Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About the Crimes (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

Blogger's note: I'm covering this giant doorstop of a novel part by part. This post is the fourth of five. To read prior entries in order, start with The Part About the Critics" HERE, then "The Part About Amalfitano" HERE, then "The Part about Fate" HERE.

We just passed the twelfth anniversary of the internet publication of the greatest book review ever written, and I was today years old when I realized that yes, in fact, "The Part About the Crimes" is the A Feast for Crows of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially as rendered in audio format by the talented but exhausted-sounding Scott Brick, whose habit of giving every sentence a rapid rise and quick plunging fall in pitch to convey a certain kind of drama just drives home the repetitive, almost liturgical quality of so much of this part of the novel, by far its most depressing and demoralizing oh my god too many hours, which, its title tells us right away we should not be expecting a walk in the park, but even by the standards of something explicitly about the tidal wave of femicide that is the primary thread in this big fat tapestry, this is grim stuff. I think this whole damned city of Santa Teresa must all be the kind of paid up subscribers to Black Dawn (see my post about "The Part About Fate") that drop everything when the new issue arrives in the mail and don't do a damned thing until they've read the whole magazine cover to cover. Or at least, that's what the cops do. When they're not relentlessly trading dated and exhaustingly horrible and sexist "what's the difference between women and X" jokes, anyway. Yuck.*

The stuff between the repetitions isn't much better, either. For instance, about midway through this part, a side character from "The Part About Fate", a Mexico City sportswriter named Sergio, pops up again, now back in Santa Teresa to write about its seemingly dual crime wave (we'll talk about about the Penitent later) in his new role as a crime reporter, takes a prostitute to bed and has a weird conversation with her that still kind of makes me want to scream.

Smoking a post-coital cigarette**, Sergio starts demanding to know what the unnamed prostitute knows about the murders, and gets pretty shitty when she tells him she has a "vague idea" about them. He berates her for not having solidarity with all these other whores who have been murdered since she is one herself, then she reponds, not by expressing sympathy or regret or concern or fear, even for herself, but by pointing out that Sergio has made a category error. The women being murdered in Santa Teresa have not been prostitutes, but, mostly, workers, employees of the maquilladoras. She emphasizes the word "workers" and just generally conveys the idea that as far as she is concerned, what she does for a living is not "work." Again, I'm kind of applying 21st century standards to a book set and largely composed during the 90s, but even back in those far off days, before we all as a society (or at least the left-leaning half of society) agreed that "sex work is work" we did refer to prostitutes as "working girls," so, uh, no.

I mean, I know I'm being picky and even a little precious about this scene in a novel section that basically exists to drive home that the failure to regard women as fully human has big social and individual costs that disproportionately (and often fatally) are paid by those same women, but hey, it's also an illustrative passage of how grim this part can be. But this is "The Part About the Crimes" at its lightest.

Overwhelmingly, "The Part About the Crimes" is about repeating one archetypal scene over and over and over and over again (I think the official femicide body count for this novel is 109, but I can't remember where I saw that and might be too lazy by the time I've written this post to track it down), just like Brienne of Tarth repeating Sansa Stark's description to every character she meets, except way more grim. It mostly goes something like this:  In (a month of a year), a (woman or a teenager or, a few times, a tween), who may or may not have a name, is found dead and unceremoniously dumped somewhere -- in a field, alongside a highway, etc. -- where she won't necessarily be noticed right away but (with a few grim skeletal exceptions) but is likely to be noticed after a reasonably short period of time. We get a description of her clothes. We learn whether she has been shot or stabbed or strangled. We get the important information as to whether or not she was raped and in what orifices. We find out which of Santa Teresa's Finest gets assigned her case. We get a half-assed account of his half-assed efforts. We are then told that the case was "closed" or "shelved", but here these two terms are basically interchangeable for verisimilitude; in real life, cops don't just say "we gave up."

Over and over and over again.

And while not every murder victim gets a name -- either because by the time she is found she is no longer identifiable, or simply because nobody ever shows up to claim or identify her -- every cop does, and gets a little vignette about as detailed as Stephen King's slapstick death stories midway through The Stand, usually with cameo appearances by other cop characters, but ultimately the cops' stories blur together and fade from the reader's  memory exactly as the murder victims have from the city's, because 2666 is not a whodunnit. There is not going to be a hero detective who puts it altogether and solves the crime spree.

