10:05 am - Enduring Bolaño
I made it sound as if I weren't going to return to Bolaño's bleakly intricate landscapes* for a long time to come, but I succumbed to a kind of compulsive curiosity one day when, wandering the stacks, only in the Romance language neighborhood, not intentionally strolling down hispanophone highways or byways, the reflective red gleam of a vertical 2666 caught me right between the eyes. And even though my arms were full, the numbered spine kept glowering in my peripheral vision, and it was just right there - didn't require any waiting in lines or filling out forms of reserve or recall - so I just took it, hefted it into my already bowed arms, which seemed like a weighty enough gesture in itself, and set it beside the bedside table. Not on it - just beside it.
Well, I've liked it so far, for reasons I'm still trying to understand - because I've disliked so much of the other, so I'm half-wondering if it's he who's doing something different, or I. And I've also half been thinking about what makes the reader endure, in a novel where we're not quite sure what's supposed to happen but we keep getting the impression that something's supposed to happen; it seems to me that it's the latter, delivered in that incidentally ominous way - often Lynchian** that makes a reader (makes me, at least) endure.
But, speaking of endurance (or, really, speaking only because of the question of endurance): I've just reached "The Part About the Crimes." I'm thinking about stopping. Regardless of how necessary it is to the whole excessive, terrifying, monstrous enterprise of the book, I can't, right now, find myself in the frame of mind to read 300 pages of (as I understand it) descriptions of raped and murdered women. I think I will stop, at least for now.
But, those of you (like, for instance) who've read it: how awful and how necessary did that section seem?
*Here's what seems like one of the many self reflexive descriptions of his writing:
"It won't do you much good," said the cook, "it'll be dark in five minutes. Sunsets in the desert seem like they'll never end, until suddenly, before you know it, they're done. It's like someone just turned out the lights," said the cook.
Oh, and, of course, the part where Amalfitano reflects on the differrence between each great writer's version of, say, A Christmas Carol and his bigger, baggier, monstrous novels:
"What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters 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."
**Lots of it, if you're in the right mood, can support or suffer the Lynch comparison. (Another brief instance, which is citable because it's localizable, as opposed to the entire landscape of that ambience that you can feel if you're inclined to: "Don't you want something else to eat before you go? he heard the cook say. He didn't answer. The desert began to disapper.") But Iove the instance where that Lynchian heritage is explicitly invoked, and then also performed by means of a logical disconnect that's a big part of Lynch's method:
The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafe was a deepred, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the cafe was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me.
"It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film," said Fate.
The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages.
"Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even thing that haven't happened yet," he said.
[BUT THEN!]
After he told Fate how to get to the cybercafe, they talked for a while about Lynch's films. The clerk had seen all of them. Fate had only seen three or four.
Fate, having seen only a handful of Lynch's films, notices the reference. The clerk shrugs it off, though, like maybe it is, maybe it isn't - and then we find out, only a few lines later, that he's seen all of Lynch's films. Which disconnect has bunch of implications, but one seems to have to do with the kind of--not indifference--but equivalence that comes of excess.
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