My pleasure reading over the last month or so included mostly Bolaño, as you could probably tell from the previous few posts. After reading 2666 again, I started Nazi Literature in the Americas, his fake encyclopedia of the mostly melancholy and marginal lives of the men and women who constituted a century-long literary movement built around fascist ideas. Of course, these people were all fictional. It was, as I’ve considered everything else I’ve read by Roberto Bolaño, brilliant.
But after finishing Nazi Literature, I started The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and the transition between the two authors in my reading was jarring. It’s made me think about the development of my own writing style, which, even though I owe a lot to the modernists like Joyce and Woolf, now is more aligned with the easier language of Bolaño and Nabokov. The idea I had today was that the reason for this transition has to do with my philosophical development more than my tastes as an author.
What fascinated me about modernist literature when I first discovered James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was the technique of stream-of-consciousness writing, language that inserted the reader into the thoughts of the character as they drifted along an associative train through time and space, sometimes focussed on the colloquial, sometimes on flights of memory, sometimes intimate moments of self-reflection, and sometimes into fragmentary thoughts that completely dissociated one from reality and could lose track of what is typically thought of as the narrative altogether. Plot became secondary to character study with this technique.
And it had none of the irritating omniscience that so annoys me in so much nineteenth century literature. The narration of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Maryann Evans (George Eliot) knew everything about their characters and displayed them on the page for you to read. Every facet of their characters were laid out in the text like the terms of an anatomy lesson. It wasn’t so much character study to me as character explanation. The narrator displayed all the psychological properties, and they collided in the mechanical necessity the parts dictated. I could almost call it mechanical realism.
This stream-of-consciousness technique offered a teenager with pretentions for a career in writing a way of exploring a character-constituted narrative, but kept the mystery and paradoxes that I saw in actual people. The mechanical realist technique put every facet of their characters’ psychologies on display, each one fitting together into a consistent whole. A character revealed through stream-of-consciousness could embrace inconsistency, as the character itself could become just as lost in its own stream as the reader. Surprise was possible.
My philosophical development began just as I was turning 19, with my first course in the subject from Jim Bradley, to whom I owe lifelong thanks. When I first began, I was fascinated by the problem of how the subjective could be bridged with the world, how thought could become objective and no longer distort the world in order to understand it. But over the following years, I began to understand how flawed this entire philosophical setup was. If a human subject’s knowledge of the world was so radically distorted as this setup says it is, then no creature with such a flawed perceptual apparatus could survive. In all the ways I had studied of how people tackled the question of how we could overcome the distortion inherent to subjectivity, no one had seriously questioned whether subjectivity was inherently distorting of reality at all. And I abandoned most of the philosophy that refused to pose this question.
And this is why, as I’ve developed this stance of radically rejecting the subject-world problem and all the ways this pseudo-problem crops up in other philosophies (mind-body, thought-reality, certainty-doubt), I’ve come to abandon the stream-of-consciousness as a fruitful literary technique. Reading Faulkner has just made this even more clear to me. I’m only reading him for the first time this year, having picked up a box set of three novels cheaply at a used bookstore in Windsor this March. He’s a master of the technique, taking it to what looks to be an extremity of fragmentation. The story of The Sound and the Fury is nearly impossible to discern from the constant shifts in time, mood, event, perception, and thought. These shifts are structured along the narrative of the decline and fall of the noble family of Compson. But that narrative is far from apparant in the words themselves and their organization.
The stream-of-consciousness technique is a story told from deep within a single character’s subjectivity. And taken to its extreme in Faulkner, I can see now the presumption in the technique as to the nature of a subjectivity: a distortion of the plot playing out in the real, outside, world. There is no place for the world itself to be mysterious in its constitution of itself, no place for a conspiracy between a character and her world, no way to turn a narrative into a plot against the reader. The only way for confusion and mystery to arise in stream-of-consciousness writing is in the distortion consciousness creates in trying (and inevitably failing) to apprehend the world.
The realism of Nabokov, Bolaño, Vonnegut, DeLillo, and Pynchon (these are my favourite examples; I know I must read more women) can create grand structures of multiplicity through a simple structure: realist writing with a narrator who doesn’t know everything, and who sometimes might not know anything. A stream-of-consciousness can flow in only one direction: down the black hole of a distorting subjectivity. Myserious realism can build an entire world with a quick suggestion.
Showing posts with label Roberto Bolaño. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roberto Bolaño. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Because, as You Know, Time Is Unreal
This is something funny I say lately when people ask me to be philosophical, even if it’s after 8.00 in the evening or I’ve had my second pint or equivalent wine or liquor. That’s the subject of an essay I read a couple of weeks ago by John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, which was incredibly controversial at the time, because no one could deal with the idea that time wasn’t real. He wrote that we can never identify time itself, only the relative succession of events in order. Once I realized that was the point of his essay, I understood that it wasn’t controversial at all anymore, and that he only anticipated the conceptual leap of special relativity physics, just without the math. When I use that phrase at a party, I usually follow it up with, “But that doesn’t matter anyway.”
