Think of Troilus

Jealous lovers are more respectable, less ridiculous, than jealous husbands. They are supported by the weight of literature. Betrayed lovers are tragic, never comic. Think of Troilus.

— from The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene.

(I'm only about 50 pages in. The above is from page 17, and I think there's something beautiful and true about the statement.)

This novella is nothing like what I expected. It seems that the story of the affair is recounted in a series of flashbacks, with the cool detachment time allows. It feels absolutely uncomfortably voyeuristic; the narrator's a bit spiteful — we're allowed this glimpse of intimacy without being fully welcomed into it.

There's also a surprising lot about the process of writing in here, the discipline of it, the research and inspiration. The narrator raises the problem of weighting a scene with unspoken meaning, and magically Greene is meanwhile weighting the scene with unspoken meaning.

But I don't know anything about Troilus.

Ninja girl

Confession (and further proof of negligent parenting): We've never actually taken the kid trick-or-treating. Except for that time when she was 2 and we were visiting my mom and we went to all of 3 houses, and this was less for the joy of trick-or-treating than for the joy my mother took in showing off her cute granddaughter to the neighbours.

Our urban neighbourhood simply isn't condusive to it. We've never once had trick-or-treaters at our door, at this address or in our previous apartment. I've never seen any in the streets. Which I don't fully understand — I know kids live around here, there's a school at the end of the street, and the playground a couple blocks over even this time of year is full of them. Helena tells me some of her classmates partake in this tradition — I have yet to determine if these are kids who live nearby or out of zone. It's all very mysterious.

But I don't think Helena minds much. There have always been plenty of activities, and candy, at school (and daycare before that) to keep here happy.

With yesterday's crappy weather, she was more interested, thankfully, in preserving that other grand Halloween tradition: the watching of scary movies.

Google "scary movies for kids" and you'll find parents like me wondering what's too scary. You'll also find lots of outraged parents wondering why on Earth we would want to scare our precious youngsters. Well, because it's fun.

Obviously individual sensibilities must be taken into account, but this kid's made of pretty tough stuff (although ironically, the older she gets, the scarier she thinks Doctor Who is, her fear growing proportionally with her comprehension). She's been reminding me for weeks that we need to find a scary movie. And not a cartoon.

Last year we watched The Birds. She watched less than half before opting for bed, but it made a memorable, nontraumatic impression, such that we can refer to this cultural touchstone when we encounter vicious swarms of seagulls in parking lots and have a good laugh over it.

This year: The Horror of Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee. Helena tells me it wasn't scary at all (don't tell her I told you, but I saw her jump twice). It's just biting people, and she shrugs her shoulders. Although, she clarifies, if Dracula acually came to bite her, yes, she'd be scared, but he's biting other people so it's no big deal. But now at least she knows how to kill a vampire.

The museum

So the effect of that moment I was living was of something I was remembering. Visitors to my Museum of Innocence must compel themselves, therefore, to view all objects displayed therein — the buttons, the glasses, the old photographs, and Füsun's combs — not as real things in the present moment, but as my memories.

Here is an incomplete inventory of the objects on display:

