2666
January 1996 wasn't a bad month for the city police. Three men were shot to death in a bar near the old rail line, apparently in a settling of scores between narcos. The body of a Central American with his throat cut appeared on a route used by polleros. A fat, short little man wearing a strange tie printed with rainbows and naked women with the heads of animals shot himself in the roof of the mouth while playing Russian roulette in a night club in Madero-Norte. But no bodies of women were found in the city's vacant lots, or on its outskirts, or in the desert.
It snowed here in southern Maine Sunday through Tuesday night, and I picked up a copy of Bolaño's 2666 from the UNH library and read it through as quickly as Liz Norton, one of the four minor critics of the first part of the novel, wrote down her nightmare in the middle of her nightmare, 'as if her fate or her share of happiness on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up.' Or call it an attempt, not at a novel but toward what Amalfitano (to the critics an unreadable and unread man, strange and interesting but in the end probably just mediocre, a failure) called the great and the imperfect and the torrential works: 'blazing paths into the unknown.' Even bookish pharmicists, he says, are afraid to read these works and so will never know the fear of writing them.
Open the windows on the snow, fallen during the night. Everything is accomplished. A silence past the summer, and a silence that's never been with summer. In some ancient summer...(flies swarming a single cow...)
War's end, in another place. Ashes falling over the town. The dusting of snow over the communal pit. 'They were digging to the fire of hell,' and all one could see at the surface, the drunken, coughing men, spitting blood and staring. The earth, rigid and cold as a body, as these bodies they were shoveling back into the snow. The phone call from headquarters like an exchange out of The Castle, as was so much of Zeller/Sammer's story. Misunderstandings that were violently resolved.
Shades. Minor authors. After they bludgeoned the taxi driver for mistaking them for clientele and Liz for a whore, Pelletier and Espinoza of course become the same man, or at least I could no longer tell one from the other, whether by their dreams, their desires, their ends. Which one was it who later dreamt of the boy diving for seaweed? And the strange thing, says Pelletier or Espinoza, one to the other, meaning by 'strange' the fearful thing, was that the water was alive. Possibly no one had ever read Bifurcaria Bifurcata to the very end. The book that Archimboldi wrote with a haste or a speed that he never again matched was also the one book that no one else could finish, could read without drifting off (a book that, like Archimboldi himself, was neither English nor German, of the sea nor the forest, but adrift somewhere in those tidal hollows among the rocks, where people drown, where his wife Ingeborg [was] drowned). Was it this book or the death/murder of his wife that changed him from the diver he was as a boy to whatever he became as an old man --
Sacrifice, murder. Thought back on certain pages from The Ruin of Kasch. What a book that is.
The baroness never read him. But she loved him.
Snow, the desert. The part about the crimes has a Lynchian quality to it, beyond the deadening relentless rehearsal of each crime, the signature killing: the fracture of the hyoid bone, the strangling, the mutilation (always one breast, like an Amazon), and then the personal details, the tennis shoes or the heels, the color of the eyes, the height, the evidence, the evidence of a life preserved. And then, he said, we met again, as though the wind had remembered and the waves had remembered, washing upon the shore. From the entrance of the special detective like Dale Cooper or Miguel Ferrer (I can't remember the Twin Peaks character's name at the moment), to the ending with Azucena and Sergio, talking, the geography, the genealogy of love. He names Lynch, or a few of his movies, somewhere in the book. Have to look this up.
The Rose: Amalfitano and the black Peregrino. What became of Rosa and Fate? The Endless Rose. Rilke. The attar of Hofmannsthal. The Magic Mountain sanatorium sequence with Ingeborg and Archimboldi: When she took the handkerchief away from her mouth the stain of blood was like a giant rose in full bloom.
I remember the typist's story, and the conductor who dismissed Archimboldi as one dismisses everything fearful -- with understanding. 'Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.' 'What are you talking about?...What do you mean by Westerns?' 'Cowboy novels,' said Hans. This declaration seemed to relieve the director...'
As Amalfitano to the critics, Archimboldi to the maestro. '...not knowing that it's burning.'
And the typist, who was a writer. He was a minor writer, the 'semblance' of the secret writer, the hidden one who attempts the masterpiece. A pine, one of many pines whose sole work whether or not he knew it was to hide the secret writer and to screen those books from 'hungry eyes,' the wrong people. That 'magic flower of winter.' 'I don't have much time,' the secret words told him in the morgue by the secret writer's dead ringer and then the opening doors, one after another, the doors that for him meant the end of writing and for the secret writer (Archimboldi) the very beginning. 'Few,' the typist says, 'are the writers who give up.'