The reason I bring it up is that I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 again just after I got back from Edinburgh. The story had stuck with my memory, involuntarily popping up in my consciousness ever since I read it last winter, and no novel had done that to me before. I’ve been able to see a lot more of the interconnections and callbacks among the different parts now that I hadn’t noticed the first time, which has made it a much more rich reading experience. But just now, I was thinking about why the parts are arranged out of chronological order as they are in the book, and I came to an idea that makes an incredible amount of sense. Whether it was Bolaño’s or not doesn’t matter, but it’s a fascinating idea.
The Chronological Order of 2666
One: 1998-late 2003
Two: 1980-2000
Three: early 2003
Four: 1993-1997
Five: 1920-2003
I never really understood why a writer would arrange their work out of chronological order (unless it was actually a time-travel story, in which case the concept becomes kind of laughable, or at least it should) before I wrote A Small Man’s Town, which is told out of chronological order. You could say that I organized the events of my book not in chronological order, but in emotional order. My book is organized in a series of arcs in which my characters mature emotionally. Some of them move more chronologically than others because those characters don’t have as many setbacks in developing their maturity. I found that kind of structure to be more significant than a simple order of events from 2001-10, because none of the events in that book are really all that significant. So that’s why I never adhered strongly to chronology.
Just before I started writing this, I had this idea about why Bolaño didn’t adhere to chronology. 2666 is a novel about the abyss, a maelstrom of violence and death bubbling underneath the surface of the ordinary life we think is so secure, but that when we least expect it can swallow us whole (or chomp us up in pieces) and spit us back out days, months, years later reduced to a bloody pulp. This is not an uplifting Mitch Albom style story where everything is alright because we love each other. The problem with the abyss is that it’s a void, it’s so terrifying that it’s unspeakable. So all we can do is approach as close as we can without falling in.
And that’s what the order of the five parts of 2666 do. The protagonists of each part, as you progress from part one to part five, become better able to approach, perceive, and understand the abyss. The four literary critics of part one- Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton, and Piero Morini - are sheltered, cultured western Europeans of the 1990s and 2000s. They understand it only through art, particularly the literature of Benno von Archimboldi (whose work we never actually read or have described in any detail), and perceive it only through their incomprehensible dreams.
Oscar Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, is a philosophy professor in Santa Teresa, the ficionalized Juarez where the killings of hundreds of women takes place. He perceives the abyss through his estranged wife’s madness and death from AIDS, and the voices he hears as he edges into madness himself. Oscar Fate, the American journalist visiting Santa Teresa by accident to cover a mediocre boxing match for his magazine, meets up with some low-level gangsters in the city, one of whom is dating Amalfitano’s daughter Rosa. He sees the violent criminal culture that renders the murder of hundreds of women so ordinary, and understands it well enough to know that he and Rosa are both in way over their heads.
The fourth part is about the killings themselves, or at least the first few hundred of them, and the investigations that the police, narcotrafficers, and gangs get involved in. This part puts us in the thick of the massacre itself, with only one young cop, Lalo Cura, standing out among a large ensemble cast this time, as the only one who believes that the police can solve the crimes, and actually working towards this himself.
And part five tells the life story of Benno von Archimboldi: how a young German boy who loves to swim gets enlisted in the Nazi army, fights on the Eastern Front, is shot in the neck, recuperates in the reclaimed cavern of a long dead Jewish sci-fi writer whose works inspire him to begin his own literary career, plucking his pen name from random thoughts at the time, falling in love with a slightly mad girl after whose death he wanders Europe as an itinerant even as his books becomes increasingly famous, while he himself embraces life for its impermanence, instability, and finitude, and all the small moments of joy that come throughout it if you’re ready to receive them, until one day he hears from his sister, an ordinary woman with a son who moved to America to start a business and found himself roped into this terrible matter of these murders in Santa Teresa. So Archimboldi flies to Mexico to help.
I think it’s intriguing that the character of Prof Amalfitano turns up in the most parts. I think, and this is entirely unfounded speculation, that if the rumours that a sixth part of 2666 exists or was planned or prepared, it would feature Amalfitano finally succumbing to complete insanity. It would perhaps involve Archimboldi as well, and perhaps an older Lalo Cura, though I cannot say if he would be jaded by then or just as determined to stop the killings even if he understands them as deeply as my reading suggests.
The reason I bring it up is that I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 again just after I got back from Edinburgh. The story had stuck with my memory, involuntarily popping up in my consciousness ever since I read it last winter, and no novel had done that to me before. I’ve been able to see a lot more of the interconnections and callbacks among the different parts now that I hadn’t noticed the first time, which has made it a much more rich reading experience. But just now, I was thinking about why the parts are arranged out of chronological order as they are in the book, and I came to an idea that makes an incredible amount of sense. Whether it was Bolaño’s or not doesn’t matter, but it’s a fascinating idea.
