BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

On misogyny (or not), big, unweildy novels, nebulous motivations, and transcendent writing of the highest order:

I’ve been putting off writing my review of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 for months now, not only becuase I’m a shamless procrastinator but also because it’s one of the most difficult books on which I’ve ever tried to get a proper handle.  Even a summary of the novel doesn’t it lend itself to a few simple sentences.  2666 is separated into five parts which, though interrelated, tell disseperate stories which rarely ever feature overlapping characters.  The best thing about the different parts of the book is that it gives me an organized way of tackling this beast of a novel.

“Part 1: The Part About the Critics,” follows the love-triangle drama of four academics who are critics of Benno von Archimboldi, an author of several novels who mysteriously disappeared years earlier.  Three of the critics are men who each, at one point, fall in love with their only female colleague, Liz Norton.  At the end of this section, three of the critics, including Liz, travel to Santa Teresa, Mexico where they believe they will finally be able to track down Archimboldi.

I don’t have much to say about this section, because of all the parts, it was definitely the part I liked the least.  The problem for me was that I just didn’t care about any of the critics’ escapades, and in the end I didn’t see why I was supposed to.  I didn’t understand any of the character’s motivations, especially and most particularly Liz’s.  At one point, Liz asks one of the male critics, “How could it have taken me so long to realize you loved me?… How could it have taken me so long to realize I love you?”  I wondered when I, the reader, was supposed to know that as well becuase it was definitely news to me, especially since she’d been having a kind of manage toi relationship with the two other critics.

This is the kind of reaction I had to a lot of the things the critics did.  At some point, it seemed as if Bolano was merely content to tell us what ctitics were feeling and doing as opposed to showing us why they were feeling the way they were and why they were doing the things they did.  Perhaps, I was simply missing the clues  that may have been hidden within the text as to the characters’ motivations.  But if there were clues, they must have been hidden too deeply for me to find them.  I was so unmoved by the entire section that I’m not sure if I would even want to reread it just to find those clues.

Part 1 also introduces a recurring issue I had with the 2666: Bolano’s portrayal of women.  Granted, all of the characters in “The Part About the Critics” are pretty one-dimentional, but Liz really bothered me.  Step at Steph & Tony Investigate! made a good point when she writes that Liz seems to be merely “a vessel for the male trio’s sexual urges.”  She doesn’t have much personality, and the personality that she does display is of a sexually promiscuous woman who is not very good at making up her mind.

Unfortuntely, this protrayal of women is fairly consistent throughout the rest of the novel.  Given the nature of what could be called the central part of the book, “Part 4: The Part About the Murders,” it’s hard to know just how much of this misogyny was done purposefully.  I want to believe that Bolano had a good reason for putting such a portrayal in the novel, but what that reason that may have been I’m not so sure.  I will return to this issue of misogyny in review 2 when I tackle the later sections in the novel.

Honestly, the only thing that kept me reading was the fact that I’d been told 2666 gets much better as the novel progress (and it does).  Despite Bolano’s transcendent writing, which I haven’t even had a chance to write about yet, I was happy to turn the final page on this part of the book.

In “Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano” 2666 really begins to open up, and I began to see flickers of the beautiful writing that had been so universally praised.  Amalfitano is a depressed and lonely university professor who lives in Santa Theresa, though he is not originally from Mexico.  He has a seventeen year old daughter, Rosa, who might be in danger as the murders of young women in the city begin to escalate, murders which Amalfitano may or may not have something to do with.  Amalfitano also has a wife who abandons him and their daughter for a poet she has never met before.  Her story, in my opinion, turns out to be the best part of this section.  ”Part 3: The Part About Fate” is the story of an American reporter who travels to Santa Theresa to cover a boxing match only to become interested in writing a story about the growing number of murders which have been plaguing the city for years.

Part 2 and Part 3 are where things started to really pick up for me.  In fact, it’s when the novel really begins to open up and sing.  It’s where I began to mark passages and pages which I thought were especially evocative or beautifully written.  Here’s a sampling:

Page 180:

The trains came from Italy and from the north of France, and Lola went back and forth like a sleepwalker, her big blue eyes unblinking, moving slowly, since the weariness of her days was beginning to wear on her, and she was permitted entry to every part of the station, some rooms converted into first aid posts, others into resuscitation posts, and just one, descreetly located, converted into an improvised morgue for the bodies of those whose strength hadn’t been equal to the accelerated wear and tear of the train trip. At night she slept in the most modern buildings in Lourdes, a functionalist monster of steel and glass that buried its head, bristling with antennas, in the white clouds that floated down from the north, big and sorrowful, or marched from the west like a ragtag army whose only strenth was its numbers, or dropped down for the Pyrenees like the ghosts of dead beasts.

Page 227:

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano.  Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great masters.  Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Page 256:

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

That last excerpt is taken from an entire page which I would quote in its entirety if I could.  It would be an exelllent example of the incadecent imagery Bolano manages to create in just a few short paragraphs.  Often, he doesn’t just a paint a picture for the reader, but he transports them into an entirely different world. I have rarely been pulled into a scene or a conversation the way that I have been by Bolano’s writing.  For that reason, 2666 is one of the most vivid imaginative experiences I’ve ever had with reading.

As far as noticeable themes in the first three parts of 2666, well that’s another (more difficult) matter altogether.  Despite what I thought of Part 1 as an engrossing story, it was easy to see that the characters were on a quest.  Ostensibly, that quest was to find the writer Amalfitano (why they wanted to is never explained, either to themselves or to the reader), but what they were really searching for was, of course, themselves.  They were seaching for something or someone that equaled the passion they felt for Amalfitano’s novels.  Bolano leaves it up to the reader to determine whether they are successful or not, but he does end Part 1 on a note of hope that at least two of the critics may find fulfillment in each other.

The other two parts are much more difficult to tackle thematically.  A geometry book figures very heavily in Part 2, and I have to admit, it went way over my head.  I just didn’t get it.  Maybe because I’ve never been a fan of geometry.  Whatever the case, though I enjoyed the writing in this section, I didn’t understand where Bolano was really going with a large portion of  Amalfitano’s story.  The same could be said for Part 3.  I actually enjoyed Part 3 more than Part 2, but I didn’t find it any less inexplicable.

And those are just the first three parts.  It gets better and more interesting with the last two, which I’ll save for part two of my review.  Until then, as always, happy reading.

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