Very few people, apart from the odd journalist (and what about Guadelupe? The female journalist? Who had an appointment with a locked up tall German towards the end of "The Part About Fate" but whom Oscar just leaves behind to drive to America with Rosa A?) even see that there really is a crime wave, let alone of the scale that it is. A few cops put their heads together about a few murders they're working on that share some grisly signature details and speculate about a serial killer, but that's only for a few of the murders, ignoring the vast number of dead women who did not have one breast sliced off and the nipple bitten off the breast that's still attached. Some of the individual murders do get solved, kind of by accident, in that they turn out to be the sadly predictable final outcomes of domestic violence, but on the whole, only we, Bolaño's readers, ever see the really big picture.

And really, this pretty much tracks for how murder investigations work in the real world. Real Cops don't solve crimes.

But anyway, this part, about the crimes, isn't just about the femicides (the recitation of which kept making me think of the sad but wistful continuing Roll Call of the Dead in Sjon's amazing CoDex: 1962). There's also a serial church desecrator on the loose! And his crimes are bizarre and spectacular and the closest thing to almost kind of funny that "The Part About the Crimes" gets.

Well, except for this one bit, when the femicides, in attenuated form, briefly have come to the attention of the powers that be in Santa Teresa, which is, I think, Natasha Wimmer making a smart and amusing choice in presenting in the sing-song of a children's book rather than the hard boiled no-nonsense crime talk we're expecting in such a scene:

Life is hard, said the mayor of Santa Teresa. We have three clear-cut cases, said Inspector Angel Fernandez. Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass, said the man from the chamber of commerce. I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight, said Pedro Negrete.

Pretty much the whole rest of the novel handles dialogue in the conventional, subject-verb forms of English prose, in which the scene would have looked like this:

"Life is hard," the mayor of Santa Teresa said.

"We have three clear-cut cases," Inspector Angel Fernandez said.

"Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass," the man from the chamber of commerce said.

"I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight," Pedro Negrete said.

The fact that this exchange is followed by a remark from the mayor that "the important thing is not to stir up any shit" may shatter the stylized children's book feel but drives home the real point being made, that this whole scene is a rote performance of professional concern, rather than a genuine attempt to communicate anything. It's the only time I actually smiled in this whole section. Thanks, Natasha!

But I haven't even got to what passes for the protagonists of "The Part About the Crimes", if there can be said that there are any. I reckon on two of them: Klaus Haas, a big tall German guy arrested on flimsy and circumstantial evidence for one of the 109 murders, who has various adventures in the Mexican jail where he awaits sentencing for so long that he eventually just calls a press conference to try to point the finger at another party for the killings; and the magnificently named Congresswoman Azucena Exquivel Plata, who has a disappeared friend, Kelly (real name, Luz-Maria), Kelly being linked, of course, to a series of orgiastic parties out on the ranches outside of Santa Teresa, to which many young and/or underage women are brought to be debauched. Hmm. The former gets involved in all kinds of inmate scuffles and, though he is himself so tall as to almost count as a giant, portentously keeps announcing to his fellow prisoners that The Giant is coming and they'd best be scared; the latter burdens us with the story of her insanely privileged life and her friendship with Ghislaine Kelly while she interviews/interrogates a private detective she's hired to find her friend.

Can these characters be protagonists, though, when one is only barely there and the other isn't even mentioned in passing until about the last 20% or so of "The Part About the Crimes?" Well, there's nobody else who comes close to qualifying, so, yes?

Speaking of that last 20% or so, it really veers off in its own weird direction, cutting up four different narratives into very small pieces and layering them on top of each other like so many jenga blocks to really drive home how much reader/listener annoyance Bolaño and Brick are going for. The Klaus Haas narrative bits start feeling like they're leading to a shaggy dog story, but you're never sure because just when they get interesting, you're torn away to another piece of Azucena's story, then to a bit about a figurant, Kessler (an American law enforcement consultant who is just sort of touring the scenes of all the crimes and letting everybody cater to him), then to another bit of corpse porn, then back to Klaus. Who, yes, sounds like he bears a more than passing resemblance to another absurdly tall German guy, whom, 700 years or so ago, three literary critics traveled to Mexico to find and bring back to Europe to accept his Nobel prize, Benno von Archimboldi. But Klaus is, of course, too young to be Archimboldi. Isn't he?

