Week 5: Some Tidbits

Page 267: In Arizona, ask Fate overhears a conversation between a young man and someone identified as “Professor Kessler.” The first time Kessler is mentioned in the novel is actually back in the Part About the Critics. Amalfitano takes Espinoza and Pelletier to a bar in Santa Teresa and the two critics overhear a conversation between several students. Page 138: “Someone, one of the boys, talked about a murder epidemic. Someone said something about the copycat effect. Someone spoke the name Albert Kessler.”

On his way into Santa Teresa, Oscar Fate sees two different omens. Page 270: “The horse was black and after a moment it moved and vanished into the dark.” Page 272: “They’re turkey buzzards, they’re always cold at this time of night.” In the book of Revelation, seven seals are opened by the Lion of Judah, each portending a deepening of the end times. The third seal is a black horse whose rider holds scales. This is the third horseman of the Apocalypse. The black horse brings drought and famine. This famine also indicates poverty—a poor people headed for death (the pale horse, the fourth horseman).

Ijustreadaboutthat has a great summary of this section of the novel. Highly recommended.

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Matt, February 24th 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
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Week 5: Seaman

As David points out in the comments of the previous post, in his Q&A, Lorin Stein mentioned that he and the translator of 2666, Natasha Wimmer, discussed “Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby-Dick as a precursor to Barry Seaman’s motivational speech.”

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael visits this church in Nantucket before he sets sail in pursuit of the great white whale. Father Mapple delivers this sermon about Jonah and the whale from high atop a pulpit (a pulpit that resembles the crow’s nest of a ship). This sermon is a sort of warning to Ishamael before he ventures forth into the great unknown in pursuit of a wetter life. Oscar Fate doesn’t realize that Barry Seaman is preaching to him about his trip into the great unknown of Mexican horror, but he is.

Father Mapple preaches the story of Jonah and the whale. In the story, God orders Jonah to go to the wicked city of Nineveh, but Jonah follows his own path and heads toward Joppa. In the boat on the way there, the other sailors realize the horrible weather is caused by Jonah’s disobedience. They throw him overboard where he is swallowed by a large fish. He lives in the belly of the whale three days and nights before repenting and being vomited up by the fish. Jonah travels to Nineveh and prophesies that God will destroy the town in 40 days. I’m tempted to quote Mapple’s whole sermon, but here is the heart of it:

Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath- O Father!- chiefly known to me by Thy rod- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?

Santa Teresa (or is it Detroit?) is the modern-day Nineveh—a city of wickedness, where death lurks in the shadows. Oscar Fate is sent (by his editor at Black Dawn) to the Sonoran city. Unlike Jonah, Fate willing travels there, but he remains a reluctant prophet.

The “Sea-man” (ha ha, semen, lol, etc.) tells a story about DANGER and his Black Panther cofounder Marius Newell growing up in California. He says that Newell was killed in Santa Cruz, “And the only reason I can think of why Marius was in Santa Cruz is the ocean. Marius went to see the Pacific Ocean, went to smell it. . . . I see him on the beach in California. A beach in Big Sur, maybe, or in Monterey north of Fisherman’s Wharf, up Highway 1.” [FWIW, both of those places have highly literary associations in my mind. Big Sur & Jack Kerouac, and Monterey & John Steinbeck.] He goes on:

He’s standing at a lookout point, looking away. It’s winter, off-season. The Panthers are young, none of us even twenty-five. We’re all armed, but we’ve left our weapons in the car, and you can see the deep dissatisfaction on our faces. The sea roars. Then I go up to Marius and I say let’s get out of here now. And at that moment Marius turns and he looks at me. He’s smiling. He’s beyond it all. And he waves his hand toward the sea, because he’s incapable of expressing what he feels in words. And then I’m afraid, even though it’s my brother there beside me, and I think: the danger is the sea.