Archimboldi: that poetry is contained in fiction, in prose. Opp. to Halder's claim (although whether he changed his mind after reaching maturity no one knows, because he came and went like the war) that nothing, nothing except poetry is pure. Amalfitano's young pharmacist has a similar view. And, judging by his own poetry, which I read last year long before his prose, Bolaño himself valued that body of work (and all poetry) above his prose. I read his poetry (the Unknown University, which I suppose is where Amalfitano works) while it was snowing in the Augusta library, and I remember it the way you remember the smell of snow. A work accomplished, invisibly, over the hours, for you, the reader, reading as it snows in the dark, your elbow cold against the colder window. But lean in.
Lean in against that rampant, sprawling, backlot proliferation of fiction. Lean in toward the endless notebooks, the materia poetica indistinguishable from poetry itself. The difficult thing, the very difficult thing (which Pessoa says somewhere, too, and which Bolaño surely swiped because he knew it already) is to write prose, to write without purity, with imperfection and with Ansky's '...light ...abolishment' out ahead of you like mountain weather which you can't predict nor would you, alive as you are in fear.
After cutting out of his life the three other scholars, students of violence although he didn't know this at the time and hadn't seen what they'd become, Morini resolves to set out on a voyage (incidentally when Morini thinks of Stevenson through Schwob it's Borges he's truly thinking of, the reader). Like the ice cream man at the end, he's neither 'a saint nor even a brave man' and so believes in posterity. Standing in front of a mirror and resigned to 'tying his tie,' he sees what he is 'helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it's burning.'
Ansky who, like the ventriloquist, is capable of distinguishing the unknown from the void ('danger,' as the ventriloquist says, 'the moment of revelation'), and so is capable of a youthfulness (and an innocence, as though he, like Archimboldi, could remember having a sister like Lotte in the shtetl that was once a place) and what he calls 'an immaturity necessary for the revolutionary act.' Absolute for life, the reader that attempts and approaches by a fear past death, against some distant and faroff year, apocalyptic, whatever burns and goes on burning...
...immersing ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment, abolishment, abolishment. Which, because I'm reading Plotinus (slowly, which is the way to read Plotinus as the way to read Bolaño is fast and always faster) reminded me of one of the many passages on light (the transcendent). He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought...[T]hat which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see, just as it is by the sun's own light that we see the sun. But how is this to be accomplished? Cut away everything.'
Billow and breeze islands and seas
Mountains of rain and sun
All that was good all that was fair
All that was me is gone
It snowed here in southern Maine Sunday through Tuesday night, and I picked up a copy of Bolaño's 2666 from the UNH library and read it through as quickly as Liz Norton, one of the four minor critics of the first part of the novel, wrote down her nightmare in the middle of her nightmare, 'as if her fate or her share of happiness on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up.' Or call it an attempt, not at a novel but toward what Amalfitano (to the critics an unreadable and unread man, strange and interesting but in the end probably just mediocre, a failure) called the great and the imperfect and the torrential works: 'blazing paths into the unknown.' Even bookish pharmicists, he says, are afraid to read these works and so will never know the fear of writing them.
Open the windows on the snow, fallen during the night. Everything is accomplished. A silence past the summer, and a silence that's never been with summer. In some ancient summer...(flies swarming a single cow...)
War's end, in another place. Ashes falling over the town. The dusting of snow over the communal pit. 'They were digging to the fire of hell,' and all one could see at the surface, the drunken, coughing men, spitting blood and staring. The earth, rigid and cold as a body, as these bodies they were shoveling back into the snow. The phone call from headquarters like an exchange out of The Castle, as was so much of Zeller/Sammer's story. Misunderstandings that were violently resolved.
Shades. Minor authors. After they bludgeoned the taxi driver for mistaking them for clientele and Liz for a whore, Pelletier and Espinoza of course become the same man, or at least I could no longer tell one from the other, whether by their dreams, their desires, their ends. Which one was it who later dreamt of the boy diving for seaweed? And the strange thing, says Pelletier or Espinoza, one to the other, meaning by 'strange' the fearful thing, was that the water was alive. Possibly no one had ever read Bifurcaria Bifurcata to the very end. The book that Archimboldi wrote with a haste or a speed that he never again matched was also the one book that no one else could finish, could read without drifting off (a book that, like Archimboldi himself, was neither English nor German, of the sea nor the forest, but adrift somewhere in those tidal hollows among the rocks, where people drown, where his wife Ingeborg [was] drowned). Was it this book or the death/murder of his wife that changed him from the diver he was as a boy to whatever he became as an old man --
Sacrifice, murder. Thought back on certain pages from The Ruin of Kasch. What a book that is.