This brings me to the one thing that I'm still really impressed by in this section of 2666. Bolaño is playing a lot with the ideas of detective fiction, and several times seems on the verge of setting up one of his many interchangeable cop-or-journalist*** characters as the Detective Who Will Solve It All, only to Lucy-yank away the football from our Charlie Brown expectations. But I'm a Gene Wolfe girl, so I became convinced right away on my first reading (and still believe it on my second, here) that we, the readers, are meant to be the Detective. If this was Gene Wolfe's 2666, I'd be sure of this, confident that if I took the time to read this book six or seven times and make careful notes of which of the bodies got which treatment and was associated with which model of car, and, probably, drew myself a detailed map of Santa Teresa and its environs, and made a careful study of the onamastics employed, I could accurately solve every single one of these murders, which, of course, have not all been committed by the same guy, or even the same guys. Factor out the domestic violence/honor killings and you're left with, I think, three, possibly four parties (depending on if Klaus Haas is guilty of anything besides slightly knowing one of the victims and standing out as a ridiculously tall German in this city of maquilladoras and nightclubs.)

BUT I'M NOT SURE. This is still the only Bolaño I've read. Is he a craftsman on Gene Wolfe's level? None of my Bolañeros and Bolañeras seem to have read Gene Wolfe (it's a mission of mine to get them to one day, when they're ready. They're getting there), and I don't think any of my Solar Cyclists have read Bolaño, so I'm the only one in a position to compare them that I know of. And I want to be sure, before I start reading Bolaño like Wolfe, that it would be worth the effort. I'm not a young woman, my TBR pile is huge, I've already given up television in the interest of reading as much of it as I can before I join the Roll Call of the Dead, and I'm longing to re-read all of Dorothy Dunnett again before I punch out, too.

Anyway and otherwise, man, all I can say is that Roberto Bolaño must have been thinking a lot about Dunbar's Number while he was writing this. This is best illustrated by one of the cop stories, the account of the sheriff of Huntsville AZ, Harry Magaña, summoned to Santa Teresa by a citizen of his fair city who was recently in Santa Teresa with a friend, only to lose track of that friend until she turned up murdered. All excited to play white knight, Harry comes barreling into Santa Teresa fixin' to investigate the hell out of this one murder, with or without the cooperation of the local constabulary. He catches the situation's brutality like a virus and meets a mysterious fate in Tijuana and could now be the Santa Teresa PD's poster boy for Not Getting Too Hung Up on One Case, punished for caring about a single person among 109. Gulp.

And so, onward to the fifth and final "Part About Archimboldi." Which I only dimly remember, and might not remember accurately at all because I'm starting strongly to suspect that "The Part About the Crimes" may have made me lose patience with this doorstop. Did I finish it, or did I not?

Watch this space, true believers.

*Which, I grew up in a law enforcement family and turned around and took employment for ten years with that same law enforcement agency (as a dispatcher, not a sworn officer) and this is the most accurate depiction of cops I've yet found in literature. When I say yuck, I mean yuck. I was still eyeball deep in my own law enforcement career when I first read 2666 so I thought maybe this time around it wouldn't hit me as bad but, nope. I'm still projectile vomiting in my head at this.

**And man, do all of these characters smoke in this novel. I know it was the 90s and whatnot but WOW. Of course, I've been reading lots of other international literature in which this keeps featuring. Everybody in Drive Your Cart over the Bones of the Dead smoked. The very freaking pages of The Morning Star were sucking on coffin nails, etc -- and those are both novels written and set in this century -- so I'm maybe more sensitive to this than usual but man, oh man, this novel brought to you by the international tobacco industry.

***One of these is a late entry in the contest to become my favorite character, the hilariously named Mary-Sue Brava, a reporter from Phoenix who gets hung up on the disappearance of another journalist who was one of only like four people to show up for Klaus Haas' press conference. I would like more of her, please, but nobody cares what I want. Anyway, I don't care that your name is Mary Sue, Mary Sue, I still love you.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About Amalfitano (tr. by Natasha Wimmer)

(Blogger's note: this is Part 2 of a [probably] five-part post about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Click here to read Part 1, if you haven't already) 

This entry is where it's going to be a bit absurd to be devoting a post to each of the five parts, as "The Part About Amalfitano" is a whopping 68 pages long, but Roberto Bolaño packed a lot into those 68 pages of 2666.