I believe this is crucial—not just to the Seaman-Mapple nexus or to Fate/Jonah, but to the overall scope of the novel. The faceless, nameless sea lurks and looms—dangerous. Paradoxically, the evil that in habits Santa Teresa is faceless and nameless. They both exist in a danger that is difficult to even describe—Marius can’t express his feelings in words. Words fail Amalfitano, the desert saps the language out of the critics. Where does that leave Oscar Fate?

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Matt, February 24th 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 5: Dreams

by Daryl L.L. Houston

231: Fate mentions something about a nightmare and a “dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake.”

234: Fate thinks he’s dreamed (he doesn’t know it?) about a movie he had recently seen, but with everything switched. The dream was like a negative of the real movie he had seen because the characters were black rather than (one presumes) white. During the dream, with its differences, he realizes that the differences might render the dream a “reasoned critique” of the movie he had actually seen.

248: Seaman tells of Marius Newell’s dream in which he was breathing the Pacific beach air, which he loved.

250: Seaman describes the landscape he discovered after getting out of prison as “the smoldering remains of a nightmare we had plunged into as youths and that as grown men we were leaving behind.”

252: Seaman says that stars are semblances in the same way dreams are semblances.

263: Fate dreams of Antonio Jones. It’s not clear from the text what the dream was actually about, though since Fate is contemplating at the time the (unknown to him) circumstances of Jones’s death and the probability that he died of old age, perhaps we can conclude that the dream pertained to that topic.

270: Driving into Mexico, Fate recalls a dream, from when he was between childhood and adolescence, of a landscape similar to the one before him. He was on a bus with his mother and aunt watching an unchanging city landscape until they finally get to the country. There he sees a man walking along the edge of a wood in what for Fate at the time of the dream is distressing loneliness.

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Matt, February 23rd 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 5: Now We’re Cookin’

by Maria Bustillos

Barry Seaman is a reimagining of Bobby Seale, who founded the Black Panthers with Huey Newton. There are significant breaks with the real story; for example, Newton was murdered in Oakland, not in Santa Cruz.  I don’t really know enough Panther history to compare point by point, but I have just ordered a copy of the real book, Barbeque’n with Bobby (pub. 1988.)

This is the second author we’ve met who brought himself back to reality by writing a cookbook; the first, as you will recall, was Sor Juana. Another fighter for freedom, and also another oppressed person. Another incarcerated person, you might say; Sor Juana in a convent, and Bobby Seale in a conventional jail. My understanding is that both of these cookbooks are very highly regarded qua cookbooks, that is to say, they are the work of serious cooks, not just some kind of literary joke, in either case. I sympathize greatly with this view of the world. Preparing and eating food really does bring people back to reality. It restores perspective.

The underlying message I’m seeing so far in this book is: art and literature can be made to liberate us, and to show us reality in its true colors, but we’ve built up a million dodges to prevent this from happening. In The Part About the Critics, the murders in Santa Teresa are completely abstract to the critics, whose concerns are almost entirely selfish, personal; the reality of the crimes is totally distant from them, even when they get to Mexico, until they begin to make contact with Amalfitano. I think that Bolano is saying is, what they really ought to be doing, what we all really ought to be doing, is concentrating with all our hearts on the fact of these murders, and doing something about it.  It bears thinking about that traditionally in Latin America, poets and writers have been activists as a matter of course–sometimes, even revolutionaries.  And that is going back to the likes of Jose Marti­. What else could possibly be more important than preventing all these atrocities? Intellectuals in Spain and Latin America see themselves as having a political destiny in a way that we don’t seem to, here in the States. Of course quite a number of them have gotten themselves thrown in jail or even shot, for their pains. Which is a subject for another day.

Amalfitano, getting back to the story, is a little closer to reality than are the critics. He has been kind of immune to all this blathering about Archimboldi, even though he is a professor of literature. This is because the dodges of the academy aren’t working, here in Santa Teresa.  Reality is getting harder to ignore, for him.

