I don't know who these people are, but they seem to love books, and have interesting ideas about this one in particular, and that's all good. I'll be checking in there as I progress to see what others make of this book.

I posted an excerpt and some comments a few days ago. Below are some of my thoughts, still relatively fresh, having completed part 1.

Archimboldi
The name is easily confused with Archimboldo, to Pelletier's outrage and horror we learn on the first page. His paintings are, in my opinion, grotesque, but inviting scrutiny.

By his early mention, Bolaño invites the reference. This book is having an effect similar to that of the paintings: surreal and weird, faintly beautiful, not what it appears to be.

Greek
— "Pelletier was more intimately acquainted than Espinoza with Mnemosyne, mountain goddess and mother of the nine muses."
— "...Espinoza and Pelletier believed themselves to be (and in their perverse way, were) incarnations of Ulysses, and that both thought of Morini as Eurolychus..."
— Pritchard to Pelletier, regarding Norton, "'Beware of the Medusa.'"

There are allusions here. Yeah, I have no idea.

Coincidence
Edwin Johns, the (fictional) artist who cut off his hand to use it in a self-portrait, relates an argument about coincidence.

"And as far as coincidence is concerned, it's never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said the world isn't a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn't a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he's already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that's a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence." [ed: Just trying to wrap my head around this... No coincidence because there's an enforced(?) structure, whether the natural structure of geography and physics, or the social/economic structure of scheduled workdays. The more order there is, the less chance for chance. But how is this suffering, exactly, apart from being at the mercy of all this order?]

"As if coincidence were a luxury?" asked Morini.

[. . .]

"Coincidence isn't a luxury, it's the flip side of fate, and something else besides," said Johns.

"What else?" asked Morini.

"Something my friend couldn't grasp, for a reason that's simple and easy to understand. My friend (if I may still call him that) [ed: Who's Johns's friend anyway?] believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. [ed: Wait a second. Being a painter, Johns actually paints with paint (and body parts). Is his friend a painter? or a writer? Is Johns simply being metaphorical here or is there possibly something more to it?] He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In the hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us."

Coincidence, then, is evidence of a God who doesn't care, who has no interest. (How is this different from there being no God at all?) But it's just a simile. Why invoke the simile if it's only to negate the vehicle?

Art
The story of Edwin Johns fascinates me. Could this personage and his claim to fame be based on a real artist?

Art is an act of self-negation. Johns certainly negated his painting hand. (Also: the only true representation of a thing is the thing itself.) Archimboldi is so negated as to possibly not exist at all.

Once in Mexico, Amalfitano explains to the critics the relationship between Mexican intellectuals with power. There follows a long and rambling yet beautiful passage, ultimately senseless, so Amalfitano admits, in which the shadows of the writers have slipped away, and this negates the worth of the intellectuals and their authority, or transmutes the intellectuals into something else entirely (reckless gods, or beautiful monsters, but pathetic all). (And here, when the intellectuals retire for the night, comes my favourite sentence: "The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.")

Violence
The violence is jarring. My jaw dropped at an early instance, when the little gaucho is looking at the lady with the eyes of a bird of prey, and here there is an image so startlingly horrific (which I will not repeat here), and then it's gone, wrapped up, uncomfortably but dismissively, as if there is nothing threatening about this "clumsy young butcher."

Then there's the taxi incident. The cabbie wasn't entirely innocent, but surely he didn't deserve all that was brought down upon him. Pelletier and Espinoza have acted "out of character," but I think that's part of the point — we never know, often don't even suspect, what we're capable of, particularly if pushed or provoked, till it happens.

One of the critics commented that the cab driver, in calling the streets a labyrinth, had unconsciously quoted Borges ("I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London)"). Is that where the violence sprouts from? The cabbie feels he's being called an idiot, so he calls their woman a whore. Are they defending her honour, or their own authority as critics? Or does it stem from something else entirely?

There is more violence to come, I know. The above episodes really came out of the blue, with my primary response in both cases being, "What the hell just happened?" Presumably, subsequent episodes will follow in this pattern?

The dreams
Are creepy. And very realistically dream-like.

Morini
Morini really interests me because he's more an observer than a participant in all the events of part 1.

His fascination with Johns seems unhealthy. I'm not sure what it's founded in. Purely academic — philosophical — curiosity? Upon first hearing the story of Johns, "The urge to weep — or else, faint — persisted, but he restrained it."

I think it's this quality that saves Morini. Restraint.

Morini is all about critical detachment.

As a contender for Norton's affections, he detaches himself, and from his outsider's position he wins her.

Similarly, his interest in Archimboldi never consumes him to the point of dropping his real life to chase some crazy tale to Mexico. His interest remains professional and reasonable. He does, however, enable the others' obsession with Archimboldi, bringing word of his sighting to them. (Coincidence? Did he foresee how the others would react? Part of me want to believe that Morini is Archimboldi, but I don't think I can make this hypothesis fit the facts.)

Maybe Morini represents the reading audience: a bit perverse, voyeuristic, but reasonably so and with restraint (the one quality all the other characters seem to lack).

Summary
This is a lot of me having no idea, and raising (or repeating) more questions than I dare answer. But greatly enjoying the ride.

Separate and interminable suburbs

If all experience is more than the sum of its parts, is it in any way possible to reconstruct a semblance thereof by analyzing its constituents?

Of course there is.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone.

Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. After they'd been talking for an hour and half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

— from 2666, by Roberto Bolaño.

Although I treated myself to a copy of 2666 at around Christmas, I'm only just now getting over the the Bolaño glut I experienced at that time and getting past the intimidation this book carries with it, and getting on with it. To this point, about 100 pages in, I'm loving it, and finding it a much smoother (more cohesive and coherent) read than The Savage Detectives.

I have the 3-volume paperback version, slipcased, chosen with commuting in mind. It's beautifully designed! The image is a detail from Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele, dark, brooding, and apocalyptic; the book title is a bold counterpoint (reminiscent of Wild West posters — Blackoak font?) in vulgar red.

From certain angles (well, most), the only visible writing is 666 (as pictured above).

I've been reading in the métro, and this book has garnered far more inquisitive glances from my fellow passengers than most, struck by its beauty or afeard of my satanic presence.