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.

Rodrigo Fresan's THE DREAMED PART (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)

Late last year while I was still on my extended blogging hiatus, I snagged a Humble Bundle of Latin American Speculative Fiction that contained, among other wonders, Rudy Ch. Garcia's The Closet of Discarded Dreams, which is one of the most delightfully batshit things I've encountered in many a year, in a life that contains regularly scheduled viewings of Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, just to put that in context.

At last I have found a companion volume. I mean, besides The Atrocity Exhibition. The three books would definitely be shelved together if I ever get around to devising a personal psychohistorical organizational scheme for my library.*

The third being, of course, Rodrigo Fresan's second Tres Partes novel, The Dreamed Part.

Fasten your seatbelts, Little Buckaroos. And, uh, ware mild spoilers for The Invented Part, but I'll keep 'em light as best I can.

Where the first of the Tres Partes** gave a master class in next-level story structure and explored the inspiration Fresan took from F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and The Kinks' very greatest song "Big Sky" and possibly Alan Moore and David Gibbon's Watchmen and maybe even Clark Ashton Smith/Robert Shea, and from Fresan's own biji ,all while telling the story of a Writer, his glamorous and weird parents, his mad sister who married into an even madder family, and a pair of his fans whom he maybe kind of manipulated (sort of posthumously) into becoming lovers and then maybe kind of kept trying to rewrite their love story over and over and over again, but then again maybe he didn't, it's just that kind of book?... (INHALE) The Dreamed Part, The Dreamed Part gets weird. In the best possible way, as you should expect after I brought up Rudy Ch. Garcia and J.G. Ballard.

The Dreamed Part is again divided into discrete segments, but this time there are only three of them. The first takes up our Writer, now suffering from extreme insomnia about which he waxes bilious and lyrical for many pages and seeking the help of some Sleep Professionals and no, I don't mean fancy bed salesmen. These are scientists, and while they poke around his body and psyche, one of them, whom he calls Ella, which is a woman's name in some languages and a feminine personal pronoun in Spanish, turns out to be the literal (he insists) Woman of His Dreams. She has dreamed about him, too, and they become lovers, but oopsie doopsie, in the midst of their love and her work in uncovering the causes of his insomnia*** and trying to treat it, her Institute accidentally creates a whole new sleep disorder, which proves to be highly contagious and soon affects everyone except for the Writer: nobody can dream anymore. Which means everybody is starting to go more than a little bit insane, except the Writer, although he's kind of going crazy trying to chronicle and make sense of it all. How is the world going to get itself out of this terrible pickle?

Ha, like we're going to get a resolution there, because suddenly we're back in the world of the Writer's sister Penelope, whose adventures among her bizarre clan of in-laws were my favorite bits of The Invented Part (and, I have since learned via the Two-Month Reivew boys, another Fresan novel, Mantra is basically all about that family and of course I've already got it lined up to read sometime later this year after I'm done with a quixotic little project I'll tell you about in the next post). Turns out Penelope channeled her resentment of her brother's appropriation of her in-law ordeals for his own fiction, together with her obsession with the Bronte family and especially Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and her own weird imagination and wrote a series of young adult novels that landed in the publishing calendar right after the Twilight novels and profited mightily off those books' fans' collective hangover and earned her a fortune. Her fiction gets just enough description here (in flaky pastry layers, of course) to make me, though not by any means her target audience, desperately want to read this batshittery: the Bronte sisters are reimagined as something between YouTube stars and podcasters who broadcast baroquely interesting fiction from their home on the Moon. I want to read the LunaBrontes' stories, and I want to read the story of the LunaBrontes. But, you know, tough.

I may be a tiny bit mad at Fresan for not having just written those things, but that's about as profitable as being mad that Jorge Luis Borges in his "lofty laziness" only ever bothered to spin his ideas out into sketches that sometimes barely count as short stories. Is that an Argentina thing, maybe?