And now we come to Oscar Fate, who is making the move toward reality, not away from it.  Barry Seaman, or Bobby Seale, is very close indeed to the workings of reality. Dedicated his life, in however flawed a manner, to redressing the wrongs of the world, in the approved manner of a Latin American intellectual. Bobby Seale’s political activities were questionable, I believe … are we hearing a Latin American revolutionary who is giving a man like Seale too much the benefit of the doubt, I wonder?  Seale renounced violence, in the end. His books are said to be worthy.  I will start with the cookbook.

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Matt, February 22nd 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 5: pages 231-290

The Part About Fate

Before officially moving away from Amalfitano’s section, we have a couple of pieces of unfinished business that will be posted today. Below is a recap and a few questions about the first part of this week’s reading (up until Fate goes to Mexico). A lot of people hate this section or call it their least favorite in the novel. After the critics and Amalfitano, Bolano throws a complete curveball with this section. What to make of it? Did it make you want to put the book down? I’ve heard people say that about The Part About the Crimes, but I know that Fate is not the most likable character. Here is Naptime Writing‘s take on this Part.

On the first few pages we get a short story about Quincy Williams and his mother dying. And then suddenly a paragraph opens “At work everybody called him Oscar Fate.” What? And then we get another 24 pages of Fate in Detroit with Barry Seaman before we get any connection at all to Sonora or Mexico or the previous plotlines of the novel. But Oscar “Fate”, really? Isn’t that a bit like naming your love interest Jane Love? I wonder if it’s not some sort of double-reverse red herring that doesn’t refer to fate per se, but rather something like Fatima prayers or the Fates of Greek myth or some specific philosopher of fatalism, just because Bolano is sneaky like that. But Bolano does seem to have a fascination with Greek mythology: “The Greeks, you might say, invented evil” (p. 266).

Barry Seaman preaches from the pulpit on five topics:

DANGER

MONEY

FOOD

STARS

USEFULNESS

He recites whole recipes verbatim. He talks in extended metaphors. In fact, I think mostly Bolano is using the characters and situations in this section as metaphors for the scenario in Mexico, reflections of the same mirror. Mentions of money and poverty grapple with some of the root causes of the horror in the Sonoran desert. When Antonio Jones (Scottsboro Boy) tells fate that “poverty didn’t cause only illness and resentment, it caused bad temper,” it recalls the poverty of the Mexican factory workers or Rebeca selling rugs in the market, surrounded by poor macho men, certainly some with bad tempers. (And yet the upper class Marco Antonio Guerra is the “ticking time bomb”, constantly exploring the limits of his temper, his violence, feeling stifled by the atmosphere around him.) The poor of Detroit are no different than the poor of Santa Teresa.

Antonio Jones’ full name is Antonio Ulises Jones. For readers of The Savage Detectives, I wonder if your ears perked up at the sight of that word on the page. Ulises Lima.

Page 245: “How does rap lead to suicide?” asked Fate.

Page 249: I had to circle this beautiful line:

And he waves his hand toward the sea, because he’s incapable of expressing what he feels in words. And then I’m afraid, even though it’s my brother there beside me, and I think: the danger is the sea.

Page 254: Seaman’s talk about how nobody smiles anymore and everyone is just trying to sell you something reminded me of David Foster Wallace and the attempt at a new sincerity in American fiction. “They want us to look at them, that’s all” sounds as much like a rebuke of Twitter, Facebook, and oversharing bloggers as it does of smiling.

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Matt, February 22nd 2010 | Tags: , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 4: Characters

by Brooks Williams

Amalfitano

Father of Rosa, ex-husband of Lola (164). Finds a copy of Testamento geometrico that he doesn’t remember buying or packing in a box of books when he arrives in Santa Teresa (185). Clips it to the outdoor clothesline (190). Begins to hear voices of his grandfather or father or maybe just a ghost.

Rosa

Amalfitano’s daughter (163). Seventeen years old and Spanish. Her mother is Lola (164).