- the shop sign that had once hung on the door where she worked (p 5)
- school photograph of maternal grandfather (p 8)
- an illustrated menu, an advertisement, a matchbook, and a napkin from Fuay, a European-style restaurant (p 12)
- the newspaper advertisement, the commercials, and bottles of strawberry, peach, orange, and sour cherry flavors of Turkey's first domestic fruit soda, Meltem, in memory of our optimism and the happy-go-lucky spirit of the day (p 26)
- Füsun's fuchsia dress (p 27)
- one of Füsun's earrings (first exhibit) (p 28)
- floral batiste handkerchief, as a symbol of solicitude (p 30)
- mother's crystal inkwell and pen set, symbolizing refinement and fragile tenderness (p 30)
- belt with oversize buckles, as a symbol of melancholy (p 31)
- photographs and postcards (p 41)
- pictures of movies stars form Zambo (p 45)
- cigarette, usher's flashlight, Alaska Frigo ice cream, symbolizing the desire and solitude of youth (p 47)
- Spleen cologne, from Paris (p 49)
- cigarette packets, teacup, glass, seashell to evoke heavy, draining, crushing atmosphere; girlish hair clip to remind us the stories happened to a child (p 55)
- painting, commissioned; view of Füsun's apartment, with chestnut tree (p 67)
- small collection of funeral photographs (p 83)
- plaster bust of his father, with plastic mustache (p 87)
- postcards of Istanbul Hilton (p 102)
- photo with Ship-Sinker Güven (who ran an insurance company); photo with gentleman banker (p 128)
- clock, matchsticks, matchbooks (p 146)
- depiction of internal organs of human body, from ad for painkiller (p 148)
- picnic basket, with thermos with tea, stuffed grape leave, boiled eggs, soda bottles, tablecloth (p 152)
- painting by Melling, of view similar to picnic view (p 152)
- door chime (p 161)
- stapler, ashtray with company logo (p 171)
- menus and glasses from Fuaye (p 174)
- letter to Füsun (p 179)
- newsclipping, with Ceyda's official beauty contest photo (p 180)
- collar of father's pyjamas, one of his slippers (p 182)
- items from mother's drawers (p 188)
- telephone token (p 201)
- hotel key, headed stationery, replica of sign (p 210)
- enlarged photo of father's toes (p 224)
- bolt of bathroom in Füsun's apartment, but not her lipstick (p 242)
- oil painting, commissioned; view of main room in Füsun's house from point of view of canary (p 250)
- little tin spoon, saltshaker, half-eaten ice cream cone (p 256-7)
- ticket stubs from summer cinemas, lobby photographs, advertisements (p 260)
- Meltem soda bottle (272)
- slender Buren wristwatch (p 288)
- model of Füsun's apartment (p 298)
- picture of view from window in back room (p 300)
- tombala set used for eight consecutive years at Füsun's house (p 322)
- 4,213 of Füsun's cigarette butts, each with its own soul (p 395)
- a pair of optical illusions (p 421)
- blue bikini (p 436)

Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard. When their first pieces passed into their hands, the first true collectors — who would later exhibit, categorize, and catalog their great collections (in the first catalogs, which were the first encyclopedias) — initially never recognized these objects for what they were.

This is an excruciatingly lovely book, this book being The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. Through all these objects, these simple objects — some conventional mementos, others ridiculously banal — a love story is told, and more.

As visitors admire the objects and honor the memory of Füsun and Kemal, with due reverence, they will understand that, like the tales of Leyla and Mecnun or Hüsn and Aşk, this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul.

It is a book in 3 parts, the first section being about Kemal's relationships and how he sabotages them. It is very much about the nature of relationships, traditional versus modern, and, in particular, the issue of a woman's attitude to her own virginity. To be a modern woman in 1970s Turkey is a complicated, contradiction-laden thing. And it's evident that Kemal doesn't fully understand it either. Kemal is engaged to Sibel, a beautiful socialite, but he has fallen in love with Füsun. We see Kemal grapple with social conventions and learn his own mind. He makes choices and deals (or not) with their aftermath.

The second section is the meat of Kemal's obsession. It is a meditation on time and memory, and love, of course. This is the story of courtship, in a way. Kemal's grand romantic gestures are comprised of countless trivialities that finally are seen to sum up to something greater than its individually insignificant parts. And yet, it is in those discrete acts that everything is contained.

My life has taught me that remembering Time — that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present — is for most of us a rather painful business. When we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments, or, as in our museum, the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful realization that this line per se has no real meaning — a sense that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore — we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the "present" can bring us enough happiness to last a century, [...]

The third section is quite short and is really more of a postscript. I'm not sure what purpose it serves to the novel as a whole... It allows Pamuk to insert the character of an author named Pamuk, commissioned by Kemal to write his story, as a guide to the museum. So that's a neat trick. Apart from that, I suppose it allows a couple points to be cleared up, things the narrator couldn't've known, and a few things are reported as being said, and I can see that it would've been difficult to have characters say these things naturally within their own narratives. Also presented here is a kind of philosophy of museums. But the astute reader would already have understood these things. Their reinforcement here is superfluous. The story by this time is essentially over. I almost wonder if the novel might be stronger without this section.

Similarly, the book contains an index of characters, absolutely useless to the average reader, but it is in keeping with the philosophy of museum: that it is not directed to the casual visitor, but it takes on import only from the perspective of the subject under examination (the museum's reason for being). The list acts as an acknowledgement of contributors.

