First, put a ~ on the n in Bolano. And I'll avoid any spoilers.
Second, no, I'm not finished with the whole book. I'm going to try to write about each book (5 in all) because I am certain that by the time I get to the end of this almost-900 page monstrosity not only will it be five years from now but I will have forgotten everything from the beginning of the book.
Starting with the title. I wish someone knew how to pronounce it. It is "twenty-six, sixty-six" (my preference, I think) or "two-six-six-six" or "two thousand six hundred sixty six" or "two six sixty six" or . . . . Of course, all translated from Spanish but the same configurations apply. The New Yorker has a "National Reading 2666 month" (right--in a month. Ha!) and discusses the title but with no real conclusions. Here and here.
I love the epilogue: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" --Charles Baudelaire. I need to find the source but it might be the title of a paper one day.
So this part, as indicated by the title, is about the critics. Four critics, only one of whom is a woman, who study the same author (who is a bit Pynchon- or Salinger-esque in reclusivity): Liz Norton (British), Jean-Claude Pelletier (French), Piero Morini (Italian), and Manuel Espinoza (Spanish) study Benno von Archimboldi (German). Arguably, the critics are the preeminent Archimboldi scholars and they supposedly spend a lot of time writing and conferencing on the author. Slightly interesting is Bolano's choice to have only European scholars and an European author when he was Chilean.
I was incredibly interested at first. How many books are written on literature scholars? Not many. And how many actually dare to show them at a conference? Not many. And how many show the relationships between scholars. Not many. So that drew me in along with all of the hype and the great physical packaging of the three book boxed set. But these scholars, unfortunately for my attention span with the book, engage in a sort of scholarship that I don't appreciate and that I find sort of useless academically. They chase the author. The actual physical author. They are interested in his life, where he is, etc. I love Salinger, love DeLillo, am intrigued by Pynchon (mainly because I don't understand the books enough to love him). But their personal lives do not come into play in my scholarship. I would never dream of taking a trip to New York to find Pynchon and can't imagine that finding the man would actually accomplish anything. And this is not only because when faced with an author I can do little more than say my name for an autograph but because I study fiction. I'm not looking to write a biography.
Another fact that tested my tolerance is the treatment of women. Norton is not on equal footing with the men academically. She stumbled into her study of the author. And, of course, she must, absolutely must, have a physical relationship that causes problems and turns sour not to mention the emotional baggage she brings into that relationship. And the narrator (third person omni), at first, paid little heed to her and her opinions on the relationship but offered the other side in detail. Toward the end of this book, he does resolve that a bit and pays more attention to her but the damage has been done. There aren't many other women in the book so far. An old publisher who only makes a brief appearance, a Mexican woman who is maybe (probably) sexually exploited and deserted, a woman or two referred to in a story, and a hoard of Mexican women killed but only referenced in passing toward the end of the book.
Another odd thing is the attention paid to dreams by the narrator. Several times the reader is told about the dreams of the main characters. They're maybe interesting but I'm not sure what to do with them.
2666 is certainly not like other South American/Latino books I've read. This is not Garcia Marquez's magical realism (which right now just makes me want to read that instead). I would be interested to know if this is a strain of Latino literature I've missed or if it's something new or if it's just Bolano (which really just makes me want to go back to school for Latino lit).
So far the book is good. Not quite the brilliant espoused by critics and it definitely tests my interests. It's a dense read and the tiny sections instead of chapters tend to make me read fewer pages in one sitting. Add that to the plot and thematic trouble and it's going to take me a while to get through it. I like it but I'm really questioning whether all the hype isn't just because the author died, left the book unfinished, and the sheer ginormous size of it. It might help, too, if I had already read The Savage Detectives instead of piling it on my nightstand.
So, forward I go (after a brief respite with some Winterson and Obama, I think).
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