Lola

Amalfitano’s ex-wife. Rosa’s mother. Always carries a switchblade (164). Her favorite poet lives the insane asylum in Mondragon and she believes (although, according to Amalfitano, it isn’t true) that she had slept with the poet at a party. Runs off with Imma to see the poet (166). Is able to gain entry into the asylum on the third try and speaks to the Poet, meets Gorka (171). Has a brief relationship with Larrazabal (175-179). Has another son named Benoit (182). Returns to Amalfitano after seven years (182-183). Reveals that she was diagnosed with AIDS while in France (184). Â Leaves again after a few days (184-185).

Inmaculada (“Imma”)

Friend of Lola, who calls her Imma. Lesbian (167). Travels with Lola to visit the poet in Mondragon.  Once they are able to meet with The Poet, she essentially stands against the wall, reading poems. Their money runs out shortly afterward and Imma goes to make some money and never returns (175).

The Poet

Lives in an insane asylum in Mondragon (165). Gay. Heavily medicated. Blows smoke rings “in the most unlikely shapes” (172).

Edurne

Friend of Inma.  Lola and Inma stay with her and her husband (Jon) when they first arrive in Mondragon. She had been an ETA commando (171).

Gorka

The Poet’s doctor. He is writing a biography of the Poet (173). It is entirely possible that Gorka is just a patient at the asylum.

Larrazábal

A driver that picks up Lola on the road. Takes her to the cemetery in Mondragon, where they have sex (175). They run into each other again in the cemetery when he has brought another woman there (176-177). Lola moves in with him and he becomes her lover, gives her money, takes her to the asylum (179).

Silvia Perez

Professor. She convinces Amalfitano to take the teaching job in Santa Teresa.  They meet in Buenos Aires and then later in Barcelona (199).  Has a 16 year-old son (204). Â Amalfitano and Rosa accompany Silvia and her son on a trip (204-205). She appears to have a romantic interest in Amalfitano.

Marco Antonio Guerra

Dean Guerra’s son. Carries a gun. He gives Amalfitano a ride home from the university, but first they go for a drink outside of Santa Teresa (214-216). He likes to get into fights – both to give beatings and to get beat up. He only reads poetry (226).

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Matt, February 22nd 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 4: Vocabulary

by Meaghan Doyle

acacia
any of a large genus (Acacia) of leguminous shrubs and trees of warm regions with leaves pinnate or reduced to phyllodes and white or yellow flower clusters

aegis
protection

aquifers
a water-bearing stratum of permeable rock, sand, or gravel

Basque
a member of a people inhabiting the western Pyrenees on the Bay of Biscay

cacique
a native Indian chief in areas dominated primarily by a Spanish culture

candelillas
a shrubby spurge native to southwest Texas and Mexico, having densely clustered, erect, essentially leafless stems that yield the multipurpose Candelilla wax

catatonia
catatonic schizophrenia

chonchon
a mythical bird creature in Chilean folk myth

colocolo
a small striped cat native to the western central South America

cumulonimbus
cumulus cloud having a low base and often spread out in the shape of an anvil extending to great heights

desultory
marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose

doleful
full of grief

ecclesiastical
of or relating to a church especially as an established institution

eugenics
a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed

ex-votos
a votive candle offering

factotum
a general servant

ideologue
an impractical idealist

incubi
evil spirits that lie on persons in their sleep; especially : one that has sexual intercourse with women while they are sleeping

junta
a council or committee for political or governmental purposes; especially : a group of persons controlling a government especially after a revolutionary seizure of power

larch
any of a genus (Larix) of northern hemisphere trees of the pine family with short fascicled deciduous leaves

majolica
earthenware covered with an opaque tin glaze and decorated on the glaze before firing

malheureux
unhappy; miserable

mendicants
beggar

merendero
picnic spot

metawe
jar of 1 to 3 liters

mote con huesillos
a traditional Chilean summer-time drink consisting of a sweet liquid syrup made with dried peaches (huesillo) and mixed with fresh cooked husked wheat

