Some Thoughts on Bolaño's 2666

"The mention of Trakl made Amalfitano think, as he went through the motions of teaching a class, about a drugstore near where he lived in Barcelona, a place he used to go when he needed medicine for Rosa. One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barley out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a Sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the prefect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters to spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench." 

Roberto Bolaño 2666

Translation: Natasha Wimmer

       Been reading 2666. I'm not done yet and want to hold off on writing more about it until I've finished, but it's at least safe for me to say I think this is exactly the type of book that Amalfitano suspects people are afraid of. The type of thing that contemporary American literature normally refuses to publish, mostly out of fear that readers will be intimidated by the page count alone not to mention the continual references to obscure poets (of all people!). As much as the industry can, they belittle this type of book every chance they get and call on the writers of serious entertainment fiction to back them up (Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Safran Foer I am looking at you). This relationship serves both writer and industry well, since both can reassure each other of the seeming integrity of their decision to yield to the market in determining what should and should not be selected for publication. Their argument goes something like this: The market demands predictability, most readers are only interested in solidly constructed entertainment, they are giving a large portion of their valuable time to do something that will provided them no material return for their energy spent so this fucking book better be worth it buddy cause I could be watching House right now. So how, you ask, is Bolaño being published? It's a fair question, and maybe part of the answer is that I am just another intellectual who thinks the sky is falling every time I look at a best seller list, or maybe even today amid the destruction of language via the Twitter newspeak (40 characters or less or you will pay!) a few authors manage to slip gigantic packages of subversion through the cracks. It may also have something to do with the misleading theme of a self-deprecating artistic vanguard which is in actuality more a joke on the establishment than it is on those who take a chance. I'm thinking of Savage Detectives here specifically but the issue has its moment in 2666 as well when the same Amalfatino gives his brilliant monologue on the relationship between the Mexican intellectual and the state. How else is it possible than that critics would praise Bolaño despite his clear indictment of the establishment and his endlessly intertwining sentences that shift through theme and clause before trailing off altogether on even longer diversion only to wind up somewhere else completely but still somehow exactly where you are suppose to be? But Bolaño can also read the way I always wanted genre fiction to read, like Joe Strummer had written it instead of writing Straight to Hell. Or to be more clear, it's quite possibly Bolaño wrote the perfect novel for the globalization era; a new Hearts of Darkness for our time. His popularity in this regard doesn't seem to be a mystery. He is not afraid of narrative or any other formal literary convention and proves himself more than capable of telling a story (aptly handled by his translator), but unlike some other contemporary novelists, his willingness to follow "the rules" is not an apology for wanting to use art to grapple with something much bigger. In fact, both compliment the other quite well and even save each other from cliches that can weigh each fraction down (the shit heel objectivity of realism and the utter farce of pure art). So maybe the sky is not falling and culture isn't dying, or perhaps the "social (realist?) novel" and the "experimental novel" really do need each other more than MFA programs and publishers would like everyone to think. Just as the horrific story of how hundreds of women were brutally murdered amid an industrial nightmare on the border between northern and southern hemispheres is the key to the secrete of this world (as one character muses early on in 2666), poetry (and by poetry I mean something other than what you think I mean)  can offer the hope needed to travel through hell.