Salut tout le monde ! Bonjorn a totes! Hola a totham! ¡Hola a todos! Ciao a tutti ! Ciao a tücc! Ciau a tutti! Ola a toz! Ola a todos! Olá a todos!
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Honestly, I cannot believe we’re already at the end of the course and submitting our very final blog post. It felt like it wasn’t that long ago, remembering that I felt slightly anxious starting this course, particularly because of the Savage Detectives being a 600-something page-long book, plus another 400-something page-long book of our choice. Even though I’ve often found myself reading short novels more (300 pages or less), this course allowed me a space, an environment and an opportunity to enjoy reading long books at a slower and consistent pace, and not just by myself but with many others.
General Reflection: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Photos: Front cover of the novel « The Savage Detectives » and image of author Roberto Bolaño
Reading The Savage Detectives has been a uniquely immersive experience, both challenging and rewarding. At the beginning, I found the novel’s slow pacing and unconventional structure of shifting narrators, stylized diary entries, interviews, and fragmented timelines overwhelming and chaotic. However, as we progressed further into the novel, it began to make more sense, and I started feeling appreciative of how these elements mirror the restless, searching spirit of the characters themselves. The storylines on Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, Garcia Madero (of course), and the wider circle of the Visceral Realist poets narrate the excitement, confusion, chaos, grit, belongingness, meaning, sense and passion of the youth.
Messy, exhausting, and exhilarating: Roberto Bolaño really knows how to pull you into his carefully crafted world of the Visceral Realist and the youths in Mexico and Latin America.
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Photos: Front cover of the novel « The Savage Detectives » and images of author Sandro Veronesi
General Reflection: Quiet Chaos by Sandro Veronesi
In contrast, from the very first pages of Quiet Chaos, I felt completely absorbed in Pietro Paladini’s world. I have to say that Veronesi has a certain way of making the everyday and mundane interactions feel captivating and profound, narrating the moments of grief, loss, love and the quiet unpredictability of life. Strangely, there is a certain pull from this novel where I sometimes forget that I am reading about a fictional character and his fictional life. On several occasions, it felt like I was reading into a private memoir or journal of a real person. That is, Veronesi really knows how to craft his words in a way that I felt like this was a real experience and that Pietro Paladini is not just a main character but a real person somewhere in Italy living life and grieving his past.
Quiet, chaotic and moving: Sandro Veronesi truly knows what it takes to write something so vulnerable, so real, and so poignant, pulling me into the quiet world of Pietro and navigating grief in the most bizarre way possible.
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General Reflection: RMST 401 – Long Books by Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray
Overall, the course RMST 401 has been an enjoyable experience. At first, when I learned of this course, I really thought we would be coming up with intensive literary research, but it turned out to be different. Instead, this course offered a space, an environment and an opportunity to discuss, debate and articulate our thoughts, opinions and feelings about the books. Something that I found rare compared to many of my other courses, especially math and science courses. Similar to my other RMST 301 and RMST 302, where we read and form in-class discussions and debates about short stories, theatre, poetry and prose, I truly enjoyed talking and talking more about The Savage Detectives on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
It’s true that students don’t often come across classes where we don’t just learn but also freely discuss, talk, articulate and debate our ideas, thoughts, opinions, and feelings. In a sense, I am very appreciative of how Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray structured this course the way it is. I’m not sure if I will ever come across another course to talk about a single book for such a long period of time with so much attention and perspectives applied to analyze a book and its wider context. Maybe! I just need to join a book club: wine, cheese, books, chatters, people, friends, voices and active discussions!
T H A N K Y O U .
D A V I D C.
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Au revoir, les amis ! Adieu per ara, amics! Adéu per ara, amics! ¡Adiós, amigos! Arrivederci, amici! Ciau per adess, amis! Arrivederci pi ora, amici! Asta luego, amigos! Ata logo, amigos! Adeus, amigos!
The end of this course has me thinking about a number of things. One of them is book clubs. Another is beginnings. Another is my MA thesis.
Book club meetings have sometimes been imagined as gatherings of middle-aged women who would rather gossip or complain than discuss books. And while I unequivocally support a woman’s right to complain when she has something to complain about, I think this portrayal of book clubs wrongly suggests that middle-aged women cannot or would not choose to engage seriously with literature. Going in another direction, I wonder whether our classes could be compared to book club sessions. And then I think (without judging, certainly) about how many of us would voice complaints about The Savage Detectives, and I wonder if we can place some value on complaint as a form of engagement with both life and novels.
About beginnings. Have we reached the end of the course, or the beginning of life post-RMST 495/520? I don’t know that the answer really matters; I just think it’s healthy for me to be a little annoying on occasion. But I do appreciate the unity of opposites here: everything that begins has an ending, and vice versa. And the end of every process is the beginning of a new one. Is the end of every book the potential beginning of a new one?
