Roberto Bolano

I think there are points where its desire to encompass everything, and to swim around in this sort of real-world perspective on things, can become bothersome, where you either feel like you're being dragged through this almost mundane multiplicity and gossip of everything that happens in life, or else like the author is working so much from some kind of lived experience that he hasn't sufficiently sorted that material into something wholly useful. That bothered me over some stretches. One of the chapters I turned out to like best, in the end, was one toward the close, the one where each individual bit ends with "Everything that begins as comedy ends as ..." -- something that presented as a bit of a scaffolding, so that the material did feel well-sorted.

one reason why 'the part about the crimes' in 2666 works as well as it does is that it provides the same kind of 'scaffolding' youre talking about here.

oddly enough though im not sure that 2666 falls into this trap as readily as you might expect a book that long and dense to; i havent read savage detectives, so i dont really know how the two compare, but i wonder if the five-part structure helped bolano focus his energies (i was able to read the book in a couple days, as opposed to the weeks ive spent reading gravitys rainbow on and off recently, due in part to those kinds of structural choices that help divide/focus/sort the ideas).

not that 2666 doesnt come apart every few hundred pages--none of the sections, with maybe the exception of the part about the crimes, are as, um, tight, as they could be.

lol did lamp just explain his display name

he for certain appeared to explain something, i'm not sure what

scaffolding is the sort of word that is like scraping your fork across your teeth while eating when u say it not that im hearing it so much obv im reading these words, right now, my fingers tracing their edges striking sparks from my scrn

savage detectives is i think better than 2666 he used crude oil to do it and electronics (lol) not these clumsy construction material other ppl keep bringing up

Just for the record, I don't want to suggest that it's some necessary/sacred duty of novelists to create a feeling of the work having been rigorously culled or ordered or sorted from raw material or experience, but it is something that's usually beneficial and pretty basic to the form, no matter how diffuse the effect winds up -- I'm guessing most people who read Bolano can see where this might be an issue even if they don't mind it much? To be honest I don't know that it'd have really gotten to me in a shorter novel, but at a certain length it does start to seem like ... like the writer's "flaw," by which I don't just mean a failing but maybe the main thing about how they write that presents a difficulty or a possible weakness for the reader.

fwiw i feel uncomfortable trying to offer any judgement on bolano, considering i know nothing about south american lit in general and that seems pretty key to this book in particular, and considering how recent his death was and how much that defined his recent appearance as a writer in english.

but the inability to reconcile lived experience with the urge to make art, or the ludicrousness of wanting to - that seems kind of key to me - i mean, i don't want to say it's not a failing of the book - but it'd be hard for any book to have a more apt failing

xposts: lamp r u high right now?

my take on 2666 is that its sort of "about" the shaping of raw experience, the way we encounter and construct our world, the sorting systems we use, etc.--each main character, academic, journalist, policeman, novelist is a world-shaper (or some less corny term) charged with the ordering and structuring of the unbelievably senseless chaotic outside world. SO in some way i wonder how acutely bolano was aware of his 'flaw,' of the problems that nabisco describes, i mean, i dont wonder, i KNOW he was aware of it, cause he was a smart guy to say the least, but (and i say this without having read savage detectives so for all i know the same concerns are being addressed) its clearly something that he considers at the heart of what hes doing

xp ya the creation of art in the face of some kind of terrible murderous nihilism thats in some way equivalent to LYFE in the broad sense is bolanoid to the extreme it seems to me

thomp im just pretty sad because ilx poster nabisco is a professor and general smart guy - and i feel like he just doesnt "get it" but maybe that means that i dont "get it" - for the record.

i think theres a strong strain of corniness in bolano like a trust exercise about falling backwards thats a lot less corny when u r falling or failing in the space btw shrugging your shoulders and cheerful, hands-y landing. savage detectives is about a lot of things not one or two things cleanly parceled i guess sure this could be a difficult weakness for the reader making minute and careful judgements all the time - these book ppl are so sloppy!!!!

Truth To be Told!!!! i identified a lot with the watchmen's "inarticulate howls" which is pretty lame but there it is the black (dark?) getting blacker (darker?) &c and &c and &c

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