Anyway, in Penelope's section further light is shed on the weird, sad core plot of these novels, which is almost completely a story of serial devastating losses in the Writer's life, all of which are still shrouded in mystery going into this section. His and Penelope's yacht-setting glamor-genius parents are legendary desaparacidos, last seen alive on Christmas Eve when they stage an armed takeover of a department store as a political statement-cum-marketing stunt; there is a little boy who was like a son to the Writer's adult, unmarried, childless self who we gradually figured out was Penelope's child by her comatose husband, who has also disappeared. We get more of an idea, again, in layers of storytelling that cast a few different people as culprits, of the truth behind the first disappearance than the second, but there is, of course, another novel to go.

The third section brings us back to the Writer, but while it has lots of funny lines and entertaining observations and amusing digressions (an account of a U.S. government agent detailed to spy on Vladimir Nabokov and his wife is a particularly fun standout) it has really no plot at all, beyond "how the Writer feels coping with all of this loss and what it has meant to him to be the Writer but to have nurtured other, lesser writers to heights of fame and fortune he'll never enjoy because he can't sell out his Art, and also what it's like to be the literary executor of his own sister who also eclipsed him" and in a lesser writer's hands than Fresan's this would be deadly, watch-checkingly dull but manages not to be because there are just So Many Good Bits.

I'll share a few, out of context, just for fun. For instance, from an excursis on a particular cultural loss, that of prints of pre-digital movies that, passed from theater to theater and country to country and end up warping, via physical wear and tear on the film, warping into something other than the auteur's original opus:

Classic and artless movies that, because of their poor condition, become avant-garde. New and involuntary versions of The Time Machine or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Movies that, when seen again in fragments, end up revealing new meaning and utility: movies about a group of kids ritually devoured by subterranean monsters and about a divorced father who invents likes to amuse his children.

Or an aphorism that should probably just be the motto for this dreadful year of 2020 C.E.: "Bad fiction can be comforting during times of bad nonfiction."

Or, perhaps, my favorite, and this is a long'un but a good'un:

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf!, wolf!!, came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf!, wolf!, and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow, because he lied too often, was finally eaten up by a real best is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

A fair chunk of this longest third section concerns the Writer's mostly-internal relationship with two writers whom he blurbed early in their careers who then both became International Public Intellectuals based on their sort-of highbrow but still very popular novels, a man and a woman, both of whom he calls IKEA because of their global appeal and the essential characterlessness of their work. Snippets of remembered conversation with them are gold, as when the Male IKEA (who used his international reputation and financial resources to rescue the Writer from a bizarre and tight spot in The Invented Part), tells the Writer "I can't say I envy your books, but oh, what I would've given for some desaparacidos parents..." with an implied chiding of the Writer for not having exploited their story the way IKEA himself milked a much tamer anecdote for a whole novel "soon to be adapted for the big screen, starring Sean Penn in the lead role as moi."

So yes, ultimately, as Fresan has the Writer observe many times of himself, Rodrigo Fresan is a writer's writer, and these novels are writers' novels. Ordinarily I have little patience with writers who only want to write about writers and writing (I overdosed on metafiction my sophomore year at Bard, for a class that should have been called Forms of Postmodern Fiction but wasn't, in which we read Pynchon and Borges and Marquez and Vonnegut and Gass and I've blocked out the rest), but Fresan has kept me going on with just enough tiny, hard-to-follow breadcrumbs**** of a grandly tragic plot and lots of passages of, yes, great writing. At least part of which must be attributed to the work of translator Will Vanderhyden, though I'm too out of the Spanish language literature loop to be able to comment specifically on what Vanderhyden has brought to the table (apart from, anecdotally, coping with some 50 extra pages worth of additional text that Fresan added to the material between these books first appearing in Spanish and Vanderhyden's getting to start working on The Invented Part. of course).

But I'll have a better feel for that soon, because Vanderhyden is still at work on the third volume, The Remembered Part, which means I should be waiting patiently but upon finishing The Dreamed Part I realized I didn't feel like pausing, thank you very much, and I'm not afraid of a little hard work and the Kindle edition of La Parte Recordada was not expensive at all and so, though Spanish is my very worst language, I'm already reading the third volume. Very slowly, with the aid of a dictionary and the Kindle's often laughable but at least serviceable (usually) language translation utility. I'm still going to get the English translation when Open Letters will let me have it, and I'll read it eagerly, but you know, until then, like I said, I Am Impatient.

