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.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/29

Had to get a day away from 2666 most of the day, it was too sunny out for the dark stretches of the book. 'The Part About The Crimes' section (4)is drawing to an end and has been harrowing. I should make it through tomorrow and then start on sec. 5 p. 637 which I will not finish on that day but likely Tuesday, or more likely Wednesday on the train ride up to Seattle. We are leaving Portland in the afternoon and arriving in Seattle for dinner with Maya's cousin and probably Zabel. The next day we're headed to Vancouver to see my friend Virginia and hang for the weekend of the forth. We're not expecting any fireworks up there.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/28

Got a while further through Bolaño in the afternoon, though the insufferable heat sapped my initiative. The murders are really picking up in Santa Teresa, and a panorama of Mexican society emerges. From the crookedest cop to the simplest psychic, and through the jails, streets, bordellos and borders of México we go. Some gringos make appearances, though the preferred nomenclature is the ‘North Americans’; but the most numerous and saddest characters in 2666 are the young women.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/27 11:45 PM

He was at the bar reading like a maniac, getting caught up in the flow; sensing the texture and tone; feeling the cyclone structure spiraling out brutality, farce, sex, inchoate love-dreams; and aching out its eye a demand for intimate examination, in some sections practically tears as well; if only to feel a little human.

He was on page 512 and felt himself swirling down a giant drain, so large that those kinked hairs and dark fluids took on monstrous proportions, a familiar, filthy prelude to the inevitability of that dark tube at the bottom.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/26/08

Along the way into day three of this 2999 sprint, he carved out time for a little two-person asado o barbacoa, out in the little yard behind their triplex apartment house: that little patch of grass that neither their upstairs nor their basement neighbors seemed to pay much regard. They, he and Maia, had the little mini-Weber grill that had survived in Oregon before, during and after their time in Bogotá. Bogotá is only relevant because Maia grew up there, though truth be told government records can prove clearly, to her everlasting discomfort, her legal birthplace as Cali.
Maia was taking a rest while ‘the rake’ was marinating the ‘organic’ split-breasts, a steal for just over $6.09, in thick Petaluma red ale, fresh tarragon from his parents’ garden, a splash of olive oil, lemon pepper, lime-rind and salt on the kitchen counter. And while he divided the lines of coals on either side of the lop-sided, squat little cruddy black grillgnome and sprinkled them liberally with lighter fluid. His preferred method of achieving the desired grilling temperature (since the charcoals ought to be synthetic and mesquite-mashed) was to vigorously fan either side of the mounded coals with a broken-flat wheat cracker box. That particular brand of wheat cracker box he admired with utilitarian satisfaction, combining as it did equal parts flexibility and strength, not to mention the air displacement ratio coincidence apropos of the little rusted, busted down mini-Weber.
He sat out in the yard, buffeted occasionally by a clean, early summer wind. He read through his tome; an endless chronicle of fictional lives that though less-described, were often equally essential as our own.
This sort of dark, analytical, joyful, shivering novel existence struck him, as he watched the resplendent green foliage on the southern hill of the yard swing back and forth and tried to concentrate on the hollow sorrow of the wind chimes hanging under the stairs leading to the houses upper floor. How superior they must feel tramping about up there unfettered, he thought. This sensation struck him as logically as the dark flow of Bolano’s characters’ narratives, caught up as they were in upsetting yet not truly dire endeavors that one nonetheless feels building in the way every word and phrase is supposed to in a short story pushed to the shifty red limits, pushed outward by an ‘event’ the circumstances surrounding which are subject to strenuous daily debate. He got into his mind the scenes from Terry Gilliams’ film Brasil, in which terror and farce are pushed to the limits of absurdity: a place where suicide bombers and fine dining need not disturb each other provided that the ‘central bureaucracy’ keeps all its documents in order.
Being a bona fide bureaurcrat {he never could spell it properly}, his occupation felt phantom-like to him, as though—as he’d ready recently—a short course of mirror therapy might produce in him astounding results, seeing as how it had proved quite intriguing in the treatment of those whose brains had mal-functioned in the face of a shorted-out interpretation. ‘Just hit the right reset bundle and you can be cured by correction the expectation of a part that’s no longer ‘objectively’ there, by exploiting the image of the good brains’ reflection, allowing the previously atrophied side of the brain to unclench, declench and bench press a new realization of nothing. This seems to have happened to Liz Norton, the English professor in section 1 of 2666.
That’s why the phantom limb mirror treatment can’t be applied to those the most disturbed by a select few disorders. Those kinds of experiments minted not a few but at least seventeen documented cases of death or dire damage to the applicator {foot} etc. by the applicated. There were even cases posted on YouTube, before those got taken down by popular and legislative demand, showing grainy, muffled rampages.
‘It’s like watching fucking freddy cougar with shards of glass glued to his fists!’ one stoned adolescent had declared, the U-Tube video of his reaction quickly virating to the those in the know gawkers.
Back before, during the waiting part of the backyard BBQ for two, while she slept, he tended the grill and his book, the newly acquired coal design succeeding beyond expectations. Then they were inside and La Maita—looking stunning and sated after a long day of wall-painting at the perennially under-funded public media office on MLK—was raving about her roasted corn and he was devouring his chicken with two hands like a maniac. Mostly during the grilling process he had burned himself adjusting the food and wiping his greasy, black-flecked hands on his green corduroys and trying not to get any stain on the 2666, but at the same time absolutely drug into the story of the black magazine reporter who’s mother dies at the beginning of section 3 ‘The Part About Fate’. He heard the wind chimes again, blown to swinging by the warm gusting winds, and heard the meat sizzle and downed the rest of the 22 oz. Lagunitas as he fumbled around back by the wild yellow roses planted in the corner lee of the house under the stairs leading to the third floor. He was slated to read another solid 100 pages this evening but he only dreamed of plowing through fifty assuming he kept himself sober. That would be enough, he thought, to still allow him plenty of time to catch up on Saturday.

Blogging Bolaño 2666 6/25/08

Finished up section 1 ‘The Part About the Critics’ today and made it through section 2 ‘The Part About Amalfitano’. Amalfitano is a philosophy professor who is introduced in section 1 when the professor’s travel to Sonora in search of the elusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. Amalfitano is a Chilean of Italian descent who ends up teaching in México after leaving a position in Spain after his wife leaves him to go visit a poet living in an asylum. This mirrors an incident in section 1 where the European professors go to a Swiss asylum to visit a famous painter who has mutilated himself. Professor Amalfitano is in the midst of a nervous breakdown and almost oblivious to the troubling series of unsolved murders of young women that plague the border town of Santa Teresa and our upsetting many residents. He is hearing voices, has some strange run-ins with the son of the philosophy department dean and the section ends with him dreaming about chatting with Boris Yeltsin. Strangely enough, this all makes sense.

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.