2666 poll

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

not sure how i feel about this

The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel 2666.

why feel bad??? if its terrible or boring than its terrible and boring wont change the fact that o.g. 2666 is fukkin dope just means more 2 read

i guess he means bolano prob never wanted it published

yeah true, bit i'd like to know a little more about why it wasn't included in the first place.

xp

not to rehash the same arguments from the dfw thread (where i definitely came down on the side of "publish that shit", btw), but this seems like a different situation.

ha r u guyz arguing about the nyer article? we talked abt it a little on ilc

i guess i generally just feel like its better than all those 19th c. dudes who had their letters and unfinished work and w/e else burned in a fyre by scandalized siblings. even publishing this 6th part is just a shamless cash grab from macmillan and co. better it has a lyfe than not

its also weird to me like if someone writes something bad now everything is bad its not like ppl wont understand this isnt nec how bolano envisioned things

i can sympathize w/ writers like john d and mr que about not wanting their shit published when they dye but as an unpublished wannabe 23 yr old writer w/ a ridic amnt of unfinished shit on my computer--yall can publish it if i die, please do, it wd feel nice, to know that someone wanted to publish, my writing

that comes 4rom the hart

i can sympathize but in the end ur dead and im not so i think publish w/e fsg will publish and sb u on the other side

i am really interested to see what the hell a 6th part would be about so chalk all this up 2 that

pls publish my twitter when i am dead thx

ghost twitter

i sort of hope the 6th part is a myth dreamed up as some kind of next-level art/promotion device btw bolano and his agents cuz having the book have this missing empty ending that no one will ever read would be more 2666 than 2666 itself

este huevón.

Random question - does anyone have any idea what font is used for the title on the book cover?

Still haven't gotten past "The Part About Archimboldi." Must. press. forward.

Wait - isn't that the last part?

First part, I thought. The book begins by focusing on the Archimboldi scholars.

Or maybe that's the part about the critics?

thats the part abt the critics

Makes sense. I haven't gotten past that part yet, is what I meant.

By all means, keep going. And then, in the event that you get stuck for a bit during The Part About the Crimes, keep going through that, too. It's worth it.

But yeah, what font is that?

I abandoned this book somewhere in the middle of The Part About the Crimes about a month ago. I keep meaning to pick it up again but it's pretty grueling stuff.

"And then, in the event that you get stuck for a bit during The Part About the Crimes, keep going through that, too. It's worth it"

in retrospective,after reading through it, my advice to Number None and Daniel is the opposite.
don't let this over long part disturb yr reading, skip it if you get tired, it's not getting anywhere till the end of that part.

PRRRRRRRRROOOOOGNOSISSSS