Returning to 2666 this week with “The Part About Amalfitano”, the second Part out of five, I had a much shorter reading than normal. If I’m not mistaken, this will be the fewest number of pages in a given week for this course at just ~65 pages! Worry not though, longer readings for these long books are to come, I believe Parts IV and V are like 250-300 pages…each! I was considering reading Parts II & III this week because combined they’re actually less than either Part IV or Part V, but ultimately decided not to because I didn’t want to split up the two last Parts into three portions. I would much rather dedicate each of the Parts to one week and not split them up with a break in between, especially since I remember it was mentioned that Bolaño intended on publishing 2666 as five separate books (for financial reasons albeit). That actually leads into one of the points I want to talk about in this blog post: how these parts connect to each other (and how on earth would they work standalone)? Before I get into that though, let me give a brief (and slightly scuffed) summary of what’s happened in “The Part About Amalfitano.”
This Part is completely centered around Óscar Amalfitano, a Chilean professor in Santa Teresa, who was introduced in the first Part already (he’s also familiar with Archimboldi but not quite as big a fan as our “critics” in the first Part). We begin with Amalfitano’s life before coming to the city of Santa Teresa (where all the Parts should converge), where he lives in Barcelona with his young daughter, Rosa, and wife, Lola, who is just departing on a bit of an extended trip with her friend, Imma, to visit her favourite poet who is being held at an insane asylum near Mondragón. Yeah… Lola is a bit of an interesting character to say the least. She claims that she had slept with the poet (who people believe is gay) before meeting Amalfitano, but the thing is the story may or may not even be true because Amalfitano alleges that Lola only became aware of the poet’s existence through him when he had given her one of the poet’s books. Anyways, Lola sends letters to Amalfitano during her journey and quite a few things happen so let me try to rapid-fire it: Lola and Imma originally are refused entry to the asylum but eventually meet him after claiming to be a reporter and poet, they don’t see him the following days because he’s apparently on bedrest, Imma leaves heading to Madrid but said she would come back (she doesn’t), Lola has sex with a driver (his last name is Larrazábal, just noting this on the off chance he makes a return later), she gets kicked out of the boardinghouse she was staying at, she sleeps in a cemetery, she watches the poet who is supposedly ignoring her from afar (the poet also umm “pleases” another inmate with his hand?? not sure what the importance of that was), she stays with Larrazábal for a bit but eventually leaves by train and goes around Europe a bit, there’s a gap of five years where Amalfitano doesn’t receive any letters from Lola, then Amalfitano receives a final letter from Paris telling him that she is working a cleaning job and has another son. Wow, that was longer than I would have liked but we’re not quite done yet because two years after that final letter, Lola tracks down Amalfitano and tells him she has AIDS and is dying but wants to see Rosa once last time. After their short reunion Lola leaves by hitchhiking and that’s that.
Following that, we see a bit of Amalfitano and Rosa’s life after having moved to Santa Teresa (why did he move? well Amalfitano questions himself as to why as well). Amalfitano finds a book called Testamento geométrico in one of the boxes he packed but doesn’t remember ever packing, buying, or even having seen this book before. For some strange reasons, he decides to hang it outside on a clothesline which was already kind of mentioned in Part I when Pelletier and Espinoza visited Amalfitano’s home: “Espinoza went out into the backyard and saw a book hanging from a clothesline…It’s Rafael Dieste’s Testamento geométrico” (133). Amalfitano does some other strange things like drawing geometric figures with names of philosophers and later he begins to hear a voice talking to him in bed, some of the drawings below from page 192:
Apart from that, he lives a pretty standard life as a professor it seems, other things that happen include going to a merendero (picnic kind of place with a pool) with Rosa, Professor Perez, and her son (Perez is the one who actually convinced Amalfitano to take a job in Santa Teresa) as well as meeting Dean Guerra and his son Marco (the latter of which he actually meets a couple times which I’ll mention later). Above all though, just like in Part I, there are stories within this story, real ones like Amalfitano recollections about his father’s love for boxing (and homophobia), other conversations with the voice in Amalfitano’s head, Amalfitano literally reading us a book on telepathic Araucanians (???), and some very strange dreams, one of which is about Boris Yeltsin (a former president of Russia?) which also happens to be how Part II ends.
