No doubt 2666 will be popping up on tons of “Best Book of the Year” lists coming up soon. It’s only mid-November and already 2666 is mentioned on Tyler Cowen’s Meta-list of Best books of the year:
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. Duh. After four hundred pages of reading, I see it as less perfect than The Savage Detectives but it has greater world-historic reach and even some sprawl. A clear first choice in almost any year.
Good Readings reviews 2666:
Those familiar with the work of Roberto Bolaño will not be surprised to hear that numerous writers,
critics, and other literary types populate the pages of his newly translated posthumous masterpiece 2666. Normally I’m highly suspicious of novels about writers or writing—most often it’s an excuse for self-obsessed navel-gazing or indulgence in tired, predictable metafictional exercises. Either way, the results are almost always profoundly boring.And yet I absolutely love the fiction of Roberto Bolaño. To date I’ve read four of his books—2666, The Savage Detectives, Amulet, and By Night in Chile—all of which feature writers as characters, as well as extensive discussions of writing and literature. Given my general distaste for this kind of content in fiction, it would stand to reason that I shouldn’t particularly care for Bolaño. But if you asked me right now to name the best novels of the past decade, 2666 and The Savage Detectives would top the list.
This post about 2666 at Blographia Literaria mentions Bolaño in relation to The Invisible Library project by Levi Stahl and Ed Park. The Invisible Library catalogs books fictional books and book titles that are mentioned in works of fiction. There are some great titles in there from Nabokov and Pynchon, but I’m thinking there are some from Infinite Jest that are missing (The Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices?).
The Book Design Review blog takes a quick look at the cover of 2666:
The hardcover and one of the paperbacks features a detail of Gustave Moreau‘s Jupiter and Semele (below; click to enlarge). Jupiter is, of course, Zeus; Semele is the mother of Dionysius.
This blog will be a clearinghouse for all links and topics related to Bolaño and his books,
but it will also be the home of bolano-l, the mailing list. Subscriptions to the list will be active before the end of November. Plans are underway for a group read of 2666 to begin on the list in early 2009.
The Book Design Review blog takes a quick look at the cover of 2666:
The hardcover and one of the paperbacks features a detail of Gustave Moreau‘s Jupiter and Semele (below; click to enlarge). Jupiter is, of course, Zeus; Semele is the mother of Dionysius.
That Bolaño has another book publishing this month: The Romantic Dogs: Poems (translated by Laura Healy).
Ben Ehrenreich expands on his LA Times review in the Poetry Foundation’s Journal:
Of course Bolaño himself was first of all a poet. Only in his last decade, with a family to support and death swiping at his heels—he learned in 1992 that he was terminally ill—did Bolaño turn to prose, fiction being a more gainful grit than verse. He wrote furiously during those years, publishing four novels, as many novellas, and three short story collections before his death at the age of 50 in 2003. His last and greatest novel, the gargantuan 2666, was released posthumously and is only now available in English. Relatively few poets appear in its 900-plus pages. All of his other longer works, though, are swimming with them. Most of them are very, very bad.
So many of these reviews are long rehashes of Bolaño’s life and bibliography that one wonders if a compelling (or at least neatly packaged) biography is necessary for literary greatness. Perhaps this is what Pynchon and Salinger were trying to avoid–although their withdrawal from the celebrity-author complex gives them a compelling and neatly packaged biography. Bolaño is a unique case in that he is truly being launched into the English-speaking literary stratosphere (post-mortem) without a cumulative appreciation of his works or “story.” It’s all being crafted as we watch.
Garth Risk Hallberg, of The Millions Blog, tries to answer the question in More Intelligent Life.
In his treatise on drama, “Three Uses of the Knife“, David Mamet cribs a distinction from Stanislavsky. Some narratives, he suggests, leave us saying, “What a masterpiece! Let’s get a cup of coffee,” while others ask us to wrestle with them for the rest of our lives. It’s a contrast that feels almost obsolete in book publishing. On the supply side, publishers rush to promote “instant classics” before posterity can render a verdict. On the demand side, we feel grateful for the distraction of “a good read.” An academic cottage industry has arisen to debunk categories of high and low, obscuring tensions between inspiration and craft, between edification and mere delight. Still, the old Horatian binaries tend to obsess the serious novelist, whose medium lives and dies along the borderline where art and entertainment meet.
Nothing more or less than the sum of the stories told about them, Bolaño’s visceral realists come alive in a new way. Not only do we see Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano from every possible angle; we see them from impossible angles as well. Among the novel’s 52 + 1 voices, conflicting accounts proliferate: The visceral realists are geniuses. They are hacks. They are liars. They are saints. The author refuses to render a verdict. And yet his narrators aren’t wholly unreliable: in each version of Ulises and Arturo, we recognize something ineffable and unchanging. However plastic or fantastic, they are always somehow themselves. As we are always somehow ourselves. Among other things, then, The Savage Detectives is a treatise on human nature.
The young Archimboldi’s dialect, which is based on puns —how did you go about transferring Spanish puns (spoken by a German character) into English?
Is it really puns? I just looked back over the dialogue, and I’m not sure what you mean. You strike fear into me! Missing things like that is the translator’s great dread, but it’s probably inevitable occasionally, especially with Bolaño.
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