Roberto Bolano

wow, excellent take on 2666 max. i don't think world shaper is a corny term either, seems somewhat accurate? haven't read The Savage Detectives but from what people have told me, i don't think i'd like it.

also, i dig wild out there writing but unless there's a system/scaffolding in place (and world shaper can certainly be that), like nabisco says, after awhile, in 2666, it felt like a flaw or a writing tic and became too noticeable

I'm 2/3 of the way through 2666 so I can't comment with any authority but it seems like the value of what he's doing is inextricably bound up with how he's doing it.

no doubt if he had lived longer and it went through a couple of more iterations it would be a stronger novel, and a candidate for one of the GOAT. but I find myself quibbling about 3-5 page stretches rather than with larger sections or the overall enterprise so far.

i wrote a blog post about 2666 when i first finished it thats not specifically relevant to this topic of conversation but could be applied toward it: http://maxread.net/mindgrapes/books/2666/

btw sorry for linking to my blog and having a blog and even using the word blog and being alyve

never apologize for having a blog with the word mind grapes in it

haha many clarifications:

- I am so definitely not a professor
- I so definitely don't imagine that Bolano was unaware of this quality in his writing
- I also definitely do not think that mimetic capturing of diffuse or chaotic LIFE is in any way mutually exclusive of "sorting" on the author's part -- the process of writing is inherently a matter of organizing a reader's experience, and that experience can be organized for the purpose of presenting diffusion or chaos
- When I talk about "sorting" I am not talking about visible structure or the creation of a reader-friendly experience but basically just the sense of effectively drawing out or organizing meaning, or even just a sense of meaning, which I think Bolano does extremely well through the bulk of the book, which is obviously a lot of why the portions that don't achieve this seem less like aesthetic choices and more like portions of the writing that just aren't firing as well, you know?
- Part of why I said a writer's "flaw" isn't his/her "failing" is that yes, usually that thing is part and parcel of what a writer is trying to achieve and what they do well
- I am not presuming to "workshop" Bolano here, just attempting to describe what it was that made me think, through some portion of my reading experience, that I was turning out not to be a fan

^^ sorry that is long, but if I were surer of my understanding of the terms "imitatio" versus "mimesis" it would have been longer and way worse

it is also probably worth noting that I have only read Savage Detectives (and not 2666) and I'm pretty sure I'm having this conversation with a few people who have only read 2666 (and not Savage Detectives)

i think i may be the only one that has read both probably why my posts are so fluid and accurate

I can't read your posts in bullet point format, nabisco, paragraphs only please.

on some level the book's about our shifting, restless, relentless quest for the unknowable and providing a handy-dandy hook to hang it all on would seem like a capitulation for the reader's desire for sense to be made. and that might sound like a copout to forgive a writer's excesses but I don't think bolano's just flexing style muscles here.

he's clearly influenced by lynch and it's interesting because the arguments about bolano's excesses are similar to the ones made about lynch's. 2666 and inland empire strike me as related works, both inherently and in the way people react to them.

lol i will admit that i am trying to turn nabiscos salient point about the writerly mechanics of savage detectives into a discussion about the metaphyiscs of presence and absence in 2666

haha lookit, I strive to be open-minded and to confess those things I do not understand as well as I could, but I honestly don't think I need to be reminded what the book is "about" to suddenly solve the experience of those 150 pages or so where I just didn't think the writing was working as well

(If we want to get really professorial we could go into this, which is actually from an abstract of a thesis by someone who I think once posted to ILX: Michel Jeanneret has defined imitatio as the replication of pre-existing literary forms . . . and mimesis as the physical replication of the real world. . . . What Jeanneret cleverly shows is that imitatio and mimesis are actually mutually dependent. Without mimesis, imitatio is the lifeless replication of mere form; without imitatio, mimesis is the mechanical generation of indigestible data. -- basically this seems right to me and I think I experienced like 150 pages of Savage Detectives that felt like they swung a bit too hard into the, umm, hahaha, visceral realism of pure mimesis, which even if we stipulate that this is a profound aesthetic choice I just kinda don't think was very, umm, good?)

hmm nabisco if you want i will try to explain the concept of "meaning" to u from plato to the present, maybe that would help

oh so thats what deeznuts has been up to in his absence!

How awesome! deeznuts sd to me, that u have asked for pencil & paper

nabisco maybe if you listed the page numbers where the writing wasn't working for you we could get to the bottom of this

pps 15-35, 112, 125-137, 199, 211-253, etc

as the replication of pre-existing literary forms . . . and mimesis as the physical replication of the real world

poll

shit forgot the other option for the poll

imitatio

i have read the both of the books. no, wait, i still didn't finish 2666.

i haven't really felt like investing falling-backwards-into levels of trust into anything i've read/seen/heard lately, which is why i've spent so much time this year on things i don't really feel tempted to get into in that way, like anthony powell and jrpgs.

let's just go read max's blog

haha lookit, I strive to be open-minded and to confess those things I do not understand as well as I could, but I honestly don't think I need to be reminded what the book is "about" to suddenly solve the experience of those 150 pages or so where I just didn't think the writing was working as well

― nabisco, Monday, July 13, 2009 4:29 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fwiw tho homie i dont think any of us are trying to "solve" anything for u so much as attempting to encompass ur personal experience of bolano into a set of larger ideas abt his writing and themes and how and why it works, that being said im more than happy to tell u about heraclitus if ud like

y'know i saw this:

I honestly don't think I need to be reminded what the book is "about"

and thought it was a snarky comment at me, because i thought i'd said something about the failing-or-flaw of bolano's that nabisco is talking about is what the savage detectives was about; then i scrolled up and saw i hadn't even phrased it that way at all

anyway it's about 600 pages

i still want find someone who has seen the riddles in the end section before reading the book.

one of those abouts should be an "about".