We learn right away a thing or two about our hero, that Oscar Amalfitano (a Chilean professor with an Italian name to go with the mysterious German writer with the Italian name) whom the Critics snubbed but whose help and company they accepted in northern Mexico as the closest thing they were going to get to a Native Companion in the David Foster Wallace sense: that he has a daughter, and that the weird book of poems about geometry that was hanging from the clothesline at his house was there for rather more interesting reasons than we might have suspected. Also, he has an entertainingly eccentric ex-wife. And he might be a semi-closeted gay man with a lot of internalized self-loathing about that. Which the Critics kind of suspected, but for the wrong reasons.

First, the daughter. Rosa, by the time the Critics come to Santa Teresa, is a teenaged girl who has been raised almost exclusively by her father, who seems to have done a creditable job in that she has grown up into a competent and capable young woman with a healthy social life and a bottomless well of patience to draw on as she gets sucked more and more into the role of housekeeper in her father's book-infested household. Her mother left when she was just a baby, came back once when she was about ten years old, and both times left her without saying good-bye. She has a half-brother, her mother's little son by some man other than Amalfitano, somewhere in the world, probably Europe, whom she seems unlikely ever to meet. And also, because her mother was Spanish, Rosa has a European passport, while her father's is South American, meaning when they travel together they have to go through separate lines at airports' Customs and Immigration areas, resulting in a few slightly traumatic scenes in both of their pasts. Rosa is also, of course, just the right age to be targeted by the serial killer whose existence was only hinted at in "The Part About the Critics" but is started to emerge as a full-blown matter for concern in "The Part About Amalfitano." Gosh, I can't imagine why...

The geometry/poetry book is a tome that turned up in one of Amalfitano's many boxes of books when he moved from Barcelona, where he'd held a faculty position on a contract that ran out right around the time he met an appealing woman professor from the university in Santa Teresa and let her recruit him. He can't account for its existence in his collection at all, has never been to Santiago de Compostela, let alone to its bookstore whose label is on its cover, claims to know next to nothing about the poet who wrote it, one Rafael Dieste, who was an actual person and not a Bolaño creation. As I'll discuss in a moment, Amalfitano, with Bolaño's help, might be obscuring a more personal connection to this poet from us, but for the moment we must simply accept that he has no idea why he owns a copy of Testamento Geometrico (not a real book, but similar to a maybe-real book*). He has no intention of actually reading it, nor can he persuade Rosa to give it a try, so he does what any self-respecting Chilean-sea-bass-out-of-water would do, he uses it to recreate a Marcel Duchamp "Readymade"**, in which a geometry textbook was hung from a clothesline and exposed to the elements. Amalfitano decides to do the same with his unwanted poetry book, and expresses hopes that the book, full of idealizations about abstractions about the world, will learn something about the real world, or perhaps that the wind riffling its pages will learn something about geometry, and thus about the artificial structures it blows around and through in cities like Santa Teresa.

As for the poet, Dieste, while the dates of Dieste's actual life don't really match up, I can't stop thinking about the possibility that Dieste could be the poet with whom Amalfitano's wild thing of a wife, Lola, becomes obsessed to the point of ditching her husband and baby daughter to go off and hatch a screwball plan to break The Poet out of a Spanish mental hospital and begin an itinerant lifestyle with him in France and have his baby. Despite The Poet being gay. Now, since I know nothing at all about Rafael Dieste, I don't know if he was gay or if he spent time in a mental hospital -- it doesn't seem, from a few minutes googling, that either was true of him, but I kept running into articles in Galician and my straight up Spanish is terrible, so I'm not prepared to make a firm statement about what I found. HOWEVER...

If Dieste and The Poet are the same person, that would be one reason right there for Amalfitano to have a subconscious hostility toward Dieste's book, of a kind that would let him justify mistreating it as an homage to Duchamp***. His wife's obsession with The Poet ruined his family, after all.

BUT... 

Amalfitano may have a hand in all this himself. For while Lola insists that she met The Poet long ago and even had a one-night-stand with him at a party hosted by "the gay philosopher" with whom The Poet then lived (and which the philosopher and two other friends allegedly watched), Amalfitano's version of the backstory to her obsession is very different: she had never heard of The Poet before Amalfitano introduced her to The Poet's work. Lola is a free spirit, to say the least, and very liberal with her embroideries on the truth, and is perfectly capable not only of appropriating another's story as her own but on embellishing the hell out of it, which then brings up the question: since the alleged sexual encounter with The Poet can't actually have happened with Lola, could it have actually been Amalfitano's story originally? One of which he is deeply ashamed, as his extensive internal dialogue (we'll get to that) with himself, laden as it is with expressions of internalized homophobia, strongly suggests?