It's kind of a disturbing book, actually. (It feels at times a little uncomfortably like Nabokov, for reasons I can't pinpoint but generally to do with the nature of obsession.) I don't know if our narrator is particularly sympathetic. It's not that he treats women badly, but he does some stupid things regarding women and he's such a guy about it. (I mean, he lies to Füsun! He actually thinks it's the right thing to do, he must believe he can get away with it, but he's kind of a jerk about it.) So it's a weird thing to get all wrapped up in his obsession: I don't think we're meant to fully understand it as we go along, it is the point of the novel to make us come round to understanding it.

We're led through this museum of a book, waiting to be told how it came to be. To what tragic end did this love come? You just know — the tone, the verb tenses — that all this, this love, is over. But the obsession continues.

The weirdness is amplified by the fact that we don't really know the object of Kemal's obsession. We know Füsun only through his eyes, and there are times we must question her innocence — is she playing her own game, is she acting out of anger, spite, revenge — we don't really know her at all.

This love is not innocent, nor are the parties to it. So I'm not sure about the innocence:

Main Entry: in·no·cence
Pronunciation: \ˈi-nə-sən(t)s\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a : freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil : blamelessness b : chastity c : freedom from legal guilt of a particular crime or offense d (1) : freedom from guile or cunning : simplicity (2) : lack of worldly experience or sophistication e : lack of knowledge : ignorance
2 : one that is innocent
3 : bluet

Chastity (as abstention from intercourse) is a factor, but I don't think it is central, except insofar as it leads to a chastening of character. Perhaps the museum is less a tribute than an attempt at absolution from guilt.

This is a gorgeous novel. I don't think it's as important as Snow, but I suspect it's more accessible, with a kind of quiet, noble beauty about it. It's about this timeless thing called love, after all, dwelling on all its elements in Proustian detail. And happiness! Have I mentioned happiness? No matter how tragic its end, there's a lot of happiness in love.

More
Excerpt: Kissing.

Jeremy is reading The Museum of Innocence and blogging about it as he goes. (I love this approach to reading/blogging, where reactions and associations are more immediate. I wish I did more of this, managed my time better, instead of saving it all up for a binge.)

Washington Post: "And as Kemal becomes more and more obsessed, even ill, in his irrational pursuit of happiness, we cannot help but see that he is utterly blind to the dire politics of his time. Is it lovesickness or innocence or just plain apathy that so distracts him from the bombs, the riots, the crackdowns, the unfortunate ranks among his schoolmates who are being dragged away to jail?"

The National (Abu Dhabi): "But The Museum of Innocence is far more ambitious than it might first seem; before long, Pamuk spins his love story into a damning social history of Turkish taboos and traditions."

New York Review of Books (Pico Iyer): "Every detail, in short, speaks of a culture of quixotic aspirations."

The Harvard Crimson: "The museum-like quality of novels is about preservation, conservation, and resistance to being forgotten."

Norton Lectures:
Excerpts from "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist," delivered by Orhan Pamuk.
Summarized in Harvard Magazine.

Interviews:
NPR
International Festival of Authors

Blue Met 2010

The winner of the 2010 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, recognizing a lifetime of literary achievement by a writer of international reputation, has been announced.

Novelist Dany Laferrière will receive the prize at the 12th annual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, which will take place April 21–25, 2010.

"I am thrilled that Montreal author Dany Laferrière has accepted our invitation, and especially delighted that a long-time friend of the Blue Metropolis Festival will be recognized for the great quality, the audacity and wit of his work in several different genres," said Linda Leith, President and Artistic Director of Blue Metropolis Foundation.

Laferrière is probably best known for his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro.

Today

Today I am sick, with aches and intense sinus pressure and a very sore throat.

We had a whirlwind weekend, in Toronto, celebrating an aunt's 80th birthday, with probably near 80 family members, family friends. It made me proud to bring J-F more fully into the family fold, meeting cousins he'd never met. It made me proud that Helena was bright-eyed and sweet as ever, and that my mother could show her off before the clan.

Helena was a bit overwhelmed. "They love me so much. And everybody wants to give me presents!"

I slept most of the drive home yesterday. All I wanted was a Neo Citran and a blanket.

It didn't take much convincing this morning — J-F told my I should stay home today, and I said OK. Today, I'm a little bit glad to be a little bit sick, that I could nap and read and nap some more, and finish The Museum of Innocence (which is absolutely exquisite and highly recommended), that I could hang out with my cat.