We'll see how far I get before the English edition is published. Heh. If I finish ahead of time, perhaps I'll blog about this third volume twice, once on what I gather from reading it badly in Spanish and once after I've read it in Vanderhyden's very good English prose.

So far it's a lot of weird meditations on the significance of the color yellow in international traffic semiotics, mostly. Seems appropriate for my reading speed in a language I last studied in high school in Saratoga, WY in a classroom full of stoners and jocks who were only interested in curse words...

*Except alas, I don't own physical copies of any of these because they're all books I fell in love with long after I lost the ability to read books printed on dead tree or type with my actual hands.
**Slight excursis here to observe that every writer or would-be writer now owes Fresan a debt of gratitude for this triptych (I guess trilogies are only for genre fiction, but since this is Literature these three more-or-less sequential and deeply inter-related novels are called a triptych instead. Whatevs.), which at least in part exists to give a comprehensive and unassailable answer to that annoying old question of "where do you get your ideas?" Now we can point to these three books, each named for a component of inspiration as explicated in incredible detail within the work, as the best possible explanation, and from there we're all set. If our interlocutor has read, or at least heard of, them, then we're all set; they'll get it immediately. More likely, though, they won't, but they won't want to look foolish to us or their viewers/listeners/readers, and so they'll bull on through with an "oh, of course" and shuck and jive through the rest of the conversation to avoid admitting their ignorance, and we can steer matters elsewhere to our liking (having probably gained a certain cheap ascendancy hereby). But what if the asker of the impertinent question not only doesn't know Fresan but also has no problem admitting it, you ask? Well, then you get to steer the conversation away from answering the question and talk about Fresan instead until their eyes glaze over and they move on to some other annoying topic. Thank you, Rodrigo!
***Which turns out to have an ulterior motive as the work on the Writer is subsumed in the Dream Institute's larger goal of turning dreaming into just another tool for performing cognitive labor with tangible economic benefits. So this first section of the book feels like the weird love child of the Doctor Who episode "Sleep No More" and Jose Saramago's Blindness.
****I'm talking approaching Gene Wolfe level of difficult to spot and follow, here, not because they're secrets well kept, but because they're scattered so widely and scantly.

Rodrigo Fresán's THE INVENTED PART (Translated by Will Vanderhyden)

Some books seize one with a handful of ideas she can't shake. It might be a direct quotation from the text that does it, or a particular image (more than a decade since I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, for instance, I still think often of the comparison of a phone someone is waiting to hear ringing to a camouflaged creature lying in wait for prey on the sea floor). Sometimes it's something more complicated than that, as is most certainly the case with the reference-maniacal first volume of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes trilogy,The Invented Part. 

I can't tease out where it first occurred to me that, buried under the literary and pop cultural references in this novel (which, get ready for those; this guy is maybe the Robertson Davies of my generation) was a prolonged meditation on what the invention of writing has done to us humans and an attempt to decide whether it was as good a thing as writers and readers who eat sleep and breathe various forms of literature (yo) think it is.

Of course the ability to record our experiences, hard-won knowledge, and ideas has been a boon to us in that it has spared generation after generation from having to figure out a lot of basic stuff for itself. Science, medicine, engineering, architecture, what's edible and what isn't without various degrees of prep work and how best to do it -- a lot of vital practical survival-level stuff is transmitted that way. New research is only possible when old is done; we can't, for instance, come up with a vaccine for COVID-19 if we don't have a pretty good body of work on how to develop vaccines to draw on. This is a far better prospect than, say, waiting around for a bored semi-dilettante to notice that a small population of service workers has a mysterious immunity to a disease because of exposure to a similar one and rack his brains to figure out a way to harness the fruits of his obsession with comely young dairy maids.