Did I mention there's a lot packed into these 68 pages? There's a lot.

But so, some more about Lola. We get her whole back story before we've learned anything, really, about Amalfitano or his daughter, via a series of rambling and unfiltered letters she sent to Amalfitano during her rampages through Spain and France. She is a deeply unreliable narrator so it's impossible to tell what, if anything, is true, but these letters are some of the most entertaining storytelling in all of 2666. Lola has no shame, nor much sense of self-regard; she doesn't mind looking filthy or being used as a prostitute or sleeping rough in a cemetery, will tell any lie she needs to in order to achieve a goal and comes up with some whoppers. I would read a whole novel about Lola. But I'll take what I can get.

Later on, after Lola has sashayed into the sunset and Rosa has grown into a teenager, Amalfitano has developed some odd habits that may well grow out of his internal issues with regards to The Poet, whether or not The Poet is Dieste: he's started making strange geometric doodles in which he tries to visually map the relationshps between various philosophers and other famous thinkers, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Jacques Lacan and Doris Lessing and including both Harold and Allan Bloom. And he's started hearing a voice in his head that claims to be his long-dead grandfather, but later admits merely to being his father. And his head-father is obsessed with boxing (which will be a big part of the next book "The Part About Fate") with the idea that all Chileans are homosexuals (except dad mostly says "faggot" because dads gotta dad) and that he, Amalfitano probably is one, too, and dad's feelings about that possible fact are conflicted. Twice in this section someone muses about the idea that madness is contagious; with these aural hallucinations it seems that Amalfitano has either caught it from his wife, or might have been the Patient Zero in this relationship. This section, after all, starts with him asking himself a few rhetorical questions about why the hell he's even in Santa Teresa.

Meanwhile and elsewhere in Santa Teresa, they keep finding dead bodies of teenaged girls and young women in vacant lots near the edge of the desert, because 2666 gotta 2666. And while Rosa is mature for her age and very capable, she sure tends to get home late a lot...

One last bit of interest, here, though it may be nothing. We get to see a bit of the true relationship between Amalfitano and the son of the Dean of the university, Miguel Antonio Guerra -- a rather unpleasant young man with a habit of going to rough clubs in the city and pretending to be gay, the better to pick fights, and whom the Critics in "The Part About the Critics" at first suspected of being Amalfitano's highly inappropriate paramour. Guerra seems intended to be an early red herring candidate for being The Killer in that he is the only person we've encountered for who actively seeks out violence and goes armed.****

And... I still don't know what to make of Amalfitano's Part-ending dream in which Boris Yeltsin "the last of the Communist philosphers" (would Yeltsin, who presided over the fire sale of state assets to a bunch of would-be oligarchs that allowed them to become actual oligarchs, agree to this title, I wonder?) reveals to him the true economic formula of our times, which is apparently "supply+demand+magic" where magic is probably actually just advertising, or, as Amalfitano reckons magic to be "epic and also sex and Dionysian mists and play," which sounds like advertising to me and now I'm thinking once again about one of my favorite films of all time, based on a novel by one of my favorite writers, the blisteringly awesome Generation P***** (which, actually, prominently features one Boris Yeltsin in its phantasmagoria) and I can think of no better way to end this post and this section of 2666 than by embedding the film in its entirety here, just to be stupid, but really, you should just fire up YouTube on an actual television and bask in its glory properly (I got to see it on the big screen and chat with its director for a bit afterwards because once upon a time I got to do awesome things like go to the Toronto International Film Festival). Go forth and marvel at the film that predicted Deep Fakes by more than a decade, my lovelies!

And then watch this space for more 2666, coming very soon.

*As in it's hard to tell. One can google Dieste's Nuevo Tratado del Paralelismo, and get a few hits that even show a charmingly worn copy in a photograph, complete with a table of contents, but since most of the sites that link to it are actually dedicated to 2666, I'm not sure if it's a real book either. I mean, I myself own a hoodie that celebrates my "visit" to Oakland, CA's entirely fictional Telegraph Records from Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, after all. But clearly, Rafael Dieste sounds like an interesting man and an interesting poet I look forward to learning more about someday.

**Kind of a spiritual ancestor to Yoko Ono's "Instructions" maybe?

***Who, by the way, entitled his work exposing a geometry book to the elements the Unhappy Readymade, and by the way, Duchamp didn't actually do this to a book but told his sister to do it. She did, and later made a painting of the book after it had been exposed. Only this painting of the original project survives now.