Kissing

Kissing Füsun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction for each other; it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love's true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I were someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips, and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered ("This is a child," went one idea — "Yes, but a very womanly one," went another), and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Füsuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking's slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as Time itself.

— from The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk.

The stack

Pictured in random order, but described in a particular order according to a logic I couldn't possibly begin to explain to anyone.

(I've already actually read a couple of these, but they're still in the stack as books I have to contend with (write about, shelve, pass on to someone else). It may not look like much of a stack, but it's enough to make me feel daunted — I've gotten pretty good at not acquiring books I don't actually mean to read fairly immediately. Sure, I have a shelf of book I haven't gotten to in years, but I do my best not to let it grow.)

The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story, by Hanan Al-Shaykh. This was a review copy and I'm not sure why I accepted it because it didn't sound like the sort of thing I would ordinarily read. But! It was captivating! I was not familiar with the author's name, but apparently she's quite revered for her short stories. I was a bit put off by the prologue, which sets up how this book came to be; there was a lot of ego (both Hanan's and her mother's) and little humility. But I guess it speaks to the author's skill that she took me past that and so convincingly channeled her mother's story, about growing up as a woman, and a free-spirited one, in Lebanon in the middle of the last century, with fairy-tale-like exuberance. (Here's a great review.)

The Mystery Guest: An Account, by Grégoire Bouillier. Along with the Greene and Mann below, these are books I ordered for myself just because I really wanted them, and I'd put it off long enough. (The trailer for this book is among the first I ever saw, and still my favourite.) It's a kind of memoir, about a guy who overthinks the significance of every single social gesture or nongesture, particularly as relating to the girl who dumped him with no explanation (I'd've dumped him too). See this review for more details. The book is charming and funny, even while the narrator is a bit of a weenie. At 132 pages it makes for a great read on a rainy Sunday afternoon (which it did this past weekend, between turkey cooking and card-playing).

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene. I hear it's devastatingly good, and I quite liked Brighton Rock this past summer.

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. This is my own personal next project as a close and careful read, or as much like it as I can muster. I've been wanting to get to it for some time, as I myself have a tale of a magic mountain. I've been even more keen on Mann since coming across (via Maud Newton) this quotation from a 1955 interview:

The basic theme on which I've tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o'clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. I picked this up at our fundraising book sale at work. I'm certain some bloggers have raved about this book in the past, but I can't remember who. Was it you?

Wake, by Robert J Sawyer. I won this book about a week ago (and so far, this is the best reason I can figure to join Twitter: the contests). I find Sawyer has his ups and downs; the ideas in his novels can be awesome, but the writing at times brings it down. In some books, the dialogue was hopeless, and the characterization of women and relationships was less then believable; but he fares better than many genre writers. I've read a few chapters already — while I'm not convinced that Sawyer has the voice of a 15-year-old girl down, the story has a cool concept and I do want to know how it turns out.

The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. To be released October 20. I have a review copy. For which I am dropping everything. First sentence: "It was the happiest moment of my life, thought I didn't know it."

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.

Update

Claire and Stefanie win The Savage Detectives and 2666 respectively, both books by Roberto Bolaño. Email me with your snail mail addresses and I'll get these books out to you as soon as I can.

I did finish reading 2666 a few days ago, but I'm having a hard time carving out the mental space to write about it. It's a bit anticlimactic, to have finished. I've been refraining from reading other people's thoughts on the final part, so that my own impressions remain unadulterated, but I'm thinking now it may help catalyze my ideas.

I started reading (and am almost finished) The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story, by Hanan Al-Shaykh, and it's very romantic and exuberant and easy to be swept up in.

Life is kind of weirdly busy recently, and I'm having a hard time keeping up and staying focused.

More as it develops...

Remembrance of things Proust

It's a hundred years ago about this time of year that Marcel Proust holed himself up in a cork-lined room to begin writing A la recherche du temps perdu.

I have little to remember of Proust, as my copy of Swann's Way lies (mostly) unread under my bed (though I did read the first 30-odd pages about 20 years ago (and I don't remember them)).

But last week I received in the mail an unsolicited review copy of Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time: A Reader's Guide to The Remembrance of Things Past, by Patrick Alexander, which has me thinking I should hole my own self up in a room to write a masterpiece. Or at least maybe I should consider finally reading what Proust came up with.