nimbus
a luminous vapor, cloud, or atmosphere

occluded
closed up or blocked off

ocher
an earthy usually red or yellow and often impure iron ore used as a pigment

ontological
relating to or based upon being or existence

osteology
a branch of anatomy dealing with the bones

patina
a superficial covering or exterior

ranchera
Mexican folk song

succubi
demons assuming female form to have sexual intercourse with men in their sleep

unvanquished
undefeated

unwonted
being out of the ordinary : rare, unusual

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Matt, February 19th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 4: Locations

by Sara Corona Goldstein

Mondragon, San Sebastian, Spain — Lola’s favorite poet is institutionalized in an insane asylum here. She lives here for a while. (p. 165)

Barcelona — Amalfitano and Lola live here with their daughter, Rosa. Lola says that she met and slept with the poet at a party he and the gay philosopher have here. (p. 165, 167)

Pamplona, Zaragoza — places Lola and Imma stay on their way to San Sebastian. (p. 166-167)

Mondragon cemetary —Lola is driven here by Larrazabal who she sleeps with and later lives with; she also lives here a short time. (p. 175)

Bayonne, Landes, Pau, and Lourdes, France — Lola travels to these places during her time in France before settling in Paris. (p. 180).

Paris — Lola has a job and a son (Benoit) here. (p. 181)

Sant Cugat, Barcelona — Amalfitano is living here with Rosa when Lola visits them for the last time. (p. 183)

Buenos Aires — Duchamp comes up with the idea of hanging a geometry book on a clothesline outside while staying here. (p. 191)

Rianxo, La Coruna — Rafael Dieste, author of Testamento geometrico, is born here in 1899. (p. 195)

Santiago de Compostela — Dieste dies here in 1981. (p. 195)

A merendero, 10 miles outside Santa Teresa —Amalfitano, Rosa, Professor Perez, and her son take a trip here. (p. 199, 204)

Colonia Lindavista, Santa Teresa—Amalfitano’s house is here. (p. 199)

Los Zancudos, outside of Santa Teresa— Marco Antonio Guerra takes Amalfitano here, where they drink Los Suicidas mezcal. (p. 215)

Santiago de Chile — Lonko Kilapán publishes O’Higgins is Araucanian here in 1978. (p. 216)

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Matt, February 18th 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 4: Dreams

by Daryl L. L. Houston

185: Amalfitano dreams of Lola walking down the side of a mostly deserted highway, fearless, bearing the weight of her suitcase.

187: Never, even in dreams, has Amalfitano been to Santiago de Compostela.
201: The first time Amalfitano hears the voice in his head, he wonders if it’s part of a nightmare.
202: Lola appears in Amalfitano’s dreams along with two old friends, waving from behind a fenced park and (somehow) a room full of dusty philosophy books.
206: Amalfitano dreams of a woman’s voice talking about signs and numbers and history broken down and the American mirror. He then switches to a dream in which he’s moving toward a woman who was only a pair of legs at the end of a dark hallway.
217: “Maybe [Amalfitano] dreamed something. Something short. Maybe he dreamed about his childhood. Maybe not.”
227: Amalfitano dreams about the last Communist philosopher of the 20th century, who turns out to be a drunken Boris Yeltsin singing a sad song of a Volga boatman who commiserates with the moon about the human condition. Yeltsin explains to Amalfitano what the the third leg of the human table is (apparently magic, the first two legs being supply and demand). He then shows Yeltsin his missing fingers (or their void), drinks some more, talks about his childhood, resumes singing (“if possible with even more brio”!), and disappears into a streaked crater/latrine.

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Matt, February 17th 2010 | Tags: , , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read

Week 4: Clueless

by Maria Bustillos

Oscar Amalfitano is a bewildered man. He’s got no idea how he even wound up in this horribly dangerous town. Young girls are getting abducted and killed here, all the time, and he has got the sole care of a young daughter. My own daughter is about the same age as Rosa Amalfitano, and if we were living in Santa Teresa, you can bet your sweet bippy that that kid would not be just blithely waltzing around to the movies, not unless she were under armed guard. What is he thinking?!