As for the more common arguments expected of people like me as far as why the written word is simply the best, well, yes, written literature, poetry and prose, is a source of tremendous pleasure, a vehicle for communicating vital values like empathy and imagination, all that, but also... but also... For us later generations, it's also developed into a tremendous burden. Usually we celebrate this. As Rodrigo Fresán directly delights in quoting in The Invented Part, we love to say "so many books, so little time." Paradise is a kind of library, heaven is unlimited time to read, all that. But it creates a kind of anxiety, and it's maybe worse for creatives, who know pretty early in life (unless they're dolts) that the chances that any idea they're ever going to have is completely original to themselves are laughably slight; know also that it's far less embarrassing, once one has expressed an idea, to be prepared to have it compared to other iterations of that idea and to be aware of those iterations before some heckler throws a long-winded speech-barely-in-the-form-of-a-question that might be intended to express fellowship (hey, I love that thing your thing reminded me of, too!) but also tends to feel like intellectual one-upsmanship (what, you've not read/watched/ listened to this thing? But that means I know more about this than you do, even though I'm in the audience and you're sweating behind the podium. Loser.). It's good to know on which giants' shoulders we were first allowed to see farther. But boy, don't that create some anxiety! One will never have read every relevant thing, let alone all the things that don't at first seem relevant but some interlocutor is surely going to bring up someday.

This is of course why it's so vital for a functioning human to learn as soon as possible how to admit to imperfection, to say "I don't know" or "oops" or "really? Tell me more!" Mastering that, one has a decent chance of finding literature to be a pleasure again, which, let's be honest, a lot of academic programs feel designed to convince us it's not. I know it took me over a decade to return to reading for pleasure after my years at good old Balloc Reged Orc, to say nothing of wanting to write for something besides a piddling paycheck or a spot on a cool new band's guest list! Neglect this ability to acknowledge our limitations, and, well, just look at the goddamned White House these days. 'Nuff said.

The Invented Part, inasmuch as it's conventionally "about" anything, tells at many removes the story of a well-known "cult but not bestseller" writer of fiction. Not in a straightforward, genre fictional sequential manner, of course, no no. It's cut up into seven narratives that are scattered all along the timeline of the Writer's life. The book teases us with lots of mysteries including hey, where the heck has this guy gotten to? Is he dead? A fugitive? In hiding? But no, this is not a chase narrative. It's barely a narrative at all. It's narratives about narratives, maybe. A whole section of it is a tour of "The Writer's" but probably really Rodrigo Fresán's own biji** disguised, very thinly, as fiction -- a tour of his biji with invented parts added. Maybe all novels are, and Fresán is just letting the stitching show a bit more.

But what am I doing trying to describe this book when, in its seventh section, this book describes itself very well:

A book that would include, disappeared, the Greatest Desaparecido of All Time. A book about someone who disappears and then reappears in order to make everything disappear or change or start over;*** like someone crumpling a page into a ball and throwing it toward the circle of that waste basket at the foot of the desk and, did it make it or not?

ANYWAY...

Throughout this book of his, he, his Writer protagonist and various other characters who orbit the Writer (most of whom want to be Writers themselves) are struggling with that burden of so much accumulated culture that I've touched on above, culture which includes a lot of things like MFA programs and writers' workshops and conferences as well as all of the books and movies and symphonies and plays and sculptures and ballets and poetry slams and historical dioramas and taxidermy of extinct animals and... I'm exhausted just listing it all. Is there anything new left to make? There must be, because we still all have the urge to make it. Does it really matter if it's actually new, though? Can't it be ok to make something that's just a little bit new? Or even just to be a basic bitch? And then, do you actually want to be a creator or just to live the glamorous-looking life of one?

For the record, Fresán is a Creator, a Writer, a Goddamned Artist. His prose, ideas, characterization (particularly of the highly entertaining Karma family, a family I could only wish was the actual subject of a show some streaming service or another was suggesting to me called -- or did I just imagine it? - The Karma Family) are all fantastic but it's the structure that steals the show here.

I learned from the entertaining and often enlightening (I only learned of Fresán's existence from them, after all!) Two Month Review podcast that Fresán wrote The Invented Part's seven segments more or less simultaneously, which is perhaps the only way to achieve what he did, which is a book that feels like, if just the right language and orthogonal system could be invented to print it in, could have the first half of the book laid down in wet ink on first half's pages, and those pages pressed onto the blank second half's worth of pages to produce a perfect mirror image of the first half that would be the second half of the text. This thing is practically a giant palindrome, basically. But not in a gimmicky way. It actually feels natural.

