2666 poll

haha i thought the same thing every time i hit a new section

i voted pt. v. it was definitely the most old-school literary section of the novel, meaning it read like it could have been written in the '40s or '50s (maybe because of all the WWII stuff) but i don't know, i enjoyed it the most and archimboldi was the best character and i'm glad he made some effort to tie things together somewhat

pt. III was the worst, a lot of it seemed awkward and false and fate never really resonated as a character

i'm tempted to vote for part V because it's the freshest in my mind and it really gained momentum as it went along, but i think part I is still my favorite. actually i think i'm going to go back and re-read part I with part V in mind.

also, would read a bolano-penned 'friends' screenplay.

i definitely enjoyed pt. I but it seemed "lighter" than the other parts, like the characters were there just so he could make fun of them

havent got to part v yet so am not going to vote (am abt to finish iv) but def agree that iii is the weakest so far

agreed, and when you look it at it like this it's not much of a surprise:

"The Part About Fate" was easily the trickiest — try channeling an African-American narrator as imagined by a transplanted Chilean who never set foot in the United States." (natasha wimmer)

dude part 1 wasnt that light.

i didn't think he was making fun of the characters at all in part I. but i also read it during a strange weekend when it was oddly relevant to my situation.

did you see that interview btwn some translator + natasha wimmer (it might be the one yr quoting?) and the interviewer asks her how she dealt w/ all the puns in archimboldi's speech and she said she didnt know what he was referring to

lol, translation fail.

why are these titled like 'friends' episodes?

good question!

toss up between I and IV

good poll BTW

i actually really liked the part about Fate.

Still not quite finished the book yet so not able to vote yet.

yeah, it was the interview i linked in the other thread. the question was referring to how hans spoke as a little boy, which was only in a couple of pages. were those really puns though, or just oblique ways of referring to things? i'll have to go back and look (or really, someone who's read it in spanish should clarify).

yeah i just wanted them to talk a bit more abt it in the interview

i'm reading it in spanish but i've just started the final part so not got there yet.

part IV stayed with we longer and more vividly than anything else i read lasty year. i think its weird to say its the "best" but i think its the most necessary part of the book and it has so much force its the only section i cant imgaine the book existing w/out.

probably actually enjoyed part I the most.

on one hand i agree that part IV is the core of the book in a lot of ways, but i also don't like how some reviews give the impression that it's the only part.

it's definitely the section that's focussed on most in reviews

i think it's focused on a lot because it's so powerful (vivid, strong, etc etc) and relentless and unusual

part IV

the fate section is hit or miss but i loved the ending

i think anyone who thought the thing about friends episodes is at least a little doomed

great point, but we're all doomed, FYI

i also really like part II btw thought that it was the funniest and kindest section which was really necessary in context of how dark the other sections were

thats my ranking:
part 5
part 1
part 4
part 2/part3

part 1 is the most complete, and perfect in structure.
part 5 is the best cause of it's awesome gesture to german literature, adn because it ties everything just about right.
part 4 is the worst in terms of literature, but in the end the emotional effect is overflows.
part 2 and 3 are more less the same in style, part 3 is the worst (though still great) - too abstract and confused in parts.

yr crazy that part 4 'is the worst in terms of literature'!

actually i'm not quite sure what that means anyway

it's written more like a detached news report than a novel, isnt it?
plus it's too long.

yeah it's definitely detached but i dont see how that means it's not good lit. stuff doesnt have to be all flowery to be good writing.

it's definitely really long but as someone's said on another thread (i think) that's surely the point

part 4 is the worst in terms of literature

u keep saying this and it keeps getting more wrong

i like the meta stuff in part V where he's clearly talking about his own writing, or at least his idea of good writing.

it's a similar thing to savage detectives, where the poems or novels he makes you imagine are way better than anything he might have written if he had included samples from the fictional authors.

theory: writing about fictional fiction/authors >>>> writing about fictional music/musicians

yeah, in the sense that writing about fictional music/musicians is seriously terrible 99% of the time

thats because music is shitty and terrible and books are like the raddest thing eever

Taking Sides: Books vs. Music

not to mention that "ILB" is such a totally clumsy acronym

― mark p (Mark P), Saturday, September 7, 2002 12:37 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, in the sense that writing about fictional music/musicians is seriously terrible 99% of the time

man this is so true

when is there even a 1% when this doesnt happen?