The baroness never read him. But she loved him.
Snow, the desert. The part about the crimes has a Lynchian quality to it, beyond the deadening relentless rehearsal of each crime, the signature killing: the fracture of the hyoid bone, the strangling, the mutilation (always one breast, like an Amazon), and then the personal details, the tennis shoes or the heels, the color of the eyes, the height, the evidence, the evidence of a life preserved. And then, he said, we met again, as though the wind had remembered and the waves had remembered, washing upon the shore. From the entrance of the special detective like Dale Cooper or Miguel Ferrer (I can't remember the Twin Peaks character's name at the moment), to the ending with Azucena and Sergio, talking, the geography, the genealogy of love. He names Lynch, or a few of his movies, somewhere in the book. Have to look this up.
The Rose: Amalfitano and the black Peregrino. What became of Rosa and Fate? The Endless Rose. Rilke. The attar of Hofmannsthal. The Magic Mountain sanatorium sequence with Ingeborg and Archimboldi: When she took the handkerchief away from her mouth the stain of blood was like a giant rose in full bloom.
I remember the typist's story, and the conductor who dismissed Archimboldi as one dismisses everything fearful -- with understanding. 'Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.' 'What are you talking about?...What do you mean by Westerns?' 'Cowboy novels,' said Hans. This declaration seemed to relieve the director...'
As Amalfitano to the critics, Archimboldi to the maestro. '...not knowing that it's burning.'
And the typist, who was a writer. He was a minor writer, the 'semblance' of the secret writer, the hidden one who attempts the masterpiece. A pine, one of many pines whose sole work whether or not he knew it was to hide the secret writer and to screen those books from 'hungry eyes,' the wrong people. That 'magic flower of winter.' 'I don't have much time,' the secret words told him in the morgue by the secret writer's dead ringer and then the opening doors, one after another, the doors that for him meant the end of writing and for the secret writer (Archimboldi) the very beginning. 'Few,' the typist says, 'are the writers who give up.'
Archimboldi: that poetry is contained in fiction, in prose. Opp. to Halder's claim (although whether he changed his mind after reaching maturity no one knows, because he came and went like the war) that nothing, nothing except poetry is pure. Amalfitano's young pharmacist has a similar view. And, judging by his own poetry, which I read last year long before his prose, Bolaño himself valued that body of work (and all poetry) above his prose. I read his poetry (the Unknown University, which I suppose is where Amalfitano works) while it was snowing in the Augusta library, and I remember it the way you remember the smell of snow. A work accomplished, invisibly, over the hours, for you, the reader, reading as it snows in the dark, your elbow cold against the colder window. But lean in.
Lean in against that rampant, sprawling, backlot proliferation of fiction. Lean in toward the endless notebooks, the materia poetica indistinguishable from poetry itself. The difficult thing, the very difficult thing (which Pessoa says somewhere, too, and which Bolaño surely swiped because he knew it already) is to write prose, to write without purity, with imperfection and with Ansky's '...light ...abolishment' out ahead of you like mountain weather which you can't predict nor would you, alive as you are in fear.
After cutting out of his life the three other scholars, students of violence although he didn't know this at the time and hadn't seen what they'd become, Morini resolves to set out on a voyage (incidentally when Morini thinks of Stevenson through Schwob it's Borges he's truly thinking of, the reader). Like the ice cream man at the end, he's neither 'a saint nor even a brave man' and so believes in posterity. Standing in front of a mirror and resigned to 'tying his tie,' he sees what he is 'helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, not knowing that it's burning.'
Ansky who, like the ventriloquist, is capable of distinguishing the unknown from the void ('danger,' as the ventriloquist says, 'the moment of revelation'), and so is capable of a youthfulness (and an innocence, as though he, like Archimboldi, could remember having a sister like Lotte in the shtetl that was once a place) and what he calls 'an immaturity necessary for the revolutionary act.' Absolute for life, the reader that attempts and approaches by a fear past death, against some distant and faroff year, apocalyptic, whatever burns and goes on burning...
...immersing ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment, abolishment, abolishment. Which, because I'm reading Plotinus (slowly, which is the way to read Plotinus as the way to read Bolaño is fast and always faster) reminded me of one of the many passages on light (the transcendent). He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought...[T]hat which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see, just as it is by the sun's own light that we see the sun. But how is this to be accomplished? Cut away everything.'
Billow and breeze islands and seas
Mountains of rain and sun
All that was good all that was fair
All that was me is gone