2666 Book

The english version hasn't come out yet.
it comes out in november.
no spoilers. just here to make three points:

1) the blood and guts
2) the disaster
3) the women

1) y'know that bookbuzz you get when you're walking around the world and it's all colored with the life of the book you're reading? 894 pages of bolano's epic and i felt like the guy in those 50s sci-fi movies who gets shrunk down real small and is injected into someone's body. except it's a book. and i'm in there flapping around amongst the blood and guts and bones and bile and brains of this thing.

i love these big sprawling novels that can't be reduced to a single theme, or even a few themes. 2666 is shot through with so many goddamn ideas, is so all over the place, sloppy and strange, with temporal and geographical shifts, recurring images and motifs, characters and names -- and just the furthest thing from any kind of recognizable or coherent 'epic'. bolano's not pushing the snowball down the hill, watching it gain in mass and volume… he's drunkenly tossed a million little snowballs down there and, yeah, some are substantive and gain in size, get bigger as they go… but others flatten out and disappear or pop into snowdust as they run against trees and rocks...

2) godard complained, that in watching visconti's Senso, he was more interested by what he imagined happened after the fade-out then in the scenes themselves. in response, he shot Pierrot le Fou, a film containing all the stuff surrounding what other narrative artists would consider the 'story' -- this is kinda like what bolano's book is: a mad collage of all the befores and afters, a high-velocity mishmash of the irrelevant and irreverent, and, truth be told... something of a disaster. yeah. and it's also the most compelling thing i've read in a long time.

from 2666:

"He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick… What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of 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."

this is bolano engaged in serious fucking combat. infinitely more interesting than an author confidently sitting down at her desk, prepared to write a prose perfect, stream-lined, classy piece of work. boo!

3) at the core of 2666 is a fictional retelling of the 'female murders' of juarez. y'know about this? well, if it happened here or in europe, you'd have heard about it. naw, that's not true. if it happened here or in europe, it wouldn't have gotten this far. the fuckers would've been caught long ago (and, as against the death penalty as i may be, i wish they were caught here rather than mexico so we could fry 'em straight to hell) - well, as of 2008, the killers are estimated to have (vaginally and anally) raped and murdered (strangled, shot, set on fire, mutilated, stabbed, beaten) about 900 women. and that's a low estimate.

along with descriptions of the serial murders are included descriptions of women murdered not by the killer(s), but by boyfriends and husbands and fathers and sons and johns...

why? well, if there is one lone serial killer or a related 'band' of killers it's of dramatic interest... but that's about it. what matters, what's actually happening over there on a sociocultural level is infinitely more horrifying - the women of juarez are being physically treated as they've been spiritually and symbolically regarded for a long time. the murders, and the fact that they continue, that this isn't treated as a national emergency... well, it kind of makes sense. the madonna is home, she's safe, virginal, taken care of and taking care of... the ones who are murdered, well, they must be the Whore, no? (stop -- don't ask how the Madonna is possibly supposed to survive in a broken post-NAFTA society) .

the women of juarez are hated. and feared. the men fear the women. and the murders mean more than murder.

well, this ain't the forum for this kinda thing and i certainly don't wanna get all serious on y'all. but check this book out if you're interested...



and read 2666. i don't know if it's a 'great' book. but I know this: i read it two weeks ago and i can't stop thinking about it.