The Chronological Order of 2666
One: 1998-late 2003
Two: 1980-2000
Three: early 2003
Four: 1993-1997
Five: 1920-2003
I never really understood why a writer would arrange their work out of chronological order (unless it was actually a time-travel story, in which case the concept becomes kind of laughable, or at least it should) before I wrote A Small Man’s Town, which is told out of chronological order. You could say that I organized the events of my book not in chronological order, but in emotional order. My book is organized in a series of arcs in which my characters mature emotionally. Some of them move more chronologically than others because those characters don’t have as many setbacks in developing their maturity. I found that kind of structure to be more significant than a simple order of events from 2001-10, because none of the events in that book are really all that significant. So that’s why I never adhered strongly to chronology.
Just before I started writing this, I had this idea about why Bolaño didn’t adhere to chronology. 2666 is a novel about the abyss, a maelstrom of violence and death bubbling underneath the surface of the ordinary life we think is so secure, but that when we least expect it can swallow us whole (or chomp us up in pieces) and spit us back out days, months, years later reduced to a bloody pulp. This is not an uplifting Mitch Albom style story where everything is alright because we love each other. The problem with the abyss is that it’s a void, it’s so terrifying that it’s unspeakable. So all we can do is approach as close as we can without falling in.
And that’s what the order of the five parts of 2666 do. The protagonists of each part, as you progress from part one to part five, become better able to approach, perceive, and understand the abyss. The four literary critics of part one- Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton, and Piero Morini - are sheltered, cultured western Europeans of the 1990s and 2000s. They understand it only through art, particularly the literature of Benno von Archimboldi (whose work we never actually read or have described in any detail), and perceive it only through their incomprehensible dreams.
Oscar Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, is a philosophy professor in Santa Teresa, the ficionalized Juarez where the killings of hundreds of women takes place. He perceives the abyss through his estranged wife’s madness and death from AIDS, and the voices he hears as he edges into madness himself. Oscar Fate, the American journalist visiting Santa Teresa by accident to cover a mediocre boxing match for his magazine, meets up with some low-level gangsters in the city, one of whom is dating Amalfitano’s daughter Rosa. He sees the violent criminal culture that renders the murder of hundreds of women so ordinary, and understands it well enough to know that he and Rosa are both in way over their heads.
The fourth part is about the killings themselves, or at least the first few hundred of them, and the investigations that the police, narcotrafficers, and gangs get involved in. This part puts us in the thick of the massacre itself, with only one young cop, Lalo Cura, standing out among a large ensemble cast this time, as the only one who believes that the police can solve the crimes, and actually working towards this himself.
And part five tells the life story of Benno von Archimboldi: how a young German boy who loves to swim gets enlisted in the Nazi army, fights on the Eastern Front, is shot in the neck, recuperates in the reclaimed cavern of a long dead Jewish sci-fi writer whose works inspire him to begin his own literary career, plucking his pen name from random thoughts at the time, falling in love with a slightly mad girl after whose death he wanders Europe as an itinerant even as his books becomes increasingly famous, while he himself embraces life for its impermanence, instability, and finitude, and all the small moments of joy that come throughout it if you’re ready to receive them, until one day he hears from his sister, an ordinary woman with a son who moved to America to start a business and found himself roped into this terrible matter of these murders in Santa Teresa. So Archimboldi flies to Mexico to help.
I think it’s intriguing that the character of Prof Amalfitano turns up in the most parts. I think, and this is entirely unfounded speculation, that if the rumours that a sixth part of 2666 exists or was planned or prepared, it would feature Amalfitano finally succumbing to complete insanity. It would perhaps involve Archimboldi as well, and perhaps an older Lalo Cura, though I cannot say if he would be jaded by then or just as determined to stop the killings even if he understands them as deeply as my reading suggests.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
After Five Years, The Same Film Can Be Completely Different
So Sunday night, I watched Sideways again for the first time since I saw it in theatres back in 2004. When I first saw the movie, I laughed almost all the way through. The reason for that is because the relationship between Miles and Jack in the movie was very much like what I thought the relationship between me and one of my old friends would be like by the time we hit our mid-thirties. I’m not going to say my friend’s name because I’m Miles, and I wouldn’t want to make him have to make any unnecessary explanations to his partner(s).
As if anyone actually reads this blog. But I’ve made that mistake before.
Anyway, when I watched it again after five years of being alive, I had a very different reaction. First, I was able to notice a lot more of the little details in the film, the hidden aspects of Miles’ life that I didn’t remember from the first time. I didn’t remember the trip to his mother’s house at the start of the film, or his taking a pile of her money. And I certainly hadn’t noticed in 2004 the extra moment Miles spends looking at the picture of his father on the desk. And that made me pay more attention to what I could call Miles’ hidden story.
It’s a term I stole from Roberto Bolaño. He used to say that all his novels were not about what the main points of their narrative were, but that they were driven by a hidden story, some event or set of events that drove all the action of the obvious narrative while rarely if ever being explicitly mentioned. For Sideways, that hidden story is Miles looking after his father after the older man is badly debilitated by a stroke, and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Being able to spot that hidden story and understand it gave me a very different appreciation of the film than I had before.