The Guide is somewhat meaningless to me at this stage, but from this side of the memory of an experience I haven't had yet, it looks like it might be useful: apart from the requisite section summaries, there are character lists, plenty of photos, a history of France (or the relevant bits anyway), and a map.

I hereby pledge to follow this Guide when the time comes to actually read Proust, quite possibly in the new year. (I'm afraid my dance card is pretty full until then.)

In the meantime, I'll be warming up to the reading of the book itself with the following activities:

Proust101: A one week course on all things Proust, free, via Twitter, starting October 1, 2009, and being repeated October 8, 2009. I am subscribed — I'll let you know if I learn anything.

ProustLive: The masterpiece will be tweeted, starting October 15, 2009.

And there's always the Proust Questionnaire, which I've been meaning to try out on a friend or two.

To learn more about the Guide, or read about how it came to be, or for hordes of Proustian resources, visit the website.

Nick and Juliet

I first heard about Nick Hornby having a new book out from Maxine (Petrona), who highlighted a couple key points in a then recent Bookseller interview:

His new book, he says, epitomises the English "can't do" spirit. "It's a sad book because there's a sense of people who have not achieved what they wanted to achieve with their lives."

On similar, refreshingly pragmatic grounds, he has a go at the "lit snobs", otherwise known as the "literati". "I completely understand people's reluctance to pick up a literary novel that is not going to entertain them in the 30 minutes they have before they go to sleep at night. I think the world of books forgets that because so many of us do our reading during the day. That's a luxury so many people forget." Hornby has written about these themes of accessibility on his blog, saying that writers who challenge their readers without entertaining them sometimes forget that readers are people with "jobs and worries and dependents, people who are tired after a hard working day or week."

There have been about 3000 reviews of the book in The Guardian already, generally positive but also rather unenthusiastic. That pretty much sums up my view.

It's about a guy obsessed with a reclusive rockstar. Which you just know can't be good for this guy's girlfriend.

John Keenan likes the fact that Hornby offers a sensitive and moving portrayal of a woman. (Big deal! He's done that before, and so have plenty of writers.)

The second reason I enjoyed the novel more than any of Hornby's previous works, is the playful postmodern approach to the nature of fiction. Duncan's internet-based quest to uncover the truth about Crowe's retirement gives Hornby licence to have lots of fun with the fact that such endeavours produce a blizzard of egregious facts which take on a life and meaning of their own. Hornby produces faux-Wikipedia entries for Crowe and demonstrates how the insertion of one red herring can result in a fish farm of false information. Meanwhile Annie goes in search of her own truth about the relationship between life and art. Her hesitant probing produces profound conclusions about the artifice behind all artistic endeavours.

This is a pretty neat aspect actually, and on another level as well — in how we forge online identities in forums or develop email relationships.

Interview, National Post:

It's strange, Hornby agrees, that in music, rarities and bootlegs are coveted by fans; in movies, deleted scenes and outtakes are regularly included on DVDs; in the art world, something like a Picasso sketch is worth millions; but literature doesn't really function in the same way.

"I think it used to before computers," he says. "You can get The Waste Land with all Ezra Pound's notes on it, the Jack Kerouac On the Road on the scroll. There is stuff like that around. But really, the trouble with computers is it just goes. There really isn't such a thing as a manuscript anymore."

I'm not sure I agree. I think, generally, the sketch has more scholarly value than aesthetic. And it's just as true for literature, but as Hornby notes the scraps are easily lost.

Listen to the podcast of Q, September 29, in which Nick Hornby asserts that anyone is qualified to be a critic and declares he'd rather be a pop song than a symphony.

Actually, this is a pretty interesting interview, possibly even better than the novel, covering many of the same issues — the nature of art and art criticism, and artistic integrity, and what famous people can get away with.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is chick lit, albeit in a fictional reality somewhat tempered by the author's male perspective. It's reasonably well written, and I think Hornby writes relationships pretty well:

She took the CD out of its plastic sleeve and put it into the portable player they kept in the kitchen. But instead of pressing the "play" button, her finger hovered above it for a second. Could she really listen to it before he did? It felt like one of those moment is a relationship — and there enough of them in theirs, God knows — that would look completely innocuous to an outsider, but which were packed with meaning and aggression. Annie could imagine telling Ros at work that Duncan had gone absolutely nuts because she played a new CD when he wasn't at home, and Ros would be suitably appalled and disgusted. But she wouldn't be telling the whole story. She'd be telling a self-serving version, omitting the context. And, of course, it would be legitimate to feel bafflement and outrage if Ros didn't understand, but Annie knew Duncan too well. She understood. She knew that playing the CD was an act of naked hostility, even if anyone peering through the windows wouldn't be able to see the nakedness.

