2666 Group Read

Well, it looks like the planned read of 2666 is not going to materialize on Infinite Summer. If at some point it does materialize, I will probably refrain from posting too much here in favor of taking advantage of the infrastructure they already have in place over there. BUT until then, I plan to coordinate the group read here on this blog and on bolano-l (a google group/mailing list).

The format here will be similar to Infinite Summer’s group read of Infinite Jest. There will be a schedule, a weekly recap, and some analysis from guides. There will also be a Twitter hashtag. Since this read is not limited to or sponsored by Infinite Summer, I propose #2666 instead of #infsum partly because it’s one character shorter and partly because people are already using it. (My personal twitter account is @mattbucher)

The group read is scheduled to kick off January 25, 2010, so there is still time to order the book if you have not already done so. It’s available (in the US) in three editions: a three-volume paperback, a single paperback, and hardcover. There is also an audiobook. I believe all three editions have the same pagination (I don’t have the single-volume paperback to verify this).

We will work in different sized-chunks per week. The average-sized chunk will be about 50 pages. Some of the sections read faster than others and some demand more explication than others, so there will be some weeks (toward the end) that cover 60 or even 70 pages per week. I believe this is better than dragging out the read for four or five months, when participation drops off significantly.

The tentative schedule is as follows (the part in parentheses refers to the subject line for bolano-l messages, where x=week #):

The Part About the Critics (GR-Critics-x)
Week 1: January 25 – pages 1-51
Week 2: February 1 – pages 51-102
Week 3: February 8 – pages 102-159

The Part About Amalfitano (GR-Amalfitano-x)
Week 4: February 15 – pages 163-228

The Part About Fate (GR-Fate-x)
Week 5: February 22 – pages 231-290
Week 6: March 1 – pages 291-349

The Part About the Crimes (GR-Crimes-x)
Week 7: March 8 – pages 353-404
Week 8: March 15 – pages 404-465
Week 9: March 22 – pages 466-513
Week 10: March 29 – pages 513-564
Week 11: April 5 – pages 565-633

The Part About Archimboldi (GR-Archimboldi-x)
week 12 : April 12 – pages 637-701
week 13 : April 19 – pages 702-765
week 14 : April 26 – pages 766-830
week 15 : May 3 – pages 831-893

Like Infinite Summer, we will attempt to read this novel without spoiling any plot points for you. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about background or events surrounding the book.

Roberto Bolaño died shortly after presenting the first draft of 2666 to his publisher, Anagrama. It was reported that he was not completely finished writing or editing the novel at the time of his death. Realizing he was terribly sick, he instructed Anagrama to publish one part of the novel per year, hoping to stretch out the amount of money that his heirs could receive. His heirs were convinced that if he were not sick, he’d want the book published as a complete novel. After his death, the novel was published as a single volume with five parts.

The Part About the Crimes received the most attention when the book was published. It presents a fictionalized version of the Juarez feminicidios, or the murder of women in Ciudad Juarez. Since 1993, almost 400 women (usually young, often poor, factory workers) have been murdered in and around the city of Juarez, Mexico. Often their bodies are dumped outside of town and discovered well after the time of death. Most of the crimes are unsolved. 2666 contains a multitude of other stories, though. There are stories about academics and writers (one of Bolano’s favorite subjects), stories that slightly cross paths with The Savage Detectives, and stories of love, infatuation, and dreams of death. If this is your introduction to Roberto Bolano, you are in for a remarkable ride.

New 2666 Group Read coming soon

If you want to see a really rousing reading of Bolano’s poem Resurreccion (en Espanol), go here: http://haroldyblum.wordpress.com/
Watch this space (and bolano-l) for more information about a group read of 2666 that will kick off in January 2010. We are still working out some of the details, but there is progress.

The Millions List (revised)

So today The Millions revealed their top novel of the millennium (so far): The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

2666 comes in at #4 behind Edward P. Jones and Cloud Atlas. I love everything by David Mitchell, but there is no way in hell that The Known World and The Corrections are better than 2666. The readers’ poll also puts Junot Diaz’s odd vernacular at #1.

In response, I offer my own list. This is totally subjective and I have not read every novel published in the last 10 years, but that’s the point, right?
UPDATE: I decided to swap out Samaritan for Lush Life. I think I prefer the 2003 novel.

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

2. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

3. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

5. On Beauty by Zadie Smith

6. White Teeth by Zadie Smith

7. The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

8. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

9. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

10. The Human Stain by Phillip Roth

11. Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

12. Samaritan by Richard Price

13. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

14. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

15. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

16. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

17. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

18. The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers

19. What is the What by Dave Eggers

20. The Last Novel by David Markson

Harold y Blum

If you want to see a really rousing reading of Bolano’s poem Resurreccion (en Espanol), go here: haroldyblum.wordpress.com/

A somewhat slower pace

Not a lot going on lately around these parts. Sorry!

I did learn that Bolaño’s story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” will be featured in the Best American Magazine Writing 2009. Here is a link to Columbia University Press’s Fall 2009 catalog with the blurb about the anthology: http://tinyurl.com/qou8tf (PDF). The catalog copy just says a Bolaño short story, but what other one could it be, really?

Also, I am working on a longer post on The Part About the Crimes, but it might not be ready for a while.

2666 on the Stage

This is old news in Spain, but news to me. In November 2007, Teatre Lliure in Barcelona presented a five-hour theatrical adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s masterwork, 2666.

This video shows a few brief clips of the production (complete with a blood-covered corpse in the desert). IYI, Liz Norton is played by Chantal Aimée and Rosa Amalfitano is played by Cristina Brondo. Directed by Alex Rigola, the play is described as “an inquiry about the stark human wickedness between humor and horror.” There is also an impressive PDF dossier (in English) that includes press clippings, reviews, photos, and interviews with the director.

how did this project come about?