Finally, a relevant quotation from Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (translation by Thomas Colchie):
—[…] In a man’s life, which may be short and may be long, everything is temporary. Nothing is forever.
—Yes, but let it last a little while, at least that much.
—It’s a question of learning to accept things as they come, and to appreciate the good that happens to you, even if it doesn’t last. Because nothing is forever.
—Yes, it’s easy to say. But feeling it is something else. (259)
Although it’s not something that I plan to focus on in my thesis, lately I’ve been thinking about the ways in which beginnings and endings play out in this book (one of three that I’ll write about). Kiss of the Spider Woman is a story in which other stories (movie plots) are recounted, usually over the course of many nights. So, there is the beginning and ending of each story/movie in addition to the beginning and ending of the book itself. There are also “missing” or somewhat unclear beginnings and endings: for example, the reader learns that the two main characters have been cellmates for several months, but their first meeting is not portrayed or mentioned; and even though it is made clear that they are separated before (not at!) the end of the novel, the reader does not witness the actual moments right before that separation occurs. I think this ambiguity is one of the elements that gives Kiss of the Spider Woman its (sometimes) dreamlike quality.
Final question of the semester: Is there anything that you wish you had done differently while taking (or teaching) this course?
Comments Off on In the beginning, there was a book club
I feel like I’m never ready for endings. For me, Thursday will be the last class of my undergrad studies at UBC. In a classroom only a hallway down from the classroom where I had my nervous first class in university, on a September morning that feels distant now. Time seems to have gone in a circle. (— an attempted imitation of García Marquez. This game of parodying people’s writing styles is so addictive. I also had fun in this week’s comments parodying Jasmine and Lucas. Where does the pleasure come from? I think it lies in the smugness of being able to “see” how an author’s writing is special, to see them for what they are, to be able to keep up with them.)
What a long tangent between parentheses. I seem to have also picked up Jon’s habit of making long digressions too.
This class came at a perfect time for me — at end of my undergrad. If I took it any other time it would not have produced the same reflection that I very much need right now, and that is how much do I love literature? Do I love literary research, do I want to go on studying literature?
And in classic Bolaño fashion, I do not have an answer. But I have a few thoughts.
One thing essential to literary research is asking the right questions, or, to see what underlying questions the book is posing. This is where I’m lacking, and this is something I would enjoy working on. Jon tries to get us to practice this with these blog posts, but I don’t think I ask the best questions. To work on this, I plan to read more theory, literary or in other humanities. I hope this will help.
This must sound childish! But I really enjoyed the literary and intellectual atmosphere of this whole course. I feel I come out of it more sure than ever that I do love literature, that I’m a literature person — or rather, having reflected on the topics we covered in class, and keeping them in mind for future reading, I am maybe qualified to call myself a literature person. I thought every question we ask and try to answer in this course was very cool. We try to make a sketch of the author (not in real life, but such as is displayed in his works), to the point that we know if we’re asked: what would Bolaño say about this? How would Bolaño write about that? We talked about literary theory (like dissecting story and narrative time in TSD) as well as paratextual topics (like literary prizes, prestige, books as commodity). It was such a comprehensive exploration of literature.
Am I making it sound like I hated books before this class? I didn’t! But I only discovered my interest in research about 3 months ago, after completing my honours research project. And maybe this course will be the final little push I need to decide to commit 2 more years, or more, to studying literature.
Funny I’m worrying about all this when I haven’t even gotten responses to most of my Masters applications in education. It probably won’t be me who’s choosing.
AI was the perfect topic to end this class with. Yesterday I was trying to get ChatGPT to calculate the costs and nutrition of some recipes, and I don’t know what happened to me but I asked it: what reading snack would you suggest to a Bolaño reader? Then I thought this game was hilarious so I asked: “what about a García Marquez reader?” “And a Vargas Llosa reader?” “And a Mariana Enriquez reader?” etc. This is a classic-Bolaño game — I definitely stole this question structure from TSD. The answers were quite hilarious. I tried twice to replicate the conversation but none had as fun and easy-to-read answers as the original thread, so I apologize about the boring recipe conversations, but here it is: https://chatgpt.com/share/69d72976-9b7c-8327-a515-21523e479649
I think it would be more fun to play this with real people than AI.
To do that, I might want to join a book club.
RMST 495 will be the standard I hold against any book clubs I join.