I prefer some of Hornby's other novels, but Juliet, Naked is a quick and thoroughly entertaining read that won't tax your brain too much, which seems to be exactly what Hornby was going for.

Saint Peggy

Margaret Atwood rocks!

I have to admit, I had a tough time at first giving myself over to her new novel, The Year of the Flood — it was exactly the wrong mood to follow my other recent reads. And I felt like I was somehow morally obliged to like this book.

I've already mentioned how awed I was by the marketing machine moving this book. I wonder how much the average reader feels it though. I'm coming to think I see it only because I'm already plugged into those channels, the blogging and the twittering and the books pages.

The more it goes, the more I see it less as marketing and more as... I don't know... something between style and lifestyle. It's less directly about buy this book and more about here's some interesting information about urban bee-keeping, which has only a very little to do with the novel as a whole.

So the whole promotional angle is pretty unique and turning out to be pretty powerful, I think. I guess one can't really go wrong when publishing a Margaret Atwood novel, so there's a lot of creativity and freewheeling energy about it. How refreshing that the author tour is not a staid reading of an excerpt in some awkward space of a big-box bookstore; it's an enactment, an event. (Now let's promote lesser-selling authors this way!)

I find myself since closing this book putting light around people. And generally feeling kind of, well, floaty and flaky, kind of hippy, like I should get back to the earth. Not that I would actually give up eating red meat or anything.

But it's like this. I loved this book. I think my initial hesitation, my scepticism about this book is, in a way, built into the novel's structure. The two main viewpoints we follow are those of Toby and Ren, each of whom is brought into the fold of God's Gardeners in less than ideal circumstances, and in no way due to their having found anything remotely like God. They are grateful for the kindnesses but irreverent as concerns the core beliefs. They're basically good people, but they find the work of the Gardeners laughable; they're there by accident. But in the end, they're really more "Gardener" than any of them, in spirit and in practice. And I feel like that kind of describes my relationship with this book.

Do I need to tell you anything about the premise? The near future, gene-spliced creatures roaming the landscape, society fractured into haves and have-nots, the haves generally working for and living in the compounds of biotech corporations. The world is seeing various ecological disasters, resulting in migrations and the breakdown of social and economic structures. (Did anyone see Earth 2100? Kind of like that.) And there's a Plague, one following many caused by mutated viruses, that devastates the human population. Oh, do I love a dystopia!

In case you don't already know, Margaret Atwood is sharp. Throwaway lines are loaded with sociopolitical commentary:

[...] but I also had to do something so I might as well get an education. That's how they talked about it, as if an education was a thing that you got, like a dress.

She can be laugh-out-loud hilarious:

Bernice said the West Coast was perfect for that because although they all did stuff like yoga and said it was Spiritual, they were really just twisted, fish-crunching, materialistic body-worshippers out there, with facelifts and bimplants and genework and totally warped values.

And she still has everything of the philosophical poet about her:

There was a close-up of her dead face, looking more gentle and peaceful than I'd ever seen her look in life. Maybe that was the real Bernice, I thought — kind and innocent. Maybe she was truly like that inside, and the fighting we used to do and all her sharp and unpleasant edges — that was her way of struggling to get out of the hard skin she'd grown all over herself like a beetle shell. But no matter how she hit out and rage, she'd been stuck in there. That thought made me feel so sorry for her that I cried.

I love the ease with which she transcribes the cadence of a woman's mind. I became aware of this particularly with Cat's Eye, but it's probably there in her earlier novels too. (I studied Surfacing in high school, and that put me off early Atwood, but maybe I'll go there again some day.) Maybe it's because I'm female, and Canadian, and living in this time, that I relate to how Atwood writes, but I think it's something very special, and it's not a matter of how she captures dialogue, though she does that too, but really of grasping the flow of thoughts.

