2666 poll

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?

lalo cura seems like another fake-out, the eccentric cop who would be the one to crack the case and have a chase scene & shootout with the killer if this was a movie.

o lalo cura was that guy. man i find it so hard to remember characters names

xposts. Last night I had a bit of insomnia and got from page 600 to page 720 or something like that but that's still in the part of the crimes. So no, not at the puns bit. When I get to it I'll be sure to report back.

Lalo Cura's genealogy was pretty good too.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I was looking at this yesterday. Nice cover, intriguing premise, intimidating weight. But is it any good? I presume so, given the length of this thread, but no-one's said so in so many words

it is good, though maybe not quite as good as the savage detectives (debatable)

chaotic,confused,too long in parts,but still quite amazing i'd say

theres more about it on the bolano thread

my take is that its pretty much the raddest book to have come out last year and maybe in the last few years

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

haha ok how many people posted on this thread and forgot to vote

i guess only 4 (including myself) finished it.
but the results are right.
proportionaly, if it was 20,10,10,0,0 for example, it would seem right i guess.

about the raddest book:
im the U.S. - maybe (havent read them all of course)
but in March, the Johnathan Littel book "the kindly ones" will be published and will probably get a lot of attention
(though i am from the ones who think it's mediocre at best)

started 2666 tonight

kindly ones is the title of two other books i can think of and sounds dreadful:

« Air »
Aue visits his sister and brother-in-law's empty house in Pomerania. There, he engages in a veritable autoerotic orgy particularly fueled by fantasy images of his twin sister. The two SS police officers follow his trail to the house, but he manages to hide from them.
« Gigue »
Aue travels back to Berlin through enemy Soviet lines with his friend, Thomas who has come to rescue him. There he finds many of his colleagues preparing for escape in the chaos of the last days of the Third Reich, meets and is decorated by Hitler in the Führerbunker, escapes through the Berlin U-Bahn subway tunnels, and is finally rid of his police pursuers.

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

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan)

Just started the last part, after getting backtracked with other books, so far Hans Reiter hasn't said anything that's a pun, as far as I can tell. He just speaks with lots of elision words so that e.g. he says "Nasao na" instead of "No ha pasado nada".

elision words? i just mean elision

elysian woods

his name is hans REITER, dont u see

oh god how did i not think of that

like WRITER

o hi i thought it was about black riders

I should be finished this tomorrow, less than 100 pages to go. Part with Archimboldi is the best. My favourite digression in the book is the one about Ansky's notebook.

man this book is so good i feel like just straight up readin it again

I keep thinking about it. The last part is great, amazing reallyread by itself, (and Ansky's notebook IS a great digression, of which there are many), but I think The Part About the Crimes is the best, and has the novel's climactic moment. The fifth is basically anti-climax. (And, did anyone else sense a falling off in the fifth book, in the last 30 pages or so?)

Finished. I think I've taken 4 months to read that, even though I really enjoyed it and probably rank it as the best novel written in at least a decade, and definitely the best written by a Spanish language author who was born after 1950. I just have a really short attention span and have read four novels, a biography, a book of history and the majority of Gravity's Rainbow (which I'll start finishing later today) while reading this.

I thought the part with the crimes was good, and crucial to the book. The horror and the repetition really need to be in there to make the novel work. However I just really enjoyed the part about Archimboldi more, although yes, I would say the end part with Lotte is maybe not the best part of the book and serves more to tie things up than to really add much.

Another favourite bit of the last part was the guy who rents him the typewriter and his talk about minor and major works. Also interesting was earlier on in the book Amalfitano's talk of the prestige of shorter works going up while the magnum opuses are neglected. What a great book!

Now going to have to try and track down his other books in Spanish on abebooks or something, have only read the Savage Detectives so far.

haha ok how many people posted on this thread and forgot to vote

i do this all time including probably this poll.

jim fwiw while i loved savage detectives like crazy and deeply enjoyed 2666 i havent really felt his other stuff and by other stuff i guess i mean by night in chile and some of the stories from last night on earth. the metafictive stuff is there but the characters and stories are less compelling i think theyre kind of sloppy too.

damn, see, I was slightly worried about that. Like I've read what are considered almost unanimously the two best works and anything else I had worried would be anti-climax.

Quite saddened that By Night in Chile wasn't called "Storms of shit" as Bolano originally planned.

stoked, shd have my copy tomorrow :DD

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