For the final blog post in RMST 495, I think my biggest takeaway is how differently a story can be told, even when both books revolve around similar things and themes such as searching for someone. Reading both the Savage detectives and the Shadow of the Wind showed me that there really isn’t just one right way to tell a story, and that how a story is structured can completely change how we experience it. At the beginning of the course, I can’t lie, I did find myself struggling to read. Especially with the Savage Detectives, because it was not easy for me to read or get into, because they were way different compared to what I usually read. However, over time, I got used to the style of writing and started to understand that I did not need to catch every single tiny detail to understand the bigger picture. That shift really helped me enjoy the books a lot more because I spent less time trying to understand minor things. I realized that as long as I understand the point that is being made it is okay. What stood out to me the most about the Shadow of the Wind was how cinematic it felt. The mystery around Julian Carax kept pulling me forward, and everything came together slowly and tied in a way that felt intentional. Even though I feel like the ending didn’t live up to my expectations, I am still happy that I chose that long book for this class. On the other hand, the Savage Detectives felt completely different. Instead of one clear storyline or plot it had several different plots made up of so many different people and perspectives. At first, I found it confusing and it was so hard for me to stay focused. But as I continued reading I realized how the chaos was part of the point. I am glad I took this course because it helped me realize literature is not bad at all, in fact it could be fun even though it seems difficult at first. This course helped me learn that literature is less about “getting” everything and more about engaging with the ideas, structure, and meaning behind the text. I also greatly appreciated the class discussions we had because there have been times where I thought one thing and after going to class I saw how different perspectives shape meaning. Overall, RMST 495 helped me grow as a reader and it made me more comfortable picking up books that I don’t fully understand right away.
Discussion Question: What was your favorite part about this course?
I will not talk about what I was expecting or not about this course, so I will just focus on the aspects that I enjoyed about it.
First of , I would like to thank my classmates for being so collaborative and supportive. I never had a presentation that lasted one whole hour ( and by myself). Your points and comments were absolutely insightful and that helped to continue with the presentation and to note a few key aspects of the readings. It was an interesting experience and I survived it because of you.
Secondly ,I am happy about choosing Don Quixote. It is such a classic and I never had the chance to read it. I always thought he was just a crazy guy or at least that is how some other media portrayed him. During this semester I was shocked a few times while reading it , I laughed at him , I felt sorry for him and I learned about human’s motivations for meaning. I experienced a lot of emotions with this book which means I chose correctly. I am actually enjoying writing an essay about this character and as you can imagine there are SO MANY sources about him. His ending is sad but I think it taught me a lesson. Something that I learned before but I seemed to forget. No matter what you accomplish or not , the people who love you , will always remain by your side. I definitely give Don Quixote a solid 8/10.
About the commodification of books , It is interesting to think how much value people and institutions give to pieces of literature. It is like a enforcement at times. I am grateful that Jon made us choose our second long book , thanks!!!
The idea of the restrictive market in Bourdieu’s theory about intellectuals writing for intellectuals is fascinating as it shows how in every sphere of society there is a struggle for power and prestige.
I do not think I am ” Long Book” type of guy. It demands so much energy, time , attention , etc. …. I prefer short readings and so.. But I am glad I was pushed to read two long pieces in one semester.
Best wishes to everybody!
Discussion question:
What ideas for a long book you guys have?
I always had these crazy ideas about developing a book/script about teenagers and their school days . Many of these stories come from real events. I also had one about Angels helping humans to fight other angels that want to destroy us as they feel that humans are worthless. So basically there are some angels that think humans are good and others that don’t . But angels cannot destroy each other , so the humans have to do it…. You can call me crazy.
Now that the sun is shining, I’m finally in the mood for reading a long book recreationally (in the sun, at the beach, with an iced matcha). I just started reading a hardcover version of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai which, while not written in a romance language, is certainly a long book (670 pages). It will be interesting to see if I can enjoy reading a long book for what it is without being bombarded with all the ideas and critiques raised in class this semester (narrative, pacing, form, even materiality).
As I’m looking to start writing my final paper, I’m thinking a lot about form and time and how our long books (self-selected and Bolaño) have been altered or influenced by conventions. I left a comment on somebody’s post the other week where I was left wondering what a story would look like if an author were free from the constraints of the publishing industry (length, alternate endings, character choices, etc.). I think even beyond publishing standards, so much of how we write is done because that’s just what’s done (am I advocating to abolish standardized spelling like they had in the middle ages?) (what would a story look like if it didn’t have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, a rising action and a climax?).
This class has given me the space to think about what it would look like to push the boundaries of what is expected, what is given, what is flexible, and what is necessary for a (narrative fiction) book to be a book.
Beyond this, I look forward to applying some of the course themes to the rest of my studies, especially ideas on the phenomenology of reading, theories of narrative, and commodification/marketing. Plus, I got to discover that reading two long books at a time isn’t all that scary or hard, and so I’ll have the confidence going forward to choose books based on content without filtering by length.
I’m looking forward to our class discussion tomorrow, and wrapping up whatever loose threads remain!
Hi everyone, I can’t believe we are wrapping the course up and we’re submitting our final blog posts. I’m usually quite a nostalgic person, so any period of time that goes by and I think something like “I remember when … that was great”. I feel the same way about this course and the journey it took me on. I remember starting this class feeling a little nervous because of the title. I have been an avid reader for most of my life, but I have found it very difficult to make time for reading through my undergrad here. Even though I enjoy reading a lot, part of my mindset was that I have to read so much for all my other courses, even if I am reading me something that brings me joy, will it really, because now I’m just straining my eyes even more and doing the same act over and over again. That’s not to say I have never read for leisure during my courses, but it has usually taken me longer to finish books, and overall I felt less joy reading during the semester versus during breaks.