****Of course, I think we've already had a glimpse of the person who will be determined is the most likely suspect in the killings, in another bar, in "The Part About the Critics", where Espinoza drinks alone the day they've dropped off Liz. All Espinoza notices about him is that he is very tall, tall like Archimboldi is said to be just exceedingly ridiculously tall, but this man seems too young to be Archimboldi. Is this [REDACTED]? As usual, I don't effing remember if this is a dot that gets connected or not.

*****Based on Victor Pelevin's terrific and criminally underappreicated novel Homo Zapiens. It's a very faithful adapatation.

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

There's a really neat passage very early on in this first of the five volumes that make up Roberto Bolaño's posthumous doorstop novel, 2666, which has next to nothing to do with the plot or any other developments within the volume or the novel as a whole, but gives an early hint of at least one reason why so many people outright revere Roberto Bolaño as rendered by Natasha Wimmer in English:

The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned around (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.*

This passage is especially exquisite in John Lee's note perfect narration of the audio edition of "The Part About the Critics" -- his onomontopaeic rendering of the (drops) is goddamned art. But more about Lee in a bit.

I have a weird history with 2666. When an American edition was announced back in 2008, I pre-ordered it in a sweaty fever of excitement, ready to see if it would give me the kind of cramp from carrying it around that Infinite Jest did back in my 20s. I reckoned not, since I'd switched from foot-commuting with an overstuffed backpack of books and whatnot (seriously, if EDC was a thing in the 90s, I'd have been its queen. It was ridiculous, the shit I had in my backpack every day) to bike commuting, with the heavy stuff in panniers. But when it arrived, I had gotten distracted by... something. This was before I'd started this blog, before I was on GoodReads; metrics and tracking data not available, so I don't remember what it was that distracted me, but I'm sure it was very shiny.

So I didn't actually pick it up to read until it was kind of too late for me to do so, as in, I didn't start reading it until the chronic pain that has come to warp everything about my entire life started warping my life and making things like holding a giant 900+ page book and turning its pages an exercise in agony (but hey, it could have been worse. I could have waited for the trade paperback. Can't do those even a little bit, trade paperbacks). But the buzz about it was still strong, and the first section, "The Part About the Critics", had such a strong whiff of my very favorite book, probably of all time, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (the first ebook I ever bought despite owning a first edition hardcover, because I wanted to spare further wear and tear on that hardcover more than I wanted not to spend ten bucks on a book I already owned) that I gritted my teeth and soldiered on for a while, but found myself interspersing this painful-but-fascinating experience with other books as has always been my bad habit, but soon I was finishing whole other novels in between bouts with the behemoth, and then whole series of novels, and then...

I know I eventually read the whole thing, but it was a horrible slog, and not necessarily because of anything inherent to the novel itself. I didn't remember things, didn't want to page physically back to find what I was missing, and eventually that kind of thing spoiled my enjoyment almost as much as the screeching pain in my hands, wrists, elbows, shoulders etc. did.

Fast foward many years. It's 2021. I'm watching the 2 Month Review podcast while enjoying the hell out of Vernon Subutex, and one of the guests is professional translator Katie Whittimore, who at that time was, I think, just wrapping up her translation of the Bolaño-esque Last Words on Earth, and I thought, hey, it's high time I gave 2666 another try. And I had an Audible credit burning in my pocket. And I figured, what the hell.

Then the kids at 2 Month Review decided that 2666 was going to be the next big honkin' book they tackle, and books like this are always fun to read with pals, so here I am, giving it another go and this time I'm loving it entirely. Amazing what a lack of physical discomfort can do. Plus, the thought of having other people to talk to about it (which was lacking in my 2008-or-so life). Anyway, the gang's first episode of their season devoted to 2666 dropped this week (and Katie is a full-time co-host for it!). Give it a watch or a listen. The discussion went to some very weird places.

But so, "The Part About the Critics", which is the first of the five "books" that comprise 2666. Ahem.