Now here is where it gets a little emo. While I was smiling all the way through, I found it so much more depressing, and Miles was even more like me. In 2004, I saw similarities between us in the way he related with Jack. I saw his drinking his best wine at the fast food joint as embracing the joyful advice Maya had given him, that a wine this good is a special occasion. But this time, his depression and loneliness was much more evident and affecting to me. He was pathetic the way he slept with Maya even though he knew he was lying, and I don’t even think he felt bad about Jack’s deception by the time he went home with her.
Since I first saw that movie, I had gone through an even longer amount of time than Miles without a woman, and had become similarly torn up and spit out over someone just as Miles was over a woman. I had become a much more bitter and less forgiving person. The selfish aspects of Miles were even more evident in the way I thought about myself and about other people.
Not only that, but we had also both written bittersweet novels with considerable autobiographical input, and I’m becoming equally pessimistic as he was of ever getting it published. And even though I’ve been successful so far in my career, I’m growing increasingly pessimistic about actually being able to get a professor’s job once I’m on the market in a few years, and about whether anyone but me will see any value in my philosophical work. As I learn more about the professional academic scene, the less I think I’ll fit in. And rebels are not tolerated in academia.
Yet even while Miles and I have converged so much in all the most depressing and pessimistic ways, I love this film even more. It’s because I can see so much more of the hidden story now than I could, and because Miles is so much more flawed, mean, and beaten-down than when I first saw him. I think that happens to all of us eventually.
When I first saw Sideways, I was young and hopeful, thinking that my goals would come to me fairly easily. Now I’m still young (but spotting my first grey hairs on the sides of my head and chin), but quite a lot more jaded, and accepting of the fact that chances are I won’t succeed to the degree I want, and that I’ll have to fight much harder than I thought I would.
Sideways is now going on my list with Five Easy Pieces and À Nos Amours as the movies that I love because they’re brilliantly made and speak to how I think of my life. Alexander Payne needs to make another film.
As if anyone actually reads this blog. But I’ve made that mistake before.
Anyway, when I watched it again after five years of being alive, I had a very different reaction. First, I was able to notice a lot more of the little details in the film, the hidden aspects of Miles’ life that I didn’t remember from the first time. I didn’t remember the trip to his mother’s house at the start of the film, or his taking a pile of her money. And I certainly hadn’t noticed in 2004 the extra moment Miles spends looking at the picture of his father on the desk. And that made me pay more attention to what I could call Miles’ hidden story.
It’s a term I stole from Roberto Bolaño. He used to say that all his novels were not about what the main points of their narrative were, but that they were driven by a hidden story, some event or set of events that drove all the action of the obvious narrative while rarely if ever being explicitly mentioned. For Sideways, that hidden story is Miles looking after his father after the older man is badly debilitated by a stroke, and the mysterious circumstances of his death. Being able to spot that hidden story and understand it gave me a very different appreciation of the film than I had before.
Now here is where it gets a little emo. While I was smiling all the way through, I found it so much more depressing, and Miles was even more like me. In 2004, I saw similarities between us in the way he related with Jack. I saw his drinking his best wine at the fast food joint as embracing the joyful advice Maya had given him, that a wine this good is a special occasion. But this time, his depression and loneliness was much more evident and affecting to me. He was pathetic the way he slept with Maya even though he knew he was lying, and I don’t even think he felt bad about Jack’s deception by the time he went home with her.
Since I first saw that movie, I had gone through an even longer amount of time than Miles without a woman, and had become similarly torn up and spit out over someone just as Miles was over a woman. I had become a much more bitter and less forgiving person. The selfish aspects of Miles were even more evident in the way I thought about myself and about other people.
Not only that, but we had also both written bittersweet novels with considerable autobiographical input, and I’m becoming equally pessimistic as he was of ever getting it published. And even though I’ve been successful so far in my career, I’m growing increasingly pessimistic about actually being able to get a professor’s job once I’m on the market in a few years, and about whether anyone but me will see any value in my philosophical work. As I learn more about the professional academic scene, the less I think I’ll fit in. And rebels are not tolerated in academia.
Yet even while Miles and I have converged so much in all the most depressing and pessimistic ways, I love this film even more. It’s because I can see so much more of the hidden story now than I could, and because Miles is so much more flawed, mean, and beaten-down than when I first saw him. I think that happens to all of us eventually.
When I first saw Sideways, I was young and hopeful, thinking that my goals would come to me fairly easily. Now I’m still young (but spotting my first grey hairs on the sides of my head and chin), but quite a lot more jaded, and accepting of the fact that chances are I won’t succeed to the degree I want, and that I’ll have to fight much harder than I thought I would.