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann

not-terrible bit about fictional music -- the protagonist's work on his operetta in coetzee's 'disgrace'.

the Writers Writing About Writers Writing is awful INCREDIBLY often, though, ur all nutz

true, a lot of young and/or bad writers do this in a "write what you know!" kind of way, but it seems so much harder even for good writers to write about music well.

nn, but the last chapter of poppy z brite's 'exquisite corpse' is bad enough to obscure a dozen you don't love me yets

haha "young and/or bad"

ha i'm not at all sure that 'you don't love me yet' is one of the good ones!

oh no, i meant it was bad, but it would take a dozen of it to be as bad as that bit of that novel. which is a bit like the epilogue to misery, only even less earned and more putrid

How does the translation deal with the pun name "Lalo Cura"?

they just call him "lalo cura" and theres a brief sentence somewhere where they explain the joke, sort of. they dont really go into depth re: the connotations of 'la locura'

by "they" i mean the translator

ah, cool.

Lalo Cura is my favourite character in this. Him at the crime scene figuring out the body was placed in exactly the spot where it would be found most easily and the fact that he's the only police officer in Santa Teresa that drinks milk.

jim, did you get to the hans reiter childhood "puns" part?

I thought it was a mess.

i hadn't noticed that A,LS. we disagree a lot on music and movies and other things so that's interesting.

Your David Mitchell recs were spot-on, and I agree with just about everything you've posted about him.

My rankings:

5
1
4
3
2 (I really thought this was the most expendable)

He could have folded a lot of the Amaltifano material into asides and digressions in Pts 1 and 3 imo.

most expendable but also one of my favorites

everybody hates 4, and finds it hard to read, and right on with that, but I feel like it's a kind of apotheosis of something

*checks to make sure that word is being used correctly*

the scene at the very end of pt 3 thru pt 4 was my favorite. I'm a giant lost in the middle of a burned forest. But someone will come to rescue me gave me chills

then pt 4 with its information overload of murders really made me feel like i was lost in a burned forest

i dont think i disliked any individual part, it was more that there were parts that read & you really got into it & then it slows down & feels more laborious, but all the parts had essential moments to the degree that i cant really space them out like that ... it feels like 50 different patchy memories thrown together

i mean that in a good, not entirely unorganized way

everybody hates 4, and finds it hard to read

crazy talk

Hate is too strong a word; don't know why I used it. Guess it just confuses me how many ppl seem to prefer 5...?

I was actually able to maintain distance in 4 mostly bcz of the journalistic detachment with which Bolano reports everything. But once in a while that detachment would break--when the police are raping the prostitutes, or when the old woman (can't remember her name) is on TV--and then all the cumulative pathos which had been held in check would come forth all at once and almost overwhelm me. It's probably the book's greatest effect imo.

good post. seems like a big obsession of bolano's throughout his work is this idea that latin america was irreparable poisoned by granting asylum to former nazi war criminals post-WWII. reading "Nazi Literature in the Americas" and really digging it.

I'm only just starting this and about 100pp into the first section, The Part About the Critics. How I keep getting myself into these 900pp books I cannot understand, but it seems, thus far, worthwhile.

I liked the part about amalfitano (sp?) best but the part about archimboldo is the most memorable. Overall i think this book is ok, idk, i'm not as enthusiastic about bolano as most people seem to be. I think the extreme sexual stamina of all his characters is lol.

i said a crazy thing last post -- that the part about archimboldi was the hardest to forget. the part about the crimes was the hardest to forget, although i think about it the least because it was an almost traumatic reading experience. my then gf and i both read this right after someone we knew was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and that was an awful decision. maybe the reason i sort of don't talk or think about this book very much is that it was *too* disturbing to me, too powerful, and i am not ready to accept it as the major work of our era, which is clearly what it sets out to be.

i wonder if viktor shklovsky would have approved of this book. he thought the point of our was to re-sensitize us to the world around us, and i think this book does accomplish that with its dull, prosaic mode of relating the murders -- as dead to the victims' suffering as our society is. probably, the effect is even more pronounced in the original spanish text, as it is really the form of that chapter -- the bodies piling up, too many to keep track of, too many to care about, until you catch yourself in this indifferent mode of reading and the effect of this recognition is even worse than any more "emotive" description of horror could be -- that makes it so striking, and sickening, as if all it is really saying, over and over, is "this is our world. look at it." until, finally, you do.

hm. this book is better than ok.