I think this class helped me shift my mindset around this feeling of exhaustion from reading because we learnt so much about the act of reading and what it does to us. It made me think of a life long hobby in a completely different way, one I had never really considered before either. It also was a bit of a challenge for me because for the first time EVER I was reading two books basically at the same time. I don’t know why I thought that would be so difficult, maybe I was just afraid of the unknown, but I actually really enjoyed switching every week, it was keeping me on my toes and brining a bit of uncertainty when I was reading, which I enjoyed.
In our last seminar, we spoke a bit about what kind of abilities ChatGPT and other AI tools have in terms of reading and understanding text, and we noted that when it does not know the answer, it simply makes something up, because it is programmed to provide answers. However, truthfulness or morality or other important qualities that do impact our understandings of information, or even books is not apart of its hardwiring. While I was reading, I also thought about all the time I was spending doing so. It was time that I could not get back, but I felt certain that I was understanding the text much better than an AI tool’s interpretation of the Savage Detectives. The book is extremely subjective, there are many unanswered questions, therefore AI cannot really have the answers to it or provide insight because there aren’t concrete facts it can make an opinion on. Additionally, we know that the act of reading isn’t happening, so there isn’t the period of reading something, then rereading and sitting with the text and drawing conclusions. The answer is instant and a blanket statement essentially. Because of this course, my perspective on reading has changed quite a bit, which I am thankful to have learned something new about something that has been apart of my life for so long.
I learned so much from Jon and my peers in class, thank you all very much!!
Since this is my final blog post for this course, maybe to mix things up I’ll keep it short this time. Eh, probably not, we’ll see. I think I might’ve mentioned before that when I type to friends or write informally, like in these blog posts, I do it as if I were speaking, which ends up making it overly verbose. Although, I also think it does a great job at capturing my feelings (arguably more important than brevity). I’m really not sure how to start off my final reflections, so maybe it’d be best to literally start at the start (my introductory blog post) alongside my expectations and feeling before taking this course. As you all know, I’m our resident science student, so even before the first class, I had my doubts about sticking out like a sore thumb or feeling some form of impostor syndrome. That brings me back to a memory of our first class where Professor Beasley-Murray said something along the lines of “I assume you’re all in arts, or arts-adjacent” to which I sort of instinctively started shaking my head. Then the professor asked what I was studying and of course I told him “science”, and at that point I did indeed feel somewhat out of place. Thankfully those worries washed away quite quickly, to a bit of my surprise, Professor Beasley-Murray not only welcomed me but also encouraged me to stay in the class!
Another worry I had was the amount of reading I’d have to do for this class. I’ve mentioned in my introductory blog post that I currently don’t read as much as I would like, and in my computer science classes there’s much, much less reading involved. Also, 2666 is a fairly long book, even when compared to other long books. Although, I was very committed from the get-go fully knowing that I’d have to manage my time well over the term juggling my other courses as well (even in my last term I decided to take four courses when I could graduate with just three). Luckily, I was able to successfully finish both The Savage Detectives and 2666 without too many hiccups… I do admit that I was late by an hour for a previous blog post as well as my blog post last week when I was sick Hopefully that doesn’t count as a severe breach of contract, I blame my overly verbose writing style (just kidding, that was just poor planning, oh well…) But anyways, yeah, in the end I didn’t have much trouble completing both of the books and I’m quite happy with myself at the end of the day. What was the point of all that worrying then? I don’t know, maybe I’m just naturally a worrywart (I love that word “worrywart”, it’s really fun to say too, apparently it comes from some American comic from the 1900s). Regardless, I bet in the future I’ll look back on my final days of university and these blogs posts fondly, especially if I do a rereading of The Savage Detectives or 2666.
Worries aside, what did I actually hope to gain from taking RMST 495, apart from answering the question “why are long books long”, which I’ll get to later? Well, the answer to that question can be found in my introductory blog post: “I wanted to take some interesting electives that really differ from my usual computer science courses. Luckily I stumbled upon RMST 495 and the course description and trailer really piqued my interest… this course would be an excellent way to get invested in a couple good, long books to escape our busy world of social media filled with short-form content. Ideally, maybe I would fall in love with reading these kinds of long books and I could take that passion with me after I graduate!” Indeed, indeed, I found this course to be thoroughly interesting and I had a lot of fun discussing in class and writing these blog posts too! To be honest, just having fun simply would have met my expectations, it’s not like I needed this course to fulfill some requirement. However, RMST 495 also surpassed that by providing me with an excuse to get invested in a couple books and definitely reinvigorated my passion for reading! Instead of like my other blog posts with the discussion question at the end, I think this will be a good place to put it this time. So for my final discussion question, I’d like to ask you all: “What has been your biggest takeaway from RMST 495? And how will you carry that forward with you?” Maybe it was from one of our peers’ presentations (the theory of the novel, or the phenomenology of reading, or narrative discourse, I don’t mean to exclude any or say I favour any of these ones in particular, I just don’t want to write them all out :P), maybe something from Bolaño, maybe something from your self-selected book, maybe just the term “MacGuffin”, or maybe, just maybe, the legendary question “why are long books long?” Let’s talk about that for a bit now!