I really wanted to tell a new, contemporary story, and my fascination for Bolaño’s work, and in particular for this novel, pushed me to do it, because it allows you to do a lot of stage-work. A  play has a life of its own, it’s not really the novel any more, the materials are very different.  The type of poetry you can produce in a novel is completely different from the poetry of the  stage. In an adaptation you start with one material, one set of contents and an underlying story, but the way of telling it is very different. I believe the project makes sense because the story is only relatively well-known. If it was a novel that absolutely everybody had read, then I would have to think again, but very few people have actually read it, amongst other things because its sheer size is off-putting.

Now I just need to build a time machine so that I can go back to 2007, fly to Barcelona, and learn Spanish enough to enjoy this.

The Tinajero poem on a pen

Bolanobolano reader Matt Reese had the nib of a fountain pen engraved with Cesarea Tinajero’s “poem” from The Savage Detectives.

Here is a good shot of the poem in the book and on the pen:

And here is a close-up of the pen.

Awesome, Matt! Thanks for sharing.

More on the Cover Design of 2666

[Update: bad link removed]

According to Strick, hardcover and paperback editions usually try to appeal to different audiences. Hardcovers, in general, are geared toward older readers, while paperbacks attract younger, thriftier buyers. Paperbacks are often redesigned to reach an audience the previous cover didn’t. But FSG decided to do something different with 2666: they released the hardcover and slipcase paperback editions at the same time, both set at the same price.

“I thought the paperback design would appeal to Bolano’s underground audience, but when I last checked, the hardcover was selling better,” Strick said. “I asked my editor, who thought that because the slipcase had to be shrink-wrapped, people felt more comfortable buying the other edition.”

The two new novels

This is sort of old news, but back in March it was reported that two new novels and a sixth section of 2666 had been found among Bolano’s papers. The Spanish paper La Vanguardia reported that the archive of papers contains poems, diaries, and “un puzle de narraciones.” The titles of the novels are apparently entitled Diorama and The Troubles of the Real Police (or the Murderers of Sonora).

The Vanguardia also tells us that

The first time Roberto Bolano wrote the name of Benno von Archimboldi was in 1988

But, about that “sixth section” of 2666, the Vanguardia explains that Bolano saved multiple drafts of his books and rewrote things several times. This leads to some equivocation:

Entre el laberinto de borradores, hay una version mas reducida de Los detectives salvajes y un bloque homogéneo, que podría considerarse la sexta novela de 2666. El escritor dejó en una nebulosa por qué Amalfitano, el especialista en la obra de Benno von Archimboldi, abandonó Barcelona para ir a dar clases al fin del mundo, a Santa Teresa (trasunto de Ciudad Juarez), “un oasis de horror en medio de un desierto de aburrimiento”. En el mecanoscrito hallado ahora se desvela el misterio de su fuga, un motivo sorprendente que explica muchos cabos sueltos del personaje, y que adquiere, así, a la luz de este texto, nueva dimensión.

So, it’s not entirely clear if Bolano wrote this as backstory about Amalfitano moving from Barcelona to Santa Teresa and decided not to include it with the overall book(s), or if there was just some poor editorial curation and, in fact, The Part About Amalfitano should be quite a bit longer. Either way, I don’t think we’ll see a “sixth section” emerge. This chunk of text would, it follows, be incorporated into The Part About Amalfitano (the shortest of the five sections).

Andrew Wylie showed another posthumous novel called The Third Reich was to publishers at the Frankfurt Buchmesse last fall. Apparently Bolano wrote everything longhand until 1995 when he bought his first computer. One of the files found on that computer was 60 pages of retyped longhand of this novel The Third Reich. Because Bolano himself had started retyping it, it is presumed he wanted to see it published.

Footnotes David Foster Wallace Conference Call for Papers

Footnotes: New Directions in David Foster Wallace Studies

“These academics’ arguments seem sound as far as they go . . “—Infinite Jest

The critical discussion of David Foster Wallace has thus far been limited to a few aspects of his most popular works. Our conference seeks to expand the response beyond the popular imagination’s categories of “difficult, postmodern, and genius,” and beyond the author’s own articulation of his project as a response to irony. We invite a reconsideration of Wallace with an emphasis on new perspectives of his entire oeuvre.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is pleased to announce a one-day conference devoted to the discussion of Wallace’s work, to be held Friday, November 20th 2009, from 9 am to 5 pm. Please send your abstracts of no more than 250-words by August 15th, along with contact info and institutional affiliation (if any), to: footnotesconference@gmail.com .

We welcome papers exploring any aspect of Wallace’s work. Some suggested directions:

1) Reconsideration of Wallace’s Oeuvre: Papers examining Wallace’s neglected early works Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair; new perspectives on Infinite Jest; the direction of Wallace’s later work.

2) Wallace’s Literary Context: The reception of Wallace’s work and the way his image has been shaped by his fans, the media, and the academy; examinations of Wallace’s relation to his literary forebears, both 20th century and earlier; Wallace outside the bounds of “postmodernism;” Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature.

3) Theorizing Wallace: Wallace’s treatment of language and formal or figurative qualities in Wallace’s writing; applications of narrative theory to Wallace’s texts or consideration of his narrative innovations; Wallace’s analytic, phenomenological, or existential contexts; treatment of the self and subjectivity; relation to ethics/values/morality; feminism and gender issues.

4) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Wallace: The use of math, logic, philosophy, science, technology, politics, sociology, psychology, law, etc. in Wallace’s work; pedagogical issues related to Wallace’s work.




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