2666 - The Part about Archimboldi

5. The Part about Archimboldi

(Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4)

I don't remember for sure when I finished 2666. Close to two weeks ago. Why have I waited so long to write about it? Not sure. Maybe because this was my "January project" so it seemed appropriate to finish it at the end of the month.

Anyway, if the part about the critics was my favorite, and the part about the crimes was the "best," I would have to say that this section was the one where I was most likely to get lost in the story, where I thought the least about Bolaño and his intentions. It made the last third of the book a nice juxtaposition to the first two-thirds.

I don't want to say a lot about the section. If you're reading this, and actually ever read 2666, I want you to get to discover it on your own. But it's about Hans Reiter, an unusual youth from a German village who fights in WWII and then sets off on a different path in postwar Germany. I felt that Reiter remained a cipher; I never understood him, which is unusual when you spend so many pages with a character. But I didn't mind that I didn't know him.

I wrote about agency a while back (in relation to Oscar Fate) and think that it's a theme that deserves a lot more attention with regards to the entire novel. Reiter seems sometimes very much an actor who is creating his own destiny, and at other times entirely passive, getting swept along by other currents. (This is true for many of the other recurring characters in this section. In fact, I would read a novel just about Baroness von Zumpe.) I guess this is probably the way life really works. But I felt it particularly strongly in this novel, perhaps because we don't necessarily see it a lot in fiction.

Some - not many, but some - loose ends get tied up in this section. Enough that when the last page came around, I felt satisfied. Which is about all you can ask for.

And I was curious about this quote, by an old man who rents out his typewriter:
"Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty."
True? I doubt it. But intriguing all the same.

It strikes me as cowardly to not attempt some final analysis of the entire work. But I don't think I have it in me. I will simply say this: Bolaño creates an entire world, where several stories that only barely interact can co-exist. For all the strangeness and feelings of unreality I experienced while reading the book, this feels, at its heart, extraordinarily real.

Murder and strange times

Duplicate Keys - Jane Smiley (Fawcett Columbine, 1984)

I like Jane Smiley a lot. I haven't read all that much by her, but seeing her was pretty much always a highlight of the LA Times Festival of Books. So when I finished 2666 and needed something witty and lighter, I saw this on my bookshelf and grabbed it.

Then I read the back cover.

It's about the aftermath of a murder within a circle of friends in NYC, circa 1980. I thought to myself, this is probably not the right book for right now, but I read it anyway. So really, is it the book's fault that I didn't like it? Maybe, maybe not. I'm discovering that I don't like much of the fiction that I read from the 70s and early 80s. I can't identify with the period, and it just seems so foreign. So that's probably part of it.

Anyway, it's a pretty good mystery. Alice, a librarian (and I'm not sure what I think about the portrayal of the profession), finds two friends shot when she comes over to water the plants. While part of a tight-knit group of friends, she finds that the group's bonds have been stretched to (and past) the breaking point. And while she is trying to find her way through the aftermath of the killings, she also shows that she's essentially in love with her best friend, is still trying to recover from her divorce, likes or doesn't like the new guy she starts sleeping with, etc. I found Alice's mind difficult to keep up with - she was a big bundle of self-contradiction. Which would normally be fine, but it didn't work for me this time. Also? I totally knew who the killer was. Maybe it wasn't supposed to come as a surprise?

While Alice is being vaguely bipolar, she also has a lot (a LOT) of conversation with her friend Susan, the longtime partner of one of the dead men. And Susan has this to say:

But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you're mad at them for being a certain way, it's actually you who's making them be that way.

Hmm. Food for thought. And now I have to go soak this book so I can document my efforts to dry it for a class assignment. Fun! :)

2666 - The Part about the Crimes

4. The Part about the Crimes

(Parts 1, 2, & 3)

Wow. ...just, wow.

Here's the section about the murders of the women in Santa Teresa. It's about 280 pages long, and when it starts with about 10 pages of murders starting in 1993, you wonder if this is what Bolaño has in store for you: an individual accounting of each woman killed in Santa Teresa. If that's all he had done, it would have been tremendous, and a statement, a reminder when you're talking about hundreds and thousands of killings that each one is its own story too. But no, interspersed is the reaction by the authorities and others. So we learn about a few detectives and policemen, an arts reporter from Mexico City who starts covering the murders, and a bunch of other people, including the suspect who gets nabbed as the serial killer, even as the murders continue while he is in prison.

It's along the way that you start to wonder if you missed something and should have been paying more attention during the previous sections. Were there clues left for you? Did you miss it? (Or maybe you aren't wondering, because perhaps you actually caught it, unlike me.) Or are they red herrings?

Also, to revisit a point above. What comes out of reading is the realization that there isn't a single killer or band of killers. It's that somehow, for whatever reason, in Santa Teresa there has arisen a climate in which the killing of women has grown essentially permissible. They become statistics, to paraphrase a great mass murderer. It becomes an indictment of something much larger than it seems.

But typing these thoughts, muddled as they are, I feel that they are sort of trite. They don't do the section justice. Trust me.

