2666 poll

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

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