Why why why why why (a song by SAULT that I listened to recently and liked). Why are long books long? Before taking this class, I’d probably say something like “it’s trivial, the author simply wanted to make it that length” but that’s not really a good answer because we can keep asking that “why” question over and over. Why did the author choose to make it that length? Why did the author choose to end the book where it ends? I also really liked the flipped version of the question “why are short books short?” We’ve seen that there are many possible answers to the question “why are long books long”: for commodification purposes, or maybe because readers are seeking long form content over binge-reading, or maybe they really want to build an immersive world with shorter stories within the larger narrative, or maybe the author just said f it I’m done with this work now, or maybe the author’s just overly verbose like the author of this blog post. There isn’t just some be-all, end-all, conclusive answer. It really varies between time period, between author, and between the books themselves. So, instead, allow me to answer the question for The Savage Detectives and 2666. To begin with, I do believe that Bolaño is a fan of writing those shorter stories within the larger narrative that I’ve mentioned countless times, so that point applies for both books. For The Savage Detectives specifically, a large portion was dedicated to all the accounts in Part II which I think Bolaño was using as the sort of “period of waiting” we’ve mentioned. While I’m not entirely convinced that it had to end where it ends (sorry professor), with the conclusion of García Madero approaching that “void”, the more and more I’ve thought it over, the more and more I’ve realized that it was probably the best place to end book. I’ve become a Bolaño fan though, so maybe I’m just looking at his books through some rose-tinted glasses. Anyways, for 2666, as was mentioned before, Bolaño first intended to release it as five separate books (which is what I’ll talk about next!) thinking “it would be less of a burden and more profitable, both for his publisher and for his heirs” which certainly would answer the question of why it’s so long (had it been released separately, the longest book would have been less than 300 pages) (895). Strangely enough though, unlike The Savage Detectives, I am much more firm on the belief that the ending for 2666 had to end where it ended. I talked a bit about it in my previous blog but it’s really an excellent ending in how it connects back to Part I while also leaving us, the readers, with unanswered questions and loose ends (which is interesting because some might use that as the very same reason why they didn’t like the ending).
Okay, so if you read my last blog post, I promised that I would talk about the “Note to the first edition” at the end of 2666 containing a few insights and notes from Bolaño. Apologies for making you all wait this long to get here! As was mentioned earlier, the editor who wrote the note did mention the whole kerfuffle (another word I love) about the division of 2666 into five separate books. They said it seemed “preferable to keep the novel whole” but they also claimed that the five parts could have been read independently, which I wholeheartedly disagree with (895). To each their own. The editor also claimed that even though 2666 was published posthumously, “the novel as it was left at Bolaño’s death is very nearly what he intended it to be” which I was really happy to read, but I do still have doubts and wonder what 2666 would have looked like in an alternate universe where Bolaño had truly completed it (895). On a lighter note, the note also mentions the references to the title of 2666 in The Savage Detectives and Amulet, which we’ve all read (neato)! Finally though, I’ll officially end here, leaving you all with a little message from Bolaño himself included in the note to the first edition:
“A final observation is perhaps in order here. Among Bolaño’s notes for 2666 there appears the single line: ‘The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano.’ And elsewhere Bolaño adds, with the indication ‘for the end of 2666‘: ‘And that’s it, friends. I’ve done it all, I’ve lived it all. If I had the strength, I’d cry. I bid you all goodbye, Arturo Belano.'” (898)
P.S. The title of this blog post, “And so farewell.”, is simply the last line of the note to the first edition. Unofficially, I’d like to end by thanking you all for reading my blog post(s) and for all of your wonderful blog posts as well. It was a great experience reading about your self-selected books and all our different thoughts on The Savage Detectives and Bolaño. I also really appreciated our discussions in class, and of course I want to thank the professor for taking us through this journey! I bid you all goodbye, Lucas Hu.
At one point in “The Part of Archimboldi,” the 325-page section with which 2666 concludes, we find ourselves something like four, five, or even six or more levels of narrative deep, as digressions and parentheses accumulate with no clear end. We might find ourselves in danger of losing sight of the whole, embedded as we are in so much detail within detail.