And the fun quote of the section, referring to a medical examiner:

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?

2666 - The Part about Fate

3. The Part about Fate

(Parts 1 and 2)

So you might, like me, see the title and think this section is about fate. It might be. It's possible, but I didn't see it. Instead, it's about Oscar Fate, the nom de plume for Quincy Williams, writer at a Harlem black-interest magazine. Fate ends up in Santa Teresa when the magazine's sportswriter dies, leaving no one to cover a big boxing match coming up in the border town. Not being a sportswriter himself, he finds himself drawn to the murders (I haven't mentioned those yet, have I? Oops, well, women are dying. More coming later.) and also to Rosa Amalfitano, who is involved with a guy who is definitely shady, and possibly far more dangerous than the word shady implies.

This is another section that I just sort of let happen to me. I look back, and it I guess I feel like I experienced the section the way I imagine Fate lived through it. Things just sort of happen to and around him. This isn't entirely to deny him agency, but I don't feel like he's very strong. (This is probably where I could make an argument about the name Fate, but honestly, I'm just not in the mood.)

Of all the sections, this is the one I think I'd most like to re-read at the end, the one where I think there are missing pieces and clues that I missed. The one where Bolaño hands out loose ends, and gives you the opportunity to tie them up for yourself, or at least create a few knots somewhere.

(Also, sooooo pleased about the Group Read coming soon, and all the things that will be made clear to me, and the mysteries that will be raised, ones that I completely missed when reading by myself.)

Jane Austen lives in my head

According to Jane - Marilyn Brant (Kensington Books, 2009)

I am part of the problem. There are too many Austen-inspired books out there. Imagined sequels (mostly to Pride & Prejudice), modern updates of her plots, modern updates of her plots starring protagonists who are explicitly working though their own relationship with Austen and how she has impacted this expectations regarding love and romance. Enough already!!!!

Except I read them. Not all the time, but I read them. So I am to blame.

But it's not fair to pile all this on Brant, whose book I came across while at the library looking for lighter reading to balance 2666. (Compare to my friend, who chose to balance the same novel with Don DeLillo and Umberto Eco.)

Here's the conceit: Ellie has a close personal relationship with Jane Austen, who "appears" in her head just as her high school teacher assigns Pride & Prejudice and spends the next 20 years as a chatty, eccentric aunt. (One who provides, among other things, romantic advice that Ellie seems most often just to ignore.) As she goes through, trying to find The One, Ellie finds that sometimes Austen is right (re: family in particular) and sometimes Austen is wrong, and that the right guy might be the wrong guy, and vice versa.

Where the book truly succeeds is in set pieces: a pair of high school dances, a tryst in a college dorm, a series of scenes with the hot Russian, a party right before graduation, and the occasional run-in with the guy who broke Ellie's heart when they were kids. They are funny and ridiculous, and identifiable. What they aren't is especially cohesive. And honestly, I'm not sure where Jane in the Brain brings to the table. But that happens sometimes.

I could definitely see this on screen. It has some memorable scenes that a young comedic actress would drool over. And lots of "awwww, don't they see they are perfect for one another" moments. What I can't decide though, is if I'd leave Jane in or let her go...

2666 - The Part about Amalfitano

2. The Part about Amalfitano

(read about Part 1 here)

Weighing in at under 70 pages in my paperback volume, this is easily the shortest section of the five. It may also be the one where I had the most trouble staying engaged. In part this is because I was feeling a little sad about leaving my critics. And I kind of wanted them to reappear - to see what was happening to them through the lens of Amalfitano. After all, we had already met him in the last section, as the man assigned to usher the critics through Santa Teresa as they search for Archimboldi.

But here we get Amalfitano on his own, some years (how many????) earlier, mostly soon after he moves to Santa Teresa. This timeline issue made me crazy, and it's probably my own fault. In some sections, I know when I'm at, Bolaño uses dates. In this one, I didn't catch them, nor did I catch clues in other sections that might have tipped me off. What I do know: the critics aren't here yet, but the Juarez-esque murders have already begun, enough to worry Amalfitano. Which reminds me....

Who is Amalfitano? I don't have a good answer to this question either. He is Chilean, a professor, a single father to Rosa, who possesses a Spanish passport. He seems to have a really shaky grasp on sanity. He's also sufficiently unremarkable - for this reader at any rate - that I was left with simply a feeling of "well, that was weird," enough so that I had to flip back through the section just to try to remember what happened.

I made a note while reading of the observation that "madness is contagious," which appears fairly early in the section and seems as good a summation as any. But I also loved this passage, a flashback, where Amalfitano's Italian father marvels at his young son:

His father was silent then, looking at his son with frank admiration and pride, as if asking himself where the hell the kid had come from, and then he was silent for a while longer and afterward said in a low voice, as if telling a secret, that Italians were brave individually. In large numbers, he admitted, they were hopeless. And this, he explained, was precisely what gave a person hope.