Sideways is now going on my list with Five Easy Pieces and À Nos Amours as the movies that I love because they’re brilliantly made and speak to how I think of my life. Alexander Payne needs to make another film.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
They Still Write Classics, The Books that Last for Centuries
I bridged 2008 and 2009 reading 2666, and no, I can't tell you what the title means. I don't think I'm supposed to. 2666 is an amazing, brilliant novel by Roberto Bolaño, a writer who has rapidly become a favourite of mine. I first discovered him when I read a magnificent and insane article about his Romulo Gallegos Prize winning novel The Savage Detectives, and having read the book, it immediately became one of my favourites of all time. Bolaño writes about broken characters whose lives stretch around Europe, Latin America, occasionally the United States and Africa, depending on the requirements of the plot (what there is of it).
So 2666 then. I won't try to compete with the long, glowing essays that you can find all over the internet simply by typing the number into google. Instead, I will only give you my dominant impressions of the book. It's an epic, sprawling work 900 pages long, written in five loosely connected parts.
The first thing that stands out for me is its cleverness in the way that its stories misdirect you while leading you exactly to the heart of the work: the murders of women in northern Mexico over the last fifteen years, and the inability of anyone to understand those acts. The book is divided into five parts, each with its own plot and protagonists. The first part is a group of self-absorbed European literature professors, all followers of a German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi, a writer so reclusive as to make Thomas Pynchon appear as if he had the paparazzi on speed-dial. I laughed at their moments of insular ignorance, as when they ask a Mexican colleague, Amalfitano, originally from Chile why he left for Argentina in 1974. Amalfitano can only look at them, amazed at their ignorance of history, even as one of the professors is from Spain, the country that prosecuted Pinochet in the late 1990s. Throughout their story, they are driven with increasing intensity by a quest to seek out Archimboldi, to finally meet the man to whose works they have devoted their lives.
I pitied the Frenchman and the Spaniard for twisting themselves up into wrecks over their love for their British colleague, the only woman among the Archimboldians. I was mystified at the story of an artist the British and Italian professor meet, who had cut off his own severed hand to use as the centrepiece of his most famous installation. I was disturbed by the scene where they beat a reactionary Pakistani cab driver in London, offended by the talk of the British critic's love affairs with the Frenchman and the Spaniard, while all three are in the same cab. I felt an odd peace watching the group fall apart in Mexico, with the Britisher returning to Europe to meet the Italian professor, who had been too ill to come with them. The Frenchman is left reading the Archimboldi novels he brought with him, while the Spaniard has an affair with a beautiful young rug merchant, an ambiguously beautiful and doomed hope of taking this young girl back to start a new life in Europe free from the undercurrents of violence in Mexico. They are fragile figures, lost in the world, only realizing at the end of the story that they must cling to something that seems stable, or else they will collapse.
Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, seems on the edge of collapse throughout his short, haunting story. He hears voices, makes an uneasy friendship with the violence-prone teenage son of a university official, has a tragically doomed love for his estranged, mentally ill wife, and a loving yet tense relationship with his teenage daughter Rosa. Reading this sometimes hallucinatory story, I was haunted by a concern for Rosa. I knew 2666 revolved around the brutal murders of young women just like Rosa. And I was concerned for her, because when the European critics meet Amalfitano in part one, which is chronologically later than part two, Rosa is nowhere to be found. I read this, and part three where she appears as well, with trepidation, and a silent gnawing of dread.
Part three is based around Oscar Fate, the pen name of a black magazine journalist from Harlem, who finds himself in Mexico covering a beyond-mediocre boxing match when his magazine's sports correspondent dies of a sudden heart attack. Sudden death haunts the perhaps-too-obviously-named-for-an-Anglophone-audience Fate, as his mother also dies at the story's beginning. He meets a group of low-level Mexican gangsters and their girls at the boxing match, and among the group is Rosa Amalfitano.
The night he spends with the gangsters is by turns hilarious and horrific. Oscar is a fish completely out of water, his New York state of mind laughable in Mexico. He may be a black man from Harlem, but black men from Harlem are eaten alive by Mexican gangsters. It's all Oscar can do to take a coked up Rosa away from her unstable gangster boyfriend and flee across the border at her father's blessing. All this while, the spectre of the killings is present, in the form of a looming interview with the tall blond German who has been imprisoned for some of the murders.
Part four, about the murders, should not be read with a weak stomach. The brutality builds by sheer repetition. Bolaño describes the murdered women as corpses, like police reports written in crisp clean language, depicting fatal wounds of rape, bludgeoning, stabbing, slicing, strangling, ripping, suffocating. The most chilling descriptions are of the women who have no families or friends, and so who go unidentified, the short paragraphs describing their mutilated bodies the only recognition they receive.
These passages alternate with the stories of the cops who investigate the murders, among other crimes that pop up on the streets of their bleak northern city. They have a half-heartedness about the task born of corruption, cynicism, jadedness, and a sense that the horrors of modern Mexico are so fantastic as to be beyond even God. There is one cop who strives continually to put some effort into stopping the avalanche of violence, Inspector Juan de Dios Martínez, if only as the sole way to ward off his own death. All he really needs is some idea of how to end the murders, and he would. He's a bleak character, a man striving to find some measure of happiness or positivity in the world. He reminds me of a younger Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, putting all his strength into building bulwarks that will always be helpless to resist a tsunami of blood.