Hans Reiter, the protagonist of this section, has yet (despite his name) to become the writer Benno von Archimboldi, who gives this part its title, which itself returns us to “The Part of the Critics,” in which the critics Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton travel to Santa Teresa in search of the elusive Archimboldi. Earlier I called this quest a “macguffin”: a gimmick that merely serves to get us to Santa Teresa, site of serial femicides and setting for this book’s central “Part of the Crimes.” But as such, the search for Archimboldi is also the novel’s frame narrative, and here we return to it. The critics may never track down their man (and indeed they are not once even mentioned in “The Part of Archimboldi”), but we do ultimately discover why the novelist may have made his way to Sonora and the US/Mexico borderlands: it turns out that Klaus Haas, imprisoned suspected author of at least some of the Sonoran crimes, is his nephew. As the book ends, Archimboldi is therefore en route to Mexico.
But before Achimboldi, there is Reiter. And if the broad plot of the novel’s frame involves the search for Archimboldi, we could say that this section tells the story of how Reiter became Archimboldi, which is equally the story of how Reiter became a writer. This narrative therefore takes us from Reiter’s birth, in 1920, in rural Prussia, child of a one-eyed mother and a crippled father who had lost his leg in the First World War, to his nomadic existence as a successful novelist and concerned uncle.
But before he becomes a writer, Reiter is a reader. Bolaño (or whoever our narrator may be… a brief Afterword to the novel, by Ignacio Echevarría, tells us that a note discovered among Bolaño’s papers states that “The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano” [1125/898]) marks Reiter’s birth with a double literary reference, to Elias Canetti “and Borges, too, I think,” who both, supposedly, claimed that “the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited” (797/639). In this case, however, these esteemed authors are wrong: the young Reiter is a creature of the water rather than the forest, and particularly a creature of the watery depths of lakes, rivers, and seas in which he likes to dive, inspired and informed by a stolen book that becomes to him something like a Bible: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Indeed, we are told that his diving and his reading are one and the same activity: “The book [. . .] was stamped on his brain, and while he dove he would slowly page through it” (799–800/641). Reiter learns to “read” the submarine world as he learns how to name things in this world through the pages of a book, which he later copies as he fills a notebook with drawings of seaweed and their Latin nomenclature: Chorda filum, Leathesia difformis, Ascophyllum nodosum . . . . This may be no book or stories (neither Bolaño nor Reiter seem particularly preoccupied by the usual structure of beginnings, middles, and ends), but it literally provides him with a language of description and reference that provides a sense of order to a chaotic and unfamiliar environment.
Reiter never completes his schooling–his headmaster declares that “the boy wasn’t fit for school” (“no estaba capacitado para estudiar”) in 1933, “the year Hitler seized power” (810/649). But he is sent to work at the local country house of an absentee baron, where he is tasked with dusting the books in the house’s immense library, and where he meets and strikes up a strange friendship with the baron’s nephew, who spends much of his time reading in the library. The nephew, Hugo Halder, introduces young Hans to the idea of genre, and the difference between history and literature. Why, asks Reiter, does Halder seem to focus on history books in his reading? “‘It’s because I don’t have a proper grasp of history,’” Halder replies, “‘and I need to brush up.’ / ‘What for?’ asked Hans Reiter. / ‘To fill a void.’ / ‘Voids can’t be filled,’ said Hans Reiter” (820/657). And indeed, as Reiter starts to expand his reading beyond his cherished Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, we see exactly how his reading opens up voids rather than filling them.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, sent as an infantryman to the Eastern Front, Reither finds himself in a village on the banks of the Dnieper, in what is now Ukraine, where in an abandoned farmhouse he finds a sheaf of papers or notebook hidden in the hearth. This turns out to be the work of the farm’s former inhabitant, a Jew named Boris Abramovich Ansky, and Reiter sits himself down in the hidden spot where he found it, “until well into the night, until his joints were stiff and his limbs frozen, reading, reading” (884/708). He also takes the notebook with him as he goes out and about, and as he is sent to the Crimea even as the Russians steadily advance West: sheltering from their artillery and airforce, he “pass[es] the time reading Ansky’s notebook and sleeping and watching things grow or burn around him” (925/740). He reads it from the moment he wakes up, “opening it at random” (921/737). He “ceaselessly read[s] and reread[s] Ansky’s notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky” (928/742). He even dreams about the thing, with a vision in which now reading and diving no longer combine so neatly as in his youth, or perhaps they combine all too well as the notebook is imagined “reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever, half of [it] stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves” (929/743). The book has become his obsession, and he envisages it dissolving into his fluid surroundings, but not without leaving a physical residue on his body.
Reiter’s account of what he constitutes then a third narrative level, which continues off and on for fifty pages or so, when Reiter finally returns to the village and, before he then abandons its farmhouse for good, returns Anksy’s “notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place. Let someone else find it now, he thought” (929/744). He passes the book on to future readers, just as the novel itself reproduces its content for us, who become thereby readers by proxy. Indeed, we read much more of what Reiter himself reads than we ever read of what he writes, in that even by the end of Bolaño’s novel we have very little sense of the content of Archimboldi’s own work. Any sense of what counts as literature (and literary value) comes either from Reiter/Archimboldi’s discussion of the topic, or from what we understand to have moved him first to write.
