Blogging Bolaño – 2666 6/23/08

The reading was going in a different direction. I was at a bar sipping a beer and working through Cortazar's Rayuela, consulting my Spanish dictionary frequently but actually making progress. After a couple hours, someone approached me from behind and slipped their arms around me. I reacted rather calmly, though I had no idea who it was. Turns out it was one of the bartenders who I have a passing familiarity with: one of those guys who ignores you when he's sober and gropes you when he's loaded. It was around 6:30 and he was loaded. His hair was dyed pink. After some nonsense talk, he convinced one of his co-workers to shave his head at a table behind the pool table. Another duded, who was also very smashed, decided to get in on the action. I tried to read a little more and made it through another chapter before things got too loud and I left. Later, I went to Carson's to pick up some furniture my brother had left there before heading off to Maine. We formulated the idea that Saturday evening after Carson had gotten off work at Powell’s. He had a surprise; an advance copy of the final Roberto Bolaño novel: 2666. My idea was to read it in a week, or as much as could be accomplished, and put in a brief daily blog entry recording my progress. The book is just under 900 pages so I figured I would need to get through around 130 pages a day. I’m on 127 now, though I haven’t really had the kind of uninterrupted periods one really needs to burn through a text—seeing as how my full-time academic clerkship covets my hours. I’m thirty pages from being through the first of the five sections of the book, entitled ‘The Part About The Critics’. I cheated a little, it must be admitted, by reading a handful of pages before today – less than twenty – just to fortify myself for the endeavor. I won’t get into summary or critical platitudes. After the main characters--a Spaniard, Frenchman, Italian and English woman--are brought together by their common literary interests and modern European academic dispositions, around pg. 121 or so, after three of them embark on a trip to México in search of an elusive literary figure – a quest not unfamiliar to those who’ve have read Bolaño’s previous knockout novel The Savage Detectives – comes one of those break-free prose passages that justify investing in fiction by putting into perspective some of the many ways that investment can go sour.