Yet in all this, Bolaño finds humour. The Arizona sheriff Harry Magaña cuts an impressive figure, and reminds me of Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies. He comes down to Mexico on a vigilante vacation, looking for the murderers of a white American tourist woman, cutting a somewhat violent path through the Mexican underworld. He's just brutal enough to get noticed, but not brutal enough to defend himself from actual Mexican criminals. This gives his own quick disappearance from the story a grimly funny irony.
Yet in all this, Bolaño finds hope, in the person of Lalo Cura (a pun on the Spanish word for priest, 'cura,' and lunatic, 'la locura'), a rookie cop recruited from the ranks of a narco's bodyguards. He seems to be the only one in all the police forces of Mexico that cares about his work without cynicism. It might be a function of his age, or perhaps some deeper part of his character, If you remember Due South, Lalo Cura resembled Benton Fraser in those nights he spent earnestly studying old guides to Become A Good Police Officer, or demonstrating actual interest in searching a crime scene for evidence, in stark contrast to most of his colleagues. I often didn't know what to make of Lalo Cura, but I knew I loved him, a paragon of virtue so out of place, yet so necessary.
Part five carries its own hope, in the wandering force of creation that is Benno von Archimboldi. I think, as Bolaño worked on 2666, he knew his work was on the verge of an English language breakthrough, as quite a few protagonists carry names that are English puns, like Archimboldi's birth name, Hans Reiter. This story follows his entire life, growing up in rural east Germany in the 1920s and 30s, being drafted into the war on Russia, and his life as a vagabond writer. His life intertwines almost miraculously with a sexually voracious Romanian general, a coolly promiscuous German baroness, the slightly mad woman who would become his wife, a Russian science fiction writer who had been disappeared by the Stalinists long before Reiter discovers his diaries, and finally the enigmatic German who connects him to the killings in Mexico. His was the first story to be dominated by hope and optimism, finding creativity, freedom, and love even in the wastelands of the Russian front of the Second World War. It was uplifting that the novel ended with this man, who was never limited by anything, especially not his own will, which in so many other characters in 2666 was found wanting and compromised.
The end of parts one, three, and four are the closing of multiple story strands. Bolaño flips back and forth between them, giving each moment of the dénouement barely a page before cutting back to its companion. The overall effect is propulsive, like a montage in cinema that brings a multifaceted story to its climax. I was put in mind of the climactic montages of the first two Godfather films, a quickening pace towards, if not an end, then a settling of scores.
Bolaño did not have time before his death in 2003 to finish all the edits he wanted to make to 2666, and it shows in some places. Oscar Fate is perhaps a little too stereotypically American at times, and I wonder if Archimboldi's trip to Mexico comes a little too quick, the reasons and history behind it all coming in a flash of little more than thirty pages. But this does not detract from the achievement of 2666, a work marvellous in its size, ambition, and intricacy. Bolaño did not write his stories with their themes and messages prominently displayed. He would talk of the story he told, and the secret story playing underneath, the real engine of the events we saw depicted on his pages.
This underlying pattern connected characters and fictional lives with a fastness that an obvious meeting could never contain. The killings are reflected in the brutality the British artist shows to his own body, or the brutal porno film Oscar Fate watches in the small hours of the morning with the Mexican gangsters. The fragility of women in a violent world is seen in the sad figure of Amalfitano's wife, Rosa's mother, who after their separation wanders Europe until finally meeting her ex-husband at last, disappearing one last time to spare them the sight of her death from AIDS. And the hope that lives in all his works is in the earnest doggedness of Lalo Cura, the stern and tired determination of Juan de Dios Martínez, and the simple honest optimism of Archimboldi on his way to Mexico to accomplish the impossible and free an unjustly imprisoned man who is a total stranger to him. This is the greatness of Roberto Bolaño, that all this comes together as one sprawling multifaceted work, many stories drawing one magnificent pattern in a dark, silent sky.
So 2666 then. I won't try to compete with the long, glowing essays that you can find all over the internet simply by typing the number into google. Instead, I will only give you my dominant impressions of the book. It's an epic, sprawling work 900 pages long, written in five loosely connected parts.
The first thing that stands out for me is its cleverness in the way that its stories misdirect you while leading you exactly to the heart of the work: the murders of women in northern Mexico over the last fifteen years, and the inability of anyone to understand those acts. The book is divided into five parts, each with its own plot and protagonists. The first part is a group of self-absorbed European literature professors, all followers of a German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi, a writer so reclusive as to make Thomas Pynchon appear as if he had the paparazzi on speed-dial. I laughed at their moments of insular ignorance, as when they ask a Mexican colleague, Amalfitano, originally from Chile why he left for Argentina in 1974. Amalfitano can only look at them, amazed at their ignorance of history, even as one of the professors is from Spain, the country that prosecuted Pinochet in the late 1990s. Throughout their story, they are driven with increasing intensity by a quest to seek out Archimboldi, to finally meet the man to whose works they have devoted their lives.