Notable reviews
Ursula K LeGuin, in the Guardian:

The personality and feelings of characters in Oryx and Crake were of little interest; these were figures in the service of a morality play. The Year of the Flood is less satirical in tone, less of an intellectual exercise, less scathing though more painful. It is seen very largely through the eyes of women, powerless women, whose individual characters and temperaments and emotions are vivid and memorable. We have less of Hogarth and more of Goya.

(I wasn't a big fan of Oryx & Crake, by the way. Some interesting ideas, but as a novel it was a little cold. I am now, however, really keen to revisit it. (TYOTF can be read and enjoyed independently of O&C.))

Jeanette Winterson, in the New York Times:

As ever with Atwood, it is friendship between women that is noted and celebrated — friendship not without its jealousies but friendship that survives rivalry and disappointment, and has a generosity that at the end of the novel allows for hope. Atwood believes in human beings, and she likes women. It is Toby and Ren who take the novel forward from the last page, not the genetically engineered new humans.

(Right. Did I mention? Genetically engineered humans!)

About the roadshow
The Guardian
Bookpuddle

Podcasts
The Next Chapter.
Q, September 18, 2009, in which Atwood asks Jian Ghomeshi if he even knows what a hippie is (God's Gardeners are not them).

Give thanks to Saint Peggy for clear-sighted literature! Let us sing!

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!

Love is cheap

Helena tells me she's going to remember yesterday forever!: It was the best day of her whole entire life! And I'm the best mommy ever!

Because!: after an un-fun morning of broken-down-refrigerator clean-up and unenthusiastically embarking on a previously planned shopping expedition (the girl needs pants! and she's really picky about her pants!) in the only time window available in the foreseeable month, I agreed that we could allow ourselves (I mean, her) a few fun minutes to browse the dollar store, and there I actually endorsed and funded the acquisition of a bow and arrow for a whole buck twenty-five.

I suspect she'll forget this day well before I do.

First time

She was at least 75 years old, a frail stick figure with a punk shock of white on top and an orange lipstick to match her jacket.

Some days more than others, inexplicably, the métro platform is more zoo than the quiet order of harmless commuters still half asleep and on their way to work. This was one of those days.

I navigated the hub, the point of transfer to another line. She was frantic to latch onto a face, and she chose mine.

Does this train go to...? Her voice trailed off, unable to maintain the volume her eyes bespoke. I had to ask her to repeat the question, the place names. Yes, I assured her.

Oh good, she smiled. It's the first time I ever take the métro. The train pulled up and we squeezed into the car.

I nodded her a reassurance when I disembarked a few stations later. She was still smiling, with all the nervous trepidation of a child on her first day of school.

I've been taking the métro for years. I'd like to believe that I'm pretty good at not letting adventures pass me by, but I'm hoping there'll be something left for me to try for the first time when I'm 75.

A day of no labour

We took the cat out of the city to put the chat in chalet.

Dinner theater

Mason Mason asks the obvious. "Why don't we write online? Aren't journals just dead blogs?"

Russell has prepped three days for this question. He defends private writing against writing for any stranger with a search engine. "I want you to think and feel, not sell. Your writing should be an intimate meal, not dinner theater."

— from Generosity, by Richard Powers.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

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).

Generosity abounds

Every day, the last few weeks, I rush to check the mailbox. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting.

Amid the usual bills and flyers I've had a couple nice surprises — for example, review copies of Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (I like most of his other novels better than this, but still breezy and delightful) and Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood (slowgoing, so far — I'm not in the right headspace for it, but maybe the upcoming cottage weekend will resolve that).

But I've been waiting for something in particular. And yesterday it came!

I pulled it out of the mailbox, and when I recognized the publisher's address, the world ceased to exist. "Oh my god oh my god oh my god" as I carried it reverentially into the house. Bag dropped off my shoulder, I let other mail slip to the ground. Child babbling incoherently in an auditory distance (she's right beside me, but she sounds like I'm underwater). My fingers fumbling at the pull tab. J-F said "You look like a junkie who just scored 10k of crack-cocaine. Do they send that by mail?" They do. It is.

Richard Powers' Generosity, about the genotype for happiness.

The blurb asks us, "What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments?"

I've been grappling with the problem of happiness for some 30 years. I think this feeling — when you open the mailbox and find an advance reading copy of a novel with an astounding premise that taps one of your own life obsessions by a guy who wrote one of your favourite books of all time — is something akin to it.