Ansky’s narrative in some ways mirrors Reiter’s own story: it is a tale of nomadism and displacement occasioned by the violence that sweeps across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. The difference is that, where Reiter fights with the German Wehrmacht, Ansky signs up at a young age (in fact, long before World War Two) with the Russian Red Army.
It is not long, however, before Ansky’s story is interrupted (much, again, like it itself interrupts Reiter’s). After a tour of duty in Siberia and the Arctic, he travels to Moscow where he meets a writer named Efraim Ivanov, whose tale now briefly takes over before being told roughly in parallel with Ansky’s own. We are now therefore at a fourth embedded narrative level. Ivanov’s story concerns the fate of a writer in the nascent Soviet Union, but perhaps more generally the problematic relationship between writing and politics, even (or perhaps especially) a politics of the Utopian Left. For Ivanov had long been a true believer–a “party member,” we are told, “since 1902” (888/710), even before, one must assume, the 1903 split that led to the division between Menshevik and Bolshevik. Before the 1917 Revolution he was still no more than a “promising writer” (888/711), fruitlessly in search of new literary forms to match the political experiments that were on the horizon. After the Revolution, he turns to science fiction as a genre suitable to the Communist sense of futurity.
At this point, then, we are given a fairly detailed account both of the short story with which Ivanov makes his name, and of a subsequent novel whose reception turns out to be much more mixed. With the extended description of both texts, then, we are now entrenched in a fifth nested narrative layer. Russian dolls indeed! Moreover, the short story, entitled “The Train through the Urals,” itself revolves around a similar nested structure. It tells the tale of a boy in 1940 (i.e. some twenty years in the future at the time that the story is written), who travels to meet his grandfather, a scientist and former Red Army soldier, whom he asks “tell stories about the revolution and the war against the Whites and the foreign intervention” (890/711). The grandfather’s stories, therefore, constitute a sixth and (for now at least) final narrative level: they are stories within a story (written by Ivanov) within a story (told by Ivanov) that is in a story (written by Ansky) within a story (Reiter’s) that itself is an element of the grand story that is Bolaño’s 2666.
We might here add, however, that 2666 itself could be described as the proliferating elaboration of a hint provided in another of Bolaño’s novels, Amulet, which is the only place in his fiction where the date 2666 is otherwise mentioned (it never once crops up in 2666 itself). And Amulet in turn expands upon a chapter (chapter four) from Part II of The Savage Detectives, as one of a series of interviews that interrupt that progression of what is arguably that book’s main plot, which involves the search for forgotten visceral realist poet, Cesárea Tinajero. Or alternatively, the fourth chapter of The Savage Detectivesmight also be seen as a development of a story first found (at least in literary/written form) in a very short section of Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco.
In other words, the grandfather’s stories of the Russian Revolution are arguably nine or even ten levels deep–or, if you prefer, within nine or ten sets of parentheses–within an over-arching narrative that concerns either the search for a poetic ur-text in the mid 1970s or the repression of Mexico’s student movement (and by extension, of all Latin America’s radical youth movements) in the late 1960s. Which is apt in so far as these same stories, asked of a grandfather by his grandson, similarly involve a return to a mythic past (which is actually the then present projected into a future that is now past), as well as the recovery of how political radicalism may be seen in years to come.
All of which shows how 2666, and Bolaño’s work as a whole, concatenates and expands, not via a process of extension but through intensification. After all, the story that this massive novel tells from beginning to end lasts less than twenty years: from November 1980, the first date to be mentioned on its first page, to some time in or shortly after 2001 (a date that occurs on page 1111), which must be when Archimboldi decides to leave for Mexico. The book expands not by linearly adding to the end, or by going back to begin ever earlier, but from the middle, via digressions that follow and mirror (and complicate) its main themes, in a search for a secret (Santa Teresa and the killings that take place there as holding “the secret of the world” [439/348]) that we will later see has been hiding in plain sight the whole time.
Finally, it in Ansky’s notebook, and so in this digressive expansion in medias res, this opening up or escape through and beyond the middle of the work, that Reiter comes across Arcimboldi, who we are told was an Italian artist (and a real one at that), even though the first mention of his name immediately leads to a digression about Courbet, which then is followed by a joke as told to Ansky by Ivanov (and as told to Ivanov by Soviet anthropologists at a party) about a misencounter between (French) anthropologists and natives in Borneo. . . And Ansky (or perhaps Reiter’s summary of Ansky’s account) is surprisingly brief when he returns to Arcimboldi (or Arcimboldo, as he’s also here called, and is more generally known). We learn, however, that “When he was near despair, Ansky returned to Arcimboldo.” Moreover, that “the Milanese painter’s technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of semblance. [El fin de las aparencias] [. . .] Everything in everything [Todo dentro de todo], writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance” (917–18/734). The joy or happiness that Arcimboldi provokes has something to do with what here is translated as a refusal or limit to appearance, and with a strange capaciousness (everything in or, perhaps better, within everything) that might remind us of Bolaño’s own technique, as described here hitherto. Everything is (already) in everything, so no need to seek it elsewhere (isn’t this Belano and Lima’s mistake in The Savage Detectives?); everything is immediately at hand, if you know how to look.