I pitied the Frenchman and the Spaniard for twisting themselves up into wrecks over their love for their British colleague, the only woman among the Archimboldians. I was mystified at the story of an artist the British and Italian professor meet, who had cut off his own severed hand to use as the centrepiece of his most famous installation. I was disturbed by the scene where they beat a reactionary Pakistani cab driver in London, offended by the talk of the British critic's love affairs with the Frenchman and the Spaniard, while all three are in the same cab. I felt an odd peace watching the group fall apart in Mexico, with the Britisher returning to Europe to meet the Italian professor, who had been too ill to come with them. The Frenchman is left reading the Archimboldi novels he brought with him, while the Spaniard has an affair with a beautiful young rug merchant, an ambiguously beautiful and doomed hope of taking this young girl back to start a new life in Europe free from the undercurrents of violence in Mexico. They are fragile figures, lost in the world, only realizing at the end of the story that they must cling to something that seems stable, or else they will collapse.
Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, seems on the edge of collapse throughout his short, haunting story. He hears voices, makes an uneasy friendship with the violence-prone teenage son of a university official, has a tragically doomed love for his estranged, mentally ill wife, and a loving yet tense relationship with his teenage daughter Rosa. Reading this sometimes hallucinatory story, I was haunted by a concern for Rosa. I knew 2666 revolved around the brutal murders of young women just like Rosa. And I was concerned for her, because when the European critics meet Amalfitano in part one, which is chronologically later than part two, Rosa is nowhere to be found. I read this, and part three where she appears as well, with trepidation, and a silent gnawing of dread.
Part three is based around Oscar Fate, the pen name of a black magazine journalist from Harlem, who finds himself in Mexico covering a beyond-mediocre boxing match when his magazine's sports correspondent dies of a sudden heart attack. Sudden death haunts the perhaps-too-obviously-named-for-an-Anglophone-audience Fate, as his mother also dies at the story's beginning. He meets a group of low-level Mexican gangsters and their girls at the boxing match, and among the group is Rosa Amalfitano.
The night he spends with the gangsters is by turns hilarious and horrific. Oscar is a fish completely out of water, his New York state of mind laughable in Mexico. He may be a black man from Harlem, but black men from Harlem are eaten alive by Mexican gangsters. It's all Oscar can do to take a coked up Rosa away from her unstable gangster boyfriend and flee across the border at her father's blessing. All this while, the spectre of the killings is present, in the form of a looming interview with the tall blond German who has been imprisoned for some of the murders.
Part four, about the murders, should not be read with a weak stomach. The brutality builds by sheer repetition. Bolaño describes the murdered women as corpses, like police reports written in crisp clean language, depicting fatal wounds of rape, bludgeoning, stabbing, slicing, strangling, ripping, suffocating. The most chilling descriptions are of the women who have no families or friends, and so who go unidentified, the short paragraphs describing their mutilated bodies the only recognition they receive.
These passages alternate with the stories of the cops who investigate the murders, among other crimes that pop up on the streets of their bleak northern city. They have a half-heartedness about the task born of corruption, cynicism, jadedness, and a sense that the horrors of modern Mexico are so fantastic as to be beyond even God. There is one cop who strives continually to put some effort into stopping the avalanche of violence, Inspector Juan de Dios Martínez, if only as the sole way to ward off his own death. All he really needs is some idea of how to end the murders, and he would. He's a bleak character, a man striving to find some measure of happiness or positivity in the world. He reminds me of a younger Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, putting all his strength into building bulwarks that will always be helpless to resist a tsunami of blood.
Yet in all this, Bolaño finds humour. The Arizona sheriff Harry Magaña cuts an impressive figure, and reminds me of Charles Bronson in the Death Wish movies. He comes down to Mexico on a vigilante vacation, looking for the murderers of a white American tourist woman, cutting a somewhat violent path through the Mexican underworld. He's just brutal enough to get noticed, but not brutal enough to defend himself from actual Mexican criminals. This gives his own quick disappearance from the story a grimly funny irony.
Yet in all this, Bolaño finds hope, in the person of Lalo Cura (a pun on the Spanish word for priest, 'cura,' and lunatic, 'la locura'), a rookie cop recruited from the ranks of a narco's bodyguards. He seems to be the only one in all the police forces of Mexico that cares about his work without cynicism. It might be a function of his age, or perhaps some deeper part of his character, If you remember Due South, Lalo Cura resembled Benton Fraser in those nights he spent earnestly studying old guides to Become A Good Police Officer, or demonstrating actual interest in searching a crime scene for evidence, in stark contrast to most of his colleagues. I often didn't know what to make of Lalo Cura, but I knew I loved him, a paragon of virtue so out of place, yet so necessary.