As I mentioned, this first part gives strong Foucault's Pendulum vibes, in that it chiefly concerns a circle of four literary academics/critics who are all obsessed with the output and career of a mysterious German author (with an Italianate surname), Benno von Archimboldi. We have the Frenchman, Jean-Claude Pelletier, the Spaniard Manuel Espinoza, the Englishwoman (and only woman in the club) Liz Norton, and the Italian Piero Morini (I think I wrote a novel like this when I was 11. I remember bugging my mom to come up with good names for a Frenchman and a Spaniard and an Italian and a German, but they were traveling by ship and about to encounter pirates). They hop from conference to conference all over Europe in that enviable-seeming way that European intellectuals seem always to be doing, become, essentially, the Mean Group of German Literature (but of course don't see themselves that way), get overly entangled (sometimes literally) in each other's lives while still actually hardly knowing each other outside the sphere of their mutal obsession (while thinking they know each other very well indeed and not just because both Pelletier and Espinoza wind up having overlapping love affairs with Norton), and go on odd little side quests trying to learn more about their famously reclusive and mysterious literary hero.

There is a famous passage in the first half of this volume, in which a story-within-a-story (within a story) that is sort of kind of about Archimboldi but is really mostly about a Frisian woman's adventures in 1920s Argentina. It is all told in one extraordinarily run-on sentence that takes up almost six pages in my first edition hardcover. Everybody talks about it; it's a pretty wild thing and quite a shaggy dog story that really kind of thematically prefigures a decent amount of what's to come in 2666. It is, however, a whole 'nother degree of remarkable in the audio book edition, and not just because it takes up a full 15 minutes of narration at regular speed. Once again, John Lee is perfection in rendering it, but here he benefits from the hand of an unknown production lackey whose job it was to edit out the inevitable flubs and coughs and misreadings that are part of every audio book narrator's raw performed recording, because that person (or people) also has to edit out any breath sounds. Which is something nobody ever notices or remarks on in ordinary audio books, of course, but in the Blackstone Audio/John Lee English language edition of 2666 this passage reaches new heights of sheer uncanniness, for while Lee of course pauses very briefly between clauses, there is nary a breath sound or even enough of a pause for a breath to be taken for the whole 15 minutes.

I know this because I was already deeply interested in how this passage would be handled when I first sat down with this audio book, and then I played it back again many, many times in sheer awe, not so much of the technical achievement or apparent stamina of John Lee so much as the overall over-the-top ridiculousness of the final effect.

I have to wonder, though, if people for whom this audio edition is their first read through of 2666 even notice this bit? Does it even register as a pages-long sentence if prior meta-knowledge hasn't prepared one for such a sentence? Or does it just flit by with the rest of the narration? Let me know in the comments if you are such a one.

Anyway... back to the text.

I'm a very different person in 2021 than I was in 2008-ish. Back then I identified, of course, with Liz, though only sort of in that she's the token girl. I dreamed of someday being something like her, though I never have made it to visit even one bit of Europe, let alone all of them. I've had overlapping lovers who were also friends, etc. etc. I'm a book nerd who's shy on academic credentials (much is made of how Liz is the only one of the Critics who isn't a full professor, hasn't written a dissertation or earned a PhD yet. Eyeroll). I've been the trained attack poodle who eviscerated a verbal opponent on my hind legs whom my peers praised more for doing it at all than for how well I did it. I've definitely had my bona fides to participate in a conversation evaluated on my fuckability instead of my actual qualifications. Etc.

But now I'm partially disabled, and so my focus has shifted irrevocably to Morini, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair (not due to the disease so much as a result of a car accident that took place prior to the events of the novel)  and seems rather an asexual ascetic of a person in contrast to the sexcapades of his friends. My disability antenna vibrate hard in every scene that includes him; I find quickly that he doesn't have an electric wheelchair, for instance -- his friends are often depicted as pushing him around places -- but he gets around almost miraculously well on his own, never encountering accessibility issues and, to my constant awe, never experiencing hand cramps or anything like the agonies I've experienced the few times I've had to use a manual wheelchair.* But presumably 1) His hands and arms are not messed up like mine are and are indoubtedly in better "shape" from doing this activity all the time and 2) Doing it all the time has given him callouses and whatnot that I lack. 

Also, his condition is deteriorating and he is frequently ailing when the other three call him on the phone**, but apart from the perfunctory half-acknowledgment whenever he honestly answers their automatic "how are you"s, the other three aren't terribly interested in how he actually is and rush to dump their latest findings about Archimboldi, literary gossip, and gossip about each other into his increasingly frail lap. Ha and also rumph. And perhaps emblematically and standing in for all three for a moment when it happens, Liz doesn't even see Morini as a man (even as a whole 'nother person, perhaps?) until a hypnagogic episode late in the story has her thinking she saw him standing in a corridor, some distance away from his chair.

Of course, to a degree Morini is partially responsible for this, as when he is temporarily struck blind for a bit but doesn't tell anyone...