What Ansky (or Reiter, or Bolaño) doesn’t tell us is the substance or content of Arcimboldo’s paintings. They are in fact at first sight all about appearance, about its ephemerality or fleetingness. He is known for still lifes, what in Spanish are known as “naturaleza muerta”–that is, paintings of flowers, vegetables, meat, and the like–whose elements are (wholly unnaturally) arranged to produce the effect, from a distance at least of portraiture. Alternatively we might say that he painted portraits whose elements turn out, on closer inspection, to be merely disconnected items that bear only a synecdochic relationship to the whole that they purport to represent. Thus his portrait of a librarian comprises what turns out to be a stack of books. His portrait “The Admiral” is composed of fish and other marine animals and shells. The same goes for his more abstract pictures, such as “Summer” or “The Sense of Smell,” which turn out, upon closer inspection, to be precarious conjunctions of elements associated with the season, or items that are fragrant or pungent in one way or another.
Again, is this not all about appearance? Or does it rather take us to the limit (the endpoint) of appearance, by showing us the forced proximities upon which resemblance rests? Is not all resemblance or representation a form of trompe-l’œil, a trick played on the eye?
And it is of course Arcimboldo, plucked from Ansky’s journal, who gives Reiter his pen name, when he finally turns to writing. But it may be that Bolaño, too, has also learned the “single lesson, but one of vital importance” that Arcimboldo teaches, a lesson that has something to do with distance and scale. The closer we get to Bolaño’s text (perhaps any text?), the more its claims to depict a broader figure dissolve, but also the more other universes and worlds open up. From the illusion of the portrait we move to stranger, vegetal worlds of what is “still life,” but not necessarily life as we know it.
I have to admit that I had no idea what to expect going into this class. I had spoken to Jon beforehand because I had to choose between this class or SPAN 495 (my course load wouldn’t allow me to do both this term) and when he told me there would be no final exams, essays or presentations I thought… How could that be? Especially for a Research seminar?
It seemed I wasn’t the only one with this question because of the class we had when we discussed, What is research? I enjoyed this class very much. It was interesting to hear everyone share their own ideas of what that was but the biggest one that we all had in common was that research starts with a question. We ask a question and we search for the answer, and our question was: What makes long books long? And also: What makes short books short? I also appreciated this discussion because it opened my mind to doing research in a different way.
The interesting thing is that a professor is one of my other classes helped answer this question, without having asked her. In my Spanish Lit & Culture class, as we were discussing pieces of literature from the 19th century, she shared that long books are long because the authors include every. single. detail. I couldn’t help but laugh because I thought back to all the conversations we had in this seminar, as well as my own frustrations (mostly with The Savage Detectives), because our complaints were usually about just that: can we just get to the point already?! In this sense, a long book is like that friend of yours that blabbers on and recounts every detail of the story before getting to the point. Sometimes it’s annoying and we don’t have the time for it but other times it’s humorous, is it not? And they make for great story-tellers! That is certainly how I feel about Bolaño, especially with a book like The Savage Detectives: What an incredible story-teller… he certainly has a creative mind.
One of my other favourite discussions was when Jon posed the question of, Could the book (The Savage Detectives) have been shorter? Longer? And did the ending make sense? (Apologies that I don’t remember word-for-word what the question was). I liked pondering on how we would have changed the story and I liked hearing different (but also similar) opinions about the ending. It was really fun to be able to read a book alongside so many other people and I honestly can’t remember the last time I did that. It must have been high school (17 years ago for me) and I can’t remember a single book that I enjoyed reading in my language classes during that time so this also felt like a first in some ways. It was also a very fun experience to read something of my own choosing (and to find others who chose the same book!), to share that experience and read about other experiences with their own books. *I have to admit, there were some blogs where I had to skip over some of the story details because I want to read the book myself and not have any spoilers!
The course has inspired me to not only read more long books in general, but to also read long books in Spanish. Thank you to everyone, it’s been such a pleasure being on this ride with each and every one of you!
Hopefully that doesn’t count as a severe breach of contract, I blame my overly verbose writing style (just kidding, that was just poor planning, oh well…) But anyways, yeah, in the end I didn’t have much trouble completing both of the books and I’m quite happy with myself at the end of the day. What was the point of all that worrying then? I don’t know, maybe I’m just naturally a worrywart (I love that word “worrywart”, it’s really fun to say too, apparently it comes from some American comic from the 1900s). Regardless, I bet in the future I’ll look back on my final days of university and these blogs posts fondly, especially if I do a rereading of The Savage Detectives or 2666.
