Final Bolano - 2666

I read Bolano all the way up and down the Max line and bus lines—from home to work in time to get in by 8 and leave by 12; back down to a little café to eat a brunch of organic beef and eggs and to sit reading hunched over a little 2-top squeezed next to the kitchen, tapping my right foot as if it’s possessed and holding my head with both hands; back on the Max to home to pick up a forgotten item for the journey and then back downtown (I have to stow the book while I walk from the Max stop to the Union Station); then on to the north bound train where I commence to read halfway to Seattle with a brief pause to look out the window at a stop just north of Vancouver, Washington where a scrap processing plant sprawls, heaped with old car parts; wanting to take a picture but not wanting it enough, or in time, to get out the camera; making a quick note about the perspective of 2666.

It’s deep into the part about Archimboldi and I’m at turns floored, without suitable access to reference material (at times despairingly so), just lost, and throughout it all slightly awestruck. We obviously learn more about Archimboldi than do the reconditionally endowed scholars in section 1. Infinitely more. We go deep into the Reiter’s past and into the pasts’ of his literary touchmates and into the past revolutions that inspired and then ensnared or ensnarled or enshrined them. We go so deep that we marvel, or grit through, those passages that we can’t always bear to follow, but nonetheless keep hold of the wire and respect Bolano all the more for having inspired us to do so.

We meet up with Fercho, a Colombian cousin accompanied by his California fiancé Karen, and go to dine and then to spend the night at their cozy apartment. He’s a mad scientist sort who’s just taken his doctorate studying electromagnetic fields of marine organisms, and his newly promised who has just begun her PHd in Electrical Engineering. Her Spanish is improving less rapidly than his English. He raves about some Colombian dark chocolate we buy at an Asian grocery and she about the fresh caught Tuna salad for dinner.
We breakfast on arepas con mantequilla y queso con café bien hecho y jugo de naranja. On our way out we stop by Pike’s Place market and the Seattle Art Museum, which we rush through on a lucky free Thursday.

We take a bus across to the Canadian border. There is a delay with some spacey guy with the wrong documents who for a minute or so tries to pretend he’s deaf but than gives up the ruse in the face of the stern Canadian border guardswomen. I learn this after almost two hours via the bus gossip. During most of it I’m on the curb racing through revelation after revelation in the book. Then we are back on the bus and across the border into Canada, and pulling into the station as the final section of 2666 pulls the narratives together but not definitively so; or rather, in such manner that one—despite the length and intensity of the book—is half-tempted to pick it up and start all over again, but this time at the beginning of a randomly different section, to examine it a different way, aided or hindered by the previously unknown.