one more note: i think my reaction to this novel -- sort of forgetting about it, or repressing it -- was common, as i don't hear it discussed very often anymore and three (four?) years ago it was The Big Thing. in one sense, bolano is telling us something we don't want to hear: our culture treats certain human beings as disposable (by "our culture" i mean the world's, global capitalism's), and the casualties of our system are just too numerous, the problems so vast, that there is nothing we can do (by "we" i mean, anyone) to stem the bleeding. i think this book truly is relentlessly nihilistic. the world it presents is a totally dead world, devoid of hope, except there are billions of people caught in it, suffering. it's been a while since i've read it, but from what i remember amalfitano stood out as one of the only decent, relatable dudes, but he goes insane and his daughter gets caught up with murderous gangsters, i think. i am thinking now that i ought to read this book again but that is never, ever going to happen.

i was singing for my supper in an overnice restaurant with some rich californian ex-soviets ("when reagan came, there was hope!") the other night, and one of them brought up this book, unprompted, but i was the only other one at the table who'd read it, so she started describing it, in detail, from page one, the part about the critics, and i kept thinking she was going to stop but she just kept going, explaining plot points and characters from at least the first two parts, showing a pretty impressive literary memory, and then finally she was like "i didn't like it at all. i didn't see the point of it." i don't think she got far into the part about the crimes. anyway i really admired that level of attentive engagement with a book she didn't like. it was russian. i think this book is very good.

An example to us all!

treeship posts on this thread = v good posts, would read again

one more note: i think my reaction to this novel -- sort of forgetting about it, or repressing it -- was common, as i don't hear it discussed very often anymore

or it's just really long

farthest i've gotten is the very beginning of the, whatever it is, private eye part?

The part about fate, i think.

He's a journalist iirc but the chapter is written in a noirish style

It was my favourite, clearly I never voted in this

I would have voted for part II, but I hadn't read it back then. It may be expendable, but it's moving, and Amalfitano is a great character. Loved part I also, and part IV is burned into my brain. I thought 2666 was great, but The Savage Detectives is even better. I'm currently trying to read everything that's been translated and, as you might expect, it's somewhat hit or miss. Distant Star and Amulet are quite good, and, if you read just one book of stories, make it The Insufferable Gaucho.

I have now finished three of five parts and I'm a good 100pp into The Part About the Crimes. I am happy to see the fifth and final part was best regarded, getting two of the four votes cast. While I have found the book interesting and full of sharply observed details, it hasn't gripped me or induced any of the thrills of discovery that I associate with books that have genuinely excited me.

I think the extreme sexual stamina of all his characters is lol.

Agree.

do we not think that he is aware that it is lol

deadpan delivery

I think he knew it was lol but he stopped laughing in the 70s at some point so the humor was theoretical.

i sort of want to claim that it's not a thing, that it's just the opening section of savage detectives and the last of 2666, that it's for specific effect. but i don't know if i'm editing my memories to make him less embarrassing -- i do recall bits in the first section of detectives (obv the first thing of his i read) that made me think, seriously, is this guy for real

I dont have a good answer for that. I think its both supposed to be funny and to add a mythical something to the book.

yes 'a mythical something' is v good, particularly for the scene in 2666 where they're j.o.ing watching someone have epic not v pleasant sounding sex in a gothic castle

ha, is that a real thing? i have no memory of that scene.

yeah. it's the countess lady and the general who is later crucified, i think.

ha i'd been talking about that scene earlier and then when jordan queried it i wondered if i had in fact invented it

it does feel sort of like a hallucination: my memory of that scene is very vivid, yet imprecise four years after reading it. maybe that book is a masterpiece after all. i don't know anymore.

Some of those scenes I took as parellel to the pornographical descriptions of the violence in 'Part about the Crimes'.

He is entirely aware of the ridiculousness, a porn parody.

I need to re-read this. Maybe I'll try and do it at the end of the year, just take a dislike to the paperbk edition of this (UK).

My paperback's cool, it's got a spiky hole punched in the cover and a skull's eye goggling out.

Given all the references to Flaubert-- wasn't there actually a scene in part 1 where they talked about Bouvard & Pecuchet? and also Finnegan's Wake?-- I felt part 4 was deliberately meant to allude/pay homage to B&P but I couldn't figure out why and I couldn't keep myself interested enough to finish that part at all. I'll try it again some time. I loved part 1 a lot.

One of the early parts (1 or 2) mentions a clerk who reads a lot, but only the secondary works of great authors. In pointing this out, Bolano cites Bouvard and Pecuchet as Flaubert's great work.

yeah. it's the countess lady and the general who is later crucified, i think.