To be honest, I most certainly could have condensed the above summary by half at least, especially the part with Lola, but I found it interesting so I decided to leave it in. Again a preliminary apology in case it was confusing or I’m missing anything that becomes relevant later in future Parts, but let me get into my actual thoughts now. Speaking of future (and past) Parts, so far Parts I and II don’t seem to connect very much besides Amalfitano being introduced in Part I and the few mentions of the women disappearing in Santa Teresa. Archimboldi, the mystery man from Part I is not mentioned a single time in Part II! We also don’t eventually come back into the “present time” with our original critics from Part I. While I enjoyed reading Part II, I’m still left a bit confused as to how everything connects. Let’s say these Parts were released as separate books just as Bolaño originally intended, by themselves, as standalones I don’t think they hold up quite well, but… since that isn’t the case and they’re released as just one multi-part book, I, as the reader, have to assume there’s much more to come. I mean, just look at the page count, I’m only 200 something pages in out of like a 900 page book (not even halfway to halfway)! As of right now at least, while I might find it tedious, I’m trying to latch onto all these stories within stories in hopes that it will all come together in the end. I doubt everything will be of importance, but surely some of it will. Perhaps we’ve already seen a glimpse of it like Lola and the poet mirroring Part I’s critics and Archimboldi (I just realized I forgot to mentioned that Lola also had some kind of elaborate plan to have the poet escape the asylum with her and to move abroad), perhaps Norton leaving Pelletier and Espinoza is like Lola leaving Amalfitano, perhaps I’m just rambling too much and I’ve made something out of nothing, perhaps it’s like the second Part of The Savage Detectives where it was mentioned in class where we’re kind of “waiting” in a sense. There’s a quote that actually really stuck out to me in Part II of 2666 when Amalfitano reads the front flap of Testamento geométrico: “Testamento geométrico was really three books, ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole…this work representing the final distillation of Dieste’s reflections and research on space” (186). Is this not kind of a metareference to 2666 itself? I mean 2666 is Bolaño’s final book just like Dieste’s so I guess we’ll have to see how all the Parts are connected “by the sweep of the whole.” Anyways, I enjoyed my experience reading Part II nonetheless and really look forward to the future Parts and seeing how all the details may or may not tie in.
Now let me talk a bit about Amalfitano. Honestly, I kind of feel a bit bad for the guy, I mean in the beginning of this Part his wife basically just abandons him and their child, and then life in Santa Teresa doesn’t sounds like lollipops or rainbows. He seems to be constantly worrying about his daughter because of the disappearances in Santa Teresa, “Amalfitano called Professor Perez and confessed that he was turning into a nervous wreck…She remind him that the victims were usually kidnapped in other parts of the city.” (198-199). He doesn’t seem to only worry explicitly though, but subconsciously as well like when Rosa leaves the house (or on page 196 when he says “it’s silly to worry about it when much worse things are happening in this city” in reference to the book on the clothesline) and perhaps it’s one of the causes of the voice he hears around the time when he sleeps. Speaking of the voice and Amalfitano’s other strange actions, I realized when I was writing the summary that I made it sound like he was a complete lunatic. Although, I don’t think that’s actually the case, from his thoughts he actually seems quite rational and at the very least Amalfitano is aware and conscious of the fact that he might be going slightly crazy with the voice in his head (he’s also kind of likable just generally speaking, maybe more than the critics in Part I). Also, on a slight side note, the book that he hangs on the clothesline wasn’t completely out of nowhere, it’s from a story about Duchamp (a chess player?) who gives a book as a gift to a newly wed couple and instructs them to “hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could ‘go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages’” (191). Now that’s interesting and all but what’s more interesting is the reason Amalfitano gives Rosa on why he hung it up “to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate” (191). Does Amalfitano kind of see the book in some strange metaphorical way as himself and Rosa surviving in Santa Teresa? Just take a look at this passage and consider it for a moment:
“he didn’t plan to stay long in Santa Teresa. I have to go back now, he said to himself, but where? And then he asked himself: what made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn’t seen yet? Because I really just want to die? And then he looked at Dieste’s book, the Testamento geométrico, hanging impassively from the line, held there by two clothespins, and he felt the urge to take it down and wipe off the ocher dust that had begun to cling to it here and there, but he didn’t dare.” (196)
Hmm, I’m not entirely sure but that’s just some food for thought. Maybe I’m going a bit crazy myself considering this blog is wayyyyy too long already. Before I end though, one last thing to note is that Amalfitano shares a drink with Marco Guerra (the dean’s son) called Los Suicidas. Sound familiar? Well it should because that’s the drink that Amadeo Salvatierra gets at the beginning of Part II in The Savage Detectives. I tried looking it up online but couldn’t really find much so I guess it’s just a mezcal drink that Bolaño made up. Do I think that this drink has any importance to either story? No, not really, just like I’m sure a myriad of other things might not be so important, but it’s cool to note. It’s also cool to note the section breaks or dinkuses(?) in this Part, some of which are very brief like on page 190, “The idea, of course, was Duchamp’s.” or even moreso on page 195, just “Help.” The first discussion question for this week that came to mind was a bit more on the vague side: “What do you think are the purposes of the details that authors write which may not necessarily be relevant to the plot?”I mean obviously to build the atmosphere, to immerse the reader into the story, to overall just make the reader’s experience more enjoyable, etc., etc., so maybe that was a poor question. Instead I’d like to ask: “What small details have you noticed in your book that you believe will be more relevant later on?” I mean with Bolaño, I’m sure there’s a ton that you could point out with all the shorter stories within the larger narrative so I’m curious for all the other books people are reading. Okay, now let me end this blog post on 2666 before it becomes 2666 words long (also what’s the significance behind the title, 2666? my bad, just end it already, Lucas! until next week!)
P.S. Starting from now I’ll be capitalizing “Part” when talking about the five different Parts of 2666 and the three different Parts of The Savage Detectives to avoid confusion when I talk about different parts/sections of specific Parts :p
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