Part five carries its own hope, in the wandering force of creation that is Benno von Archimboldi. I think, as Bolaño worked on 2666, he knew his work was on the verge of an English language breakthrough, as quite a few protagonists carry names that are English puns, like Archimboldi's birth name, Hans Reiter. This story follows his entire life, growing up in rural east Germany in the 1920s and 30s, being drafted into the war on Russia, and his life as a vagabond writer. His life intertwines almost miraculously with a sexually voracious Romanian general, a coolly promiscuous German baroness, the slightly mad woman who would become his wife, a Russian science fiction writer who had been disappeared by the Stalinists long before Reiter discovers his diaries, and finally the enigmatic German who connects him to the killings in Mexico. His was the first story to be dominated by hope and optimism, finding creativity, freedom, and love even in the wastelands of the Russian front of the Second World War. It was uplifting that the novel ended with this man, who was never limited by anything, especially not his own will, which in so many other characters in 2666 was found wanting and compromised.
The end of parts one, three, and four are the closing of multiple story strands. Bolaño flips back and forth between them, giving each moment of the dénouement barely a page before cutting back to its companion. The overall effect is propulsive, like a montage in cinema that brings a multifaceted story to its climax. I was put in mind of the climactic montages of the first two Godfather films, a quickening pace towards, if not an end, then a settling of scores.
Bolaño did not have time before his death in 2003 to finish all the edits he wanted to make to 2666, and it shows in some places. Oscar Fate is perhaps a little too stereotypically American at times, and I wonder if Archimboldi's trip to Mexico comes a little too quick, the reasons and history behind it all coming in a flash of little more than thirty pages. But this does not detract from the achievement of 2666, a work marvellous in its size, ambition, and intricacy. Bolaño did not write his stories with their themes and messages prominently displayed. He would talk of the story he told, and the secret story playing underneath, the real engine of the events we saw depicted on his pages.
This underlying pattern connected characters and fictional lives with a fastness that an obvious meeting could never contain. The killings are reflected in the brutality the British artist shows to his own body, or the brutal porno film Oscar Fate watches in the small hours of the morning with the Mexican gangsters. The fragility of women in a violent world is seen in the sad figure of Amalfitano's wife, Rosa's mother, who after their separation wanders Europe until finally meeting her ex-husband at last, disappearing one last time to spare them the sight of her death from AIDS. And the hope that lives in all his works is in the earnest doggedness of Lalo Cura, the stern and tired determination of Juan de Dios Martínez, and the simple honest optimism of Archimboldi on his way to Mexico to accomplish the impossible and free an unjustly imprisoned man who is a total stranger to him. This is the greatness of Roberto Bolaño, that all this comes together as one sprawling multifaceted work, many stories drawing one magnificent pattern in a dark, silent sky.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
A Coincidental Wrong Number
Eventually, I'll get around to writing a fairly long, detailed post about contemporary American politics, but I'm waiting for various bits of the Blagojevitch scandal to calm down, and I've been busy trying to get all the writing (conference papers, novel) and reading (Pynchon's Against the Day, Latour's Politics of Nature) out of the way by the time I fly to St John's on Xmas Eve. So until I get around to writing that, here's something that used to happen to me in Newfoundland.
About every three months or so for a period of about five years, I would get a wrong number on my mobile phone from someone looking for a person named Yahtzee. I never actually tried to track him down, because I didn't care. But over the past year, I've become inordinately fond of Zero Punctuation, the video game reviews hosted by The Escapist Magazine. I rarely play video games, and I'm rubbish at them. But I do understand the ideas involved, and I find them very interesting. And the man behind Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee Croshaw, is one of the most entertaining people on the internet today.
Just after listening to the latest Zero Punctuation review, a scathingly abusive treatment of the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game (They still make Sonic games? I was surprised too.), I thought about my formerly regular wrong numbers. Since my phone number changed when I moved to Hamilton, I don't get these wrong numbers anymore. But I imagined just now that actual friends of Yahtzee Croshaw were trying to call him. This meant that they were ranking up hideously high mobile phone charges for accidentally calling me in eastern Canada over long distance from Australia. However, that's probably not the case, as very few people would ever be that stupid.
•••
Also, there's a really good Roberto Bolaño short story online over at The New Yorker, and you should read it.
•••
Some of the reasons why I love love.
About every three months or so for a period of about five years, I would get a wrong number on my mobile phone from someone looking for a person named Yahtzee. I never actually tried to track him down, because I didn't care. But over the past year, I've become inordinately fond of Zero Punctuation, the video game reviews hosted by The Escapist Magazine. I rarely play video games, and I'm rubbish at them. But I do understand the ideas involved, and I find them very interesting. And the man behind Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee Croshaw, is one of the most entertaining people on the internet today.
Just after listening to the latest Zero Punctuation review, a scathingly abusive treatment of the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game (They still make Sonic games? I was surprised too.), I thought about my formerly regular wrong numbers. Since my phone number changed when I moved to Hamilton, I don't get these wrong numbers anymore. But I imagined just now that actual friends of Yahtzee Croshaw were trying to call him. This meant that they were ranking up hideously high mobile phone charges for accidentally calling me in eastern Canada over long distance from Australia. However, that's probably not the case, as very few people would ever be that stupid.
•••
Also, there's a really good Roberto Bolaño short story online over at The New Yorker, and you should read it.
•••
Some of the reasons why I love love.
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