Ohhh right, I forgot about that whole section. The parts that stick in my mind are the critics, Amalfitano, the journalist, and of course the crimes. So basically everything except that part, though I do remember being into how everything comes together with Archimboldi. I want to read this again.

i like how impenetrable and mysterious archimboldi is. ghostlike, itinerant, creating wildly different books (seemingly) out of a grim compulsion. the last section is pretty good, i think.

One of the early parts (1 or 2) mentions a clerk who reads a lot, but only the secondary works of great authors. In pointing this out, Bolano cites Bouvard and Pecuchet as Flaubert's great work.

heh i forgot you'd just read this and i thought man, good recall

i gave up on this part of the way through the part about archimboldi, for reasons that made sense at the time, and for x years i've wanted to finish it but don't know whether i'll be able to get the momentum to go through parts one to four again

iirc there's a remark in the foreword stating that Bolano saw 2666 as his own attempt to create a "favourite, secondary work"

wth I'll go check it

Nope, it was the afterword and it was the conjecture of Ignacio Eccevaria:

...embarked on a colossal project, far surpassing The Savage Detectives in ambition and length. ...the spirit of risk that drives it and its rash totalizing zeal. On this point, it is worth recalling the passage from 2666 in which, after his conversation with a book-loving pharmacist, Amalfitano, one of the novel's protagonists, reflects with undisguised disappointment on the growing prestige of short, neatly shaped novels (citing titles like Bartleby the Scrivener and The Metamorphosis) to the exclusion of longer, more ambitious and daring works (like Moby-Dick or The Trial):

"What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters" etc.

Frankly it kind of put me off. Reading that Guardian article about Celine today reminded me of how cool it is when L-F. works in some self-aggrandizement but with Bolano it really bothered me?

It never bothered me. It's in the short stories, too. His alter ego, Arturo, is always quite the stud. But it seems to be the same sort of quasi-mythological exaggeration as the idea that everyone he meets writes/reads poetry. It's heightened... almost an alternate universe.

Elsewhere I promised to post some impressions of 2666 after I finished it. This seemed the best place to post them. They will consist mostly of random thoughts pretending to have some connection to one another.

I found 2666 to be well written and interesting. The repetiveness of the Part About the Crimes was integral to its purpose, so it was not troublesome for me. Bolano had an excellent eye for details and he had enough discipline to keep them from piling up too profusely and burying his point.

He clearly had a strong imagination, in that through the first four parts he easily convinces you that his novel is merely reportage of observed facts and real people, whether they are doing mundane or extraordinary things, which nicely sets up the Part About Archimboldi, where he pushes the reader to accept his far more fantastic premises about his characters and their activities.

On the other hand, I found the book strangely empty and lifeless in a fundamental way, so that the Part About the Crimes really reflects the heart of the book better than any other part. The characters in that part are all either literally dead, as victims of murder, or merely deadened, as describes most of the inhabitants of Santa Theresa. The most colorful and lively characters were those in the final part, about Archimboldi, and it seems worth noting that they lived the bulk of their lives before the present era, in a mythologized past.

I discovered I could accept the plotless nature of the book, in that the thematic scaffolding was strong enough to substitute for a plot. Most of all I found it a very bleak book, always flirting with death, alienation and chaos, but not a false book. Its only falsity came legitimately, through excluding the parts of life that Bolano chose not to portray or engage with, so that this was not the falsity of lies or distortion, but simply the falsity of art itself.

a read-along, just about to start, late sept. thru nov.

http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2014/08/22/read-along-roberto-bolanos-2666/

Be interesting to follow: esp when it gets to the crimes bit. Like one of comments says on re-reading it felt like a richer experience although I had no problems first time around. I remember I couldn't stop

Still look for a copy of it with that cover.

This is the only ILB thread devoted to 2666, so this seems like the best place to put this quotation I found in his novel Amulet, since it throws an interesting bit of light on the title of his final novel.

Guerrero, at that time of nigh, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.

This sentence occurs at the end of Chapter Seven, near the bottom of page 86 in the 2008 New Directions paperback edition of the Chris Andrews translation.

Thanks for the quote, especially the punchline, which might well sum up his Prognosis: Negative (Seinfeld ref) in 2666---and the mostly self-taught exile's way of dealing with it is a deflected rage in the cage, rather than telling us what to think or feel, anyway that's the way I took it and vice-versa. Another good thread: Roberto Bolano

PRRRRRRRRROOOOOGNOSISSSS