2666 - The Part about the Critics

2666 - Roberto Bolaño (Picador, 2009)

The date is a little misleading. Bolaño was by all accounts still working on 2666 when he died in 2003. He instructed his heirs to publish the work in five separate volumes, most likely to maximize income. But, as they explain in a foreword, they chose "to reverse Roberto's decision and publish 2666 first in full, in a single volume, as he would have done had his illness not taken the gravest course." This volume first appeared in 2004, and the English translation in 2008. At that point, from what I remember, Bolaño was huge in the American literary world, and it seemed everyone was reading him and proclaiming him among the best authors of our time. (I, iconoclast as always, said hmph, and read only a short story that appeared in the New Yorker around that time.)

But then Infinite Summer happened and I gained some appreciation for long, unwieldy books, and reading them at the same time as a bunch of other people who had interesting and witty things to say about them online. So when it appeared that the site would tackle 2666 at the start of 2010, I bought my copy. And even when the site appeared to flag, and the group read disappeared, I was ready to go. So go I did. But now, it appears there will be a group read after all. This is (obviously) good news. But I had already started reading. I was more than 100 pages in. I wanted to finish before school started again. So I'll be done before the group read starts, and will "re-read" the novel through the blog.

But I digress. Each of the 5 parts, while circling around the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (supposedly - I am waiting for Part 5 to get there) could conceivably stand alone. And to keep from another "wow, this book is too big to say anything coherent about" wrap-up post, I'm going to write separately on each. So....

1. The Part about the Critics

This may prove to be my favorite section of the whole. Certainly it provided more narrative cohesiveness, and I felt more clearly connected to the characters. Oh, the characters. Well, there are four. Five, if you count Archimboldi. All four are scholars of the reclusive German author: one a Frenchman, another Spanish, a third Italian. The fourth is female, English, a bit younger. So of course they are all in love with her.

In short short short sections, we meet the scholars, learn how Archimboldi affected them, shaped their academic worlds. We follow their interactions, across countries, mostly at academic conferences. We trace some of the scholarly debate over the author, and how the mystery of his identity drives them all a little mad. We watch them navigate minefields of sex and love and friendship. And eventually, three end up in Mexico, following a lead that may eventually guide them to Archimboldi.

Does this oversimplify things? Certainly. And it doesn't even begin to get at the prose style, complex in both vocabulary and ideas. But not uniformly so, and not in a way that you miss the main points. Whether or not you miss lesser points... well, I'm sure you do. I'm sure I did.

Damn, Sookie

Dead to the World, Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2004

Dead as a Doornail, Charlaine Harris
New York: Ace Books, 2005

I read these at some point over the last few weeks. Which puts me about halfway through the series? I need to space out the rest until True Blood is back on the air, perhaps.

Anyway, the supernatural world grows in leaps and bounds, Sookie almost dies about a zillion times, but most importantly, EVERYONE wants to have sex with Sookie. It's kind of out of control. Also, like Gossip Girl (please stop and note the awesome tag), I think the show will have to make a pretty significant break from the books and go off on its own tangents. (I still get sad when I think of what I heard Book Chuck is like. Ugh.) The show has already deviated wildly through the first two seasons, and what gossip I've heard (thank you Anonymous Friend who visited the set) suggests Season 3 is the same.

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)

Behind the Scenes

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
New York: Henry Holt, 2009

I was predisposed to like Wolf Hall for a few reasons: a) I like Tudor history; b) Man Booker Prize!; c) despite all references in the novel to Thomas Cromwell being an ugly, bulldoggish man, in my head he looks like this:


Anyway, I went on a treasure hunt just before Christmas trying to find it at the library, and got lucky (very lucky: at library #3, it was not shelved, but sitting randomly on a table. I looked around like a thief to see if someone had claimed it, then snatched it up and got it to the checkout desk as quickly as possible).

I watched The Other Boleyn Girl earlier this evening, and the experience made me really appreciate Wolf Hall even more than I already had. It (the novel) is textured and complicated, and really makes you feel the passage of time and the machinations that were involved in the dissolution of Henry's marriage. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was a pawn. Cromwell is a sympathetic character, but not entirely. He is conniving, and lucky, and flawed. But you like him well enough, so you root for him. Others have written (no links - too lazy) about how interesting it is that Mantel chose to make Sir Thomas More the great antagonist in the novel, and how this is a gutsy move. I have always found More to be a little obnoxiously holy, so this set up worked for me.

What I still don't understand is the title. Wolf Hall. A place you hear about, as Cromwell takes an interest in the pale and retiring young Jane Seymour (oh, dramatic irony!) but which only makes an appearance after the final pages of the novel. Of course, it's at Wolf Hall that everything changes. For Anne Boleyn though, not so much for Thomas Cromwell, the king's right hand man. Unless perhaps that's where the end begins for him as well...

To sum up, the story of the man who rose from nothing to become as powerful as any man in England is as thrilling as it can be, considering the story has been told again and again, and we all know how it ends. It becomes clear how the forces of popes and princes - making history - are both unstoppable and yet easily swayed by those behind the scenes. I, for one, would rather be a Cromwell.