But, while there's a near-drowning here, a house fire there, a giant green cow that decapitates and rapes horses (in that order) somewhere else, it's not a book crammed with incident. Observations galore, ditto riffs on major mid-20th century pop culture and a refreshingly aromantic hero. But plot? Not a lot.

This is, in other words, not a book that is going to appeal to everyone (though I've not done what plot there is justice at all. I mean, the Large Hadron Collider is involved. Our Writer tries to Doctor Manhattan his way out of ordinary life!), but it appeals to me, and I'm eager to dive soon into its sequels, The Dreamed Part and The Remembered Part. But... I hope one thing gets left behind in The Invented Part, you guys, I'm not going to lie, and that is...

Mr. Fresán is really, really down on ebooks you guys. I mean, really down on ebooks. Sometimes it feels like he's got a mini-rant about them every few pages. And, of course, I read this as an ebook because that's really my only option. My physical disabilities have gotten worse and I can only read a physical book for maybe ten minutes a day and I can only do that if I know for sure that I'm not going to need my hands/shoulders/elbows/neck for anything else for the rest of the day (and of course, last year, I also couldn't read most print in physical books because my rapid-onset super-dense cataracts meant I needed the largest print possible, which would also necessitate, in physical book form, the largest actual books possible, which I definitely could not manipulate). There are days when I can't even use my e-reader, no, not even propped up on a stand to vaguely swipe at with a pinky to turn pages. And I'm not alone in this, not by a long shot. So, to be rebuked every few pages, or at least every chapter section or so, for my "choice" of how to read a work is not fun, especially when the experience of reading this book is otherwise such a pleasure.

I don't think I ever want to know what he thinks of audio books, you guys. But I do want to know about the parts he's dreamed and remembered so, watch this space for more Fresániana soon, Little Buckaroos. I already have The Dreamed Part ready to go as an ebook...

But first, just for a petty act of symbolic vengeance on Fresán for his (possibly unintentional? At least I hope so?) ableism****, I'm fixing to re-read Gene Wolfe's A Borrowed Man and imagine Mr. Fresán as E.A. Smithe, or rather his clone that is owned by a public library.

And if I find out that Fresán also hates audio books, you'd better believe I'm getting the third book, The Remembered Part, in that format (if it exists). Assuming he doesn't lose me in the second (spoiler: I accidentally started reading the second book first, which yes that is a downside to ebooks because I've made this mistake before and, no, I don't think he's going to lose me).

*See also everybody from Zelda Fitzgerald (not herself really a character in The Invented Part but boy, her husband kind of is) to June Mansfield to "Shakespeare's Sister" of Virginia Woolf essay fame.
**Biji is a term in Chinese literature for a notebook somewhat artfully assembled over time, more than a scrapbook, not really a journal or diary, a gathering of quotations, observations, original lines that might turn into larger works later but might be just fine on their own. Some have become quite famous, national treasures, the originals in museums that sell spiffy new copies of them to be read or just to show off on a shelf. Some are working tools for writers and other creatives. I'd argue that the form has now probably mutated into the Bullet Journal phenomenon, though I doubt any of the original practitioners of the art would have much nice to say about incorporating calendars and task lists so thoroughly into a notebook. Anyway, there's a more formal and traditional explanation of the genre in the abstract for this paper.
***Which, get ready for the sixth segment, in which the Writer basically becomes Clark Ashton Smith's Tsathoggua as interpreted by Robert Shea.
****Also maybe some classism; in one of the many anti-technology-but-I'm-not-a-Luddite rants, the Writer's ire spills over a little bit onto sound recording technology, too! "But with the gramophone many others -- who would've been hard pressed to hear their favorite Mozart or Beethoven piece more than once or twice in their lifetime -- renounced the ability to read scores and play an instrument." WHAT??? Privileged classes always had access to all of those thing -- concerts, music lessons, free time and energy to cultivate the skills taught in those lessons, but your working stiff out in the fields, you think he or she, even if a skilled "by ear" player of a fiddle or guitar who knew all the local folk songs by heart, encountered Mozart and Beethoven's stuff a whole lot, do you? Anyway, that's probably me being bitchy, but would I have been as sensitized to this kind of crap had I not already been pummeled repeatedly by the Writer's ebook opinions?