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.

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.

It's all madness

While I talk about the New Yorker incessantly in this blog, I've actually become much better over the years about not prefacing every remark with "I was reading in the New Yorker that..." But this somehow resonated so I had to share.

Adam Gopnik, on abridged books and director commentaries (abstract only): "Masterpieces are inherently a little loony."

Yes, exactly! Funny how I've heard (and repeated) time and again that line about no genius without a touch of madness (Seneca?), and yet never extrapolated to the work of the genius. So thanks New Yorker. And thanks Adam. Can I call you Adam?