Notice, though, how Amalfitano has consistently been at the total mercy of these women. So Lola wants to go off with some poet, Oscar peels off some cash for her. Rosa wants to go to a movie, hey okay, see you later. Part of the trouble with Amalfitano is, he’s like Hamlet, kind of. He’s stuck, largely because he has no faith in the significance of his own actions, so it’s like he just can’t move. He is outside all these games everyone else is playing; he can’t understand them. For example, he is neither macho, nor is he gay. He likes Archimboldi just fine, but his head wasn’t turned by Archimboldi as the heads of the critics were. He’s not doing any of that stuff; he’s just a human being, just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Professor Perez’s attempt at romancing him meets with near-total bafflement. Unlike the other men we’ve seen so far (with the possible exception of Morini,) Amalfitano’s basic interface with the world is not sexual (or gender-derived, I should maybe say.) Plus he is nice. He won’t say to anybody such phrases as, the hell you will! Over my dead body! etc.

So he’s not really equipped to deal with this reality.

Amalfitano loved Lola, and he loves Rosa; is this the weakness that makes him incapable of protecting them? You love them, so you can’t say no to them? But they’re putting themselves in such danger. (As I read this all my mom-feelings were going absolutely wild. Go after her! I’m inwardly shrieking.) I have to say, I completely part company with the author, here, if he’s trying to tell me that love weakens men, makes them incapable of protecting, as in, love means never having to prevent a crazy woman from hitchhiking out of a town full of murderers. (?) Then scan the paper with your heart in your throat for some kind of horrible news the next day (echoing the faux-plane crash of Espinoza, remember? Another horror that failed to materialize.)

Because there are all these women getting killed in Santa Teresa. How do you deal with this? Maybe it is, in fact, impossible. You’re up against it, and you have to keep on and hope for the best. About eighteen years ago, my own city, Los Angeles, was basically going up in flames. As in, on fire. It’s hard to believe now, but in fact we really did all behave as if it were a minor inconvenience, tried to get on with our lives, and quite a lot of that meant ignoring the enormity of the smoke in the air, guys with guns on the roof, the burnt shell of what had been a shopping mall. The place I’m thinking of (on Pico, near La Brea) is a tidy supermarket now, it has got a Bank of America in front just as if nothing had happened. There’s not the smallest sign. You let the elements have their way with you, and hope for the best. At some point, though, for some people, the reality won’t let you do that.

In this way, I think the volume of Dieste is a symbol for Amalfitano himself. A rational book, a book about geometry, to serve for a rational man, the Unhappy Readymade: http://www.toutfait.com/unmaking_the_museum/Unhappy%20Readymade.html

The book, like the man, is the plaything of the elements. That’s why Amalfitano is in such a panic about the book’s fate, every time he comes home. There is horror and dread kind of circling him, inexorably, and circling the book, and maybe that is what is driving him mad. How he can be spending even one moment making these incomprehensible diagrams of philosophers when he ought to be locking his daughter in her room while he buys them a pair of plane tickets out of there is beyond me. I have not been able to make head or tail of these diagrams, at least not yet, but I hope someone else here has worked on them, and will enlighten us. It really irritates me, though, that Plato should be below Aristotle in the first diagram, when clearly Plato is always above Aristotle, always the in higher, more rarefied, more ethereal air. I guess that is the one diagram that kind of makes sense, because Heraclitus really kind of gave birth to both Aristotle and Plato, you could say?

Now, Lola. I’ll be coming back to her but for the moment, I will say that Lola is another person who has been driven straight off her trolley by literature. She’s the flip side of the critics. Her fangirlhood has literally made her lose contact with reality completely. Just like them. More on that tomorrow.

16 Comments

Matt, February 17th 2010 | Tags: , , ,
Posted in 2666 Group Read
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