BLOG My BLOG Blog BLOG Links BLOG To BLOG Max's BLOG Blog BLOG Now BLOG . BLOG

max there better not be any 2666 spoilers in yr blog

uh theres like one mild hinted-at spoiler in a footnote i think

Look for about 100,000 new hits per day thanks to my linkage, Max. That's what I like to call my "reader runoff".

Well now I mostly want to know how strongly I should consider reading 2666, given that there was like 1/5th of Savage Detectives where I kind of thought Bolano was being a bit of a bore (somewhere in the manner of people who have a lots of stories about doing drugs but the stories don't add up to much, and it's possible you just had to be there)

xpost - I didn't mean that all snarky, I just meant that my complaint was maybe (like Max says) more mechanical than thematic, and so I'm resistant to "but you're not getting X" as a rejoinder, I guess? Whatever.

turns out 2666 is just one long bob newhart dream where he wakes up at the end, whew

nerd-o loves his book-y book imo

also: I think I experienced like 150 pages of Savage Detectives that felt like they swung a bit too hard into the, umm, hahaha, visceral realism of pure mimesis, which even if we stipulate that this is a profound aesthetic choice I just kinda don't think was very, umm, good?

okay i was assuming u meant the part of the book i quoted maybe u didnt but i still think this is a weird judgment 2 make weird clause to stipulate weird pause to deflect away u r misunderstanding ^_^

nabisco i am obviously totally unqualified to tell you how much youd like 2666 since i never read savage detectives but i think that 2666's specific five-part structure (and in the case of the one about the crimes the individual murder-based structure) help avoid some of the problems youre talking about; that being said, the book is hardly absent those moments/stretches where youre just kind of like... "oh." i remember the last 10+ pages being like that, which was really frustrating at the time but which i have since rationalized away due to special postmodern arguing tactics such as "oh if you were frustrated by the end it was because you didnt GET it"

2666 is worth reading, strictly for The Part About The Crimes

also--i mean this in a totally real way--sometimes reading stuff you don't connect with all the way can help your brain grow and causes you to think about stuff in a way that you wouldn't with a different book

that is what you tell people when they catch you re-reading Twilight, isn't it

Look for about 100,000 new hits per day thanks to my linkage, Max. That's what I like to call my "reader runoff".

― save your lover! (Z S), Monday, July 13, 2009 4:43 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

by runoff do you mean overflow or some online version of white flight

i assumed he meant semen

I liked "The Savage Detectives" and the first section of 2666 well enough, but I had to abandon the 2nd section of 2666 to read other stuff and now find I'm not really motivated to go back to it. I'll no doubt pick it up and give it another chance, but I'll be surprised if I don't decide I'd be likely to get more pleasure from other books.

I read both but don't have smart words bout them

yes u do i can feel it

I liked books 2-3 of 2666! tbh book 5 is the part that's slowing me down.

2666 is worth reading, strictly for The Part About The Crimes

instead of "strictly" I'd say "especially"

I don't know exactly what this is but I got a free galley proof of "The Skating Rink" at ALA

i don't know what that is but i'm jealous.

reading 2666 & Savage Detectives was like the Cien años moment I had at 12 and the La ciudad y los perros moment i had when i was 18, the Pedro Páramo moment i had at 20 etc. Renewed my love of Latin American letters. Not to say that there's not been a lot to take notice of in the interim, even old Marito Vargas Llosa is still cranking out good books, but, e.g. Lemebel is no Bolaño. I'm not really sure if I can put in to words how awesome he is.

"the skating rink" was great. it's very different from savage detectives and 2666: shorter (less than 200 pgs), only has three narrators, and tells a much more direct story. probably more "conventional," but i enjoyed it a lot.

It looks really interesting--I think I'm going to have to get it.

Yeah, Skating Rink's right up there w/ his best novellas. Only ones I haven't read yet are the Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star. Would anyone who has read those strongly recommend them? So far, Amulet was the weakest - still solid just seemed to cover a lot of the same territory as SD.

nazi literature is a great idea, when i flicked through a copy it made me sad i knew so little about s. american lit

spotify keeps advertising the paperback of 2666: it seems weird, that it does

Not that I know an awful lot about Latin American Lit, but I saw these bunch of essays on it that might be prove to be a good point of departure. The author is a playwright and novelist (really a playwright: Konfidenz is a play trapped inside a novel, if that makes sense)

Just got 'Skating Rink' in the post last night--looking forward to it.

nazi literature is a great idea, when i flicked through a copy it made me sad i knew so little about s. american lit

every book i've read by bolano makes me feel this way. i have a suspicion it makes most s. american readers feel the same way.

I found these essay/review quite nice (there's a nice review of 'the skating rink' as well):

http://quarterlyconversation.com/roberto-bolano-the-geometry-of-his-fictions