He also winds up being left behind when Pelletier, Espinoza and Norton decide to hare off to Mexico to follow up on an account of Archimboldi having surfaced in Mexico City with the intention of proceeding to a fictional town based on Ciudad Juarez, Santa Theresa, on the U.S. border -- where, as Morini discovers in some extracurricular reading, some 100 people have disappeared and been found murdered. The area is home to lots of maquilas (and in the good old 2020s would now, if it actually existed, be a place where a lot of people who came to the U.S. border seeking political asylum get diverted and left in limbo, so it's easy for people to get lost and a prime hunting ground for, that's right, a serial killer. Or maybe more than one? There are over 100 victims).

(A lot more)

Nor is this the only hint of foreboding we get before the Mexico trip. On the ramp-up to this jaunt, we've had some shocking developments, including the appearance of possible additional rivals for Norton's affections in the persons of her brutish ex-husband and of of a much younger secondary school teacher and it is perhaps partly these that trigger a suprising burst of violence on the part of Pelletier and Espinoza, not against the husband or the teacher, but against a cab driver with whom they have what seems like a small disagreement but then it spirals wildly out of control until the cab driver crudely insults Norton. The critics demand he stop the cab, and when he demands payment, Pelletier and Espinoza deliver a playground beatdown that goes way too far. This sours the friends' relationships for quite some time, to the point where later on Morini up and disappears from the hotel they're all staying at for yet another conference, and stays incommunicado for several days and isn't terribly interested in telling everybody how he spent his time.

And then there's one Edwin Johns. On an earlier London trip, the group visited an art gallery whereat this very unusual artist had a show. His art is plenty interesting in its own right, but then the last piece turns out to be arresting as hell, "an ellipsis of self-portraits" containing at its center a mummified human hand. It turns out to be Johns' human hand, the one with which he paints. He cut it off deliberately, took it to a taxidermist to be preserved, and incorporated it into that work. Johns, becomes a secondary object of the Critics' fascination because of course he does (a factor in "The Part About the Critics" is that sooner or later all four of them come to realize that there just isn't enough known about Archimboldi to make him a suitable subject for the kind of all-consuming obsession to which they're all longing to surrender; he's never going to be enough by himself), and so we are treated to a side trip when the three male Critics travel to Switzerland pretty much expressly to meet Johns so they can ask him why he did it. They are not satisfied with his answer "To make money" but in this day and age I think this is a perfectly acceptable one. Artists' works get more valuable after they're dead because then there comes to be a finite number of them; the source is for ever gone. Somebody else makes the millions that their work sells for.

How else can a living artist see that kind of financial windfall? Johns has found a way to shut down his art factory forever (unless he trains himself to paint with his other hand, or his left foot or with a paintbrush in his mouth like several disabled artists do, etc) without having to, you know, die. Except maybe he needed to get a bit more famous first...

Anyway, if you can't tell, I'm as interested in Johns as in Archimboldi, and it's driving me crazy that I can't remember if we get more Johns in 2666 or not. Of course, Liz , who missed the trip to Switzerland to meet the man himself, is unaccountably drawn to another -- or possibly the same? -- exhibit when she returns to London after bailing on Pelletier and Espinoza in Mexico, and learns one last bizarre fact about him but... is there more?

But so, "The Part About the Critics" was not my favorite back in the day, and time has only brought me to dislike the titular critics more (while leaving my love for Casaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo largely intact). I'm ready to move on and spend some time with poor Amalfitano, who is one of the many people the critics have snubbed, taken for granted, and regarded as in every way lesser than, even though he, unlike they, has actually lived a life. And had a wife. And raised a child, as we'll see pretty soon in "The Part About Amalfitano."

Stay tuned, true believers.

*I've only had to do this so far when I'm required to be in constant motion around a large space like when I'm running an event, or when I'm shopping in a large store with brutal concrete floors that doesn't have motorized carts for the handicapped; otherwise I do all right with a cane. So far. Thank goodness for my rheumatologist and my Humira prescription.

**Which they do with incredible frequency. In the days when this was still a land-line-only proposition. Presumably with long distance charges for international calls. Yet blithely they phone around even more profligately than they hop plains to go to symposia or just to visit each other. And not all of them are Baby Boomers so this is all weird and unlrelateable but hey, one of the reasons I read so much is so I can experience as many other lives as possible in the short span of my own. Especially since my physical space is so restricted now.