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!
“Who is this professor and why has he designed the course like this?” I asked myself the first time I looked at the course website back in December. I remember when I first registered I told myself that it could go so wrong I might end up hating it. It was completely out of my comfort zone. Well, well, well…fast forward four months, and it’s my only course I don’t want to end.
Most importantly, this class was an escape from my routine poli sci student life. Being obligated to spend hours reading has now left me wanting to read more than I ever did before. When I first picked up my novels I took a long look at them, but despite my initial worry of how I’m going to read/finish them and my fears for this course, I have been able to find great pleasure in reading. I also approach it way differently now. This course wasn’t just about reading two long novels. As the course description said, It was about how to get away from distractions, how to leave the world behind and lose yourself in a long book and I can confidently say that objective was achieved.
I’m thankful for many things this semester: for our discussions and for the amazing group of people in our seminar, who never failed to amaze me with their insightful thoughts throughout. Going back to my question about the professor…throughout my degree, I’ve always said that the professor makes or breaks the course. There is no way around this. No matter how interesting a subject is, if the professor doesn’t approach it with passion and care, it can end up being the worst course ever. But thankfully, we were lucky to have Jon Beasley-Murray as our professor.
I am also thankful to Bolaño. Was it the most enjoyable book? absolutely not. but maybe that is sometimes the point. It all counts in one way or another; it shows you something new. It taught me that there is something deeper than simple enjoyment in a book. It’s the way it gets you to reflect, to make meaning out of what may seem like nothing, to dig deeper and look beyond the surface to ask “Why would a guy write a book THIS LONG and make it the way he did?” This book was the reason for many of our enlightening discussions about why long books are long, why short books are short, endings, the concept of time, meaning and much more.
As much as I enjoyed reaching the end of my novels, I don’t like this ending. This being my last blog feels odd. These weekly blogs also meant a lot to me. Reflecting on each week’s reading got me to reflect on my own reading style: what distracts me, what makes me mad or happy, what I enjoy and how to actually approach reading. If I compare my answers to these questions from January to now, there is a noticeable difference for sure.
Since both of my books were from Latin American literature, this class also meaningfully added to my knowledge of the region that I may never have been exposed to otherwise. This course was never easy for me. As someone who is not a reader I would say, I definitely felt like I didn’t belong at times. But I’m proud of myself for sticking to it and not dropping the course! It’s been a great journey. This class made me realize how much there is to know and how the human brain can work so beautifully to shape ideas and thoughts, with no limit.
Finally, it’s only right if I comment on Artificial Intelligence, as this was also about “reading in the age of AI”. There is so much discussion about how students can use AI and its potential to replace humans. But one thing AI can’t do (at least not yet) is to feel. I think our ability to feel human emotions shapes a great deal of our lives, from our thoughts and actions to how our feelings influence what we produce and write. It comes down to putting your truth above what might seem like a “better” answer produced by AI and trusting that your brain is far more capable. In other words, it’s about how much we trust ourselves, I guess, and are able to validate our own work. I think it has to do something with one’s integrity as well. AI is a powerful and useful tool and there is no doubt in that. Barely a day goes by that I don’t have some form of contact with it and I think it may be impossible to avoid, as it’s so integrated into our systems whether we like it or not. But to let a tool shape your thoughts is maximum absurdity, as is consciously asking it to feel for you when it is very incapable of doing that and this class serves as evidence to that. I like to believe that AI could not reach the conclusions that we have in this course, and it could not even get slightly close to what we have been able to achieve.
Not only do I have no regrets about taking this course but what it has added to my life means so much to me. The most important part of it all you might ask? I just placed my book orders for the summer! This class was a challenge I took on a couple months ago, and it has pushed me in great directions. As I always say, challenges are what make you grow, and this class has done just that.
Thank you all for making this course as enjoyable as it’s been!
To Her Portrait (Sonnet) by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Translated by no other than Samuel Beckett. Yes, the same writer that wrote Waiting for Godot.
This coloured counterfeit that thou beholdest,
vainglorious with excellencies of art,
is, in fallacious syllogisms of colour,
nought but a cunning dupery of sense;
this in which flattery has undertaken
to extenuate the hideousness of years,
and, vanquishing the outrages of time,
to triumph o’er oblivion and old age,
is an empty artifice of care,
is a fragile flower in the wind,
is a paltry sanctuary from fate,
is a foolish sorry labour lost,
is conquest doomed to perish and, well taken,
is corpse and dust, shadow and nothingness.
***
THIS SEMESTER, I took courses that challenge everything established in my life. Literature came and ruptured itself into my world. Affecting me as a reader. I read many authors and I never prolifically read as I did for this semester. When I’m older, look back in life, at any threshold point, I wonder, will this be the point I return to?
I had doubts about taking RMST 202 and 495 at the same time. I thought I wouldn’t make it. But I did. Albeit, belated.
I cry tears of joy, happiness, retrospective. Are these moments, unbeknownst now, that I will look back upon? The good old days. I read authors I knew and authors I had not been introduced to. I finally read Robeto Bolano’s Savage Detectives. And I read another author that I bought at random. Now appreciate. Now enjoy.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I remember him, I held a paperback, a reproduced material of his writings. Retrospective. I read the novel on my commute to work. With shiny, leather shoes. Eyes as red as the devil’s hottest coals. But I read him, and wrote down my reaction to his prose.
Roberto Bolaño, read before. His Magnus opus read for the seminar class.
THE TRUTH is I neglect the seminar class. To nourish the other class. The one formatted for one novel a week. If I were to write a novel, I would come back to these experiences for material. When I had RMST 305, 202, 495 and SPAN 490. Now this semester is but an archive. What is most pertinent to me, only hovering on my experiences’ recall. Of my own mental archive of this semester. I shall revisit it in the future.
I read both texts nonetheless. And the essays, poems, and stories of Bolano. I AM WORN OUT WITH DESIRE FOR BOLANO. I AM WORN OUT WITH DESIRE FOR HIS PROSE. It is as if he writes my sentiments, my inner-self, thoughts implanted and feed on by him. The spirit of a writer lives on his writings.
Bolano introduces me to other writers through intertexts. I know them because on a linear-timeline, I am to find them through cause and effect. Reading about them evokes research. Research seminar skills at use. In an unorthodox way. In a way that seeks to trace itself in a literary lineage.
I am thankful to read all these books. This was a great semester.
Why write? With AI, writing becomes, obsolete I think. AI replaces all human intelligence. AI erodes authorship.
Reading Bolano is a dream come true. I wanted to read it last equinox. I start. Yet put it down. Don’t know why. Yet I finish it for this semester. I am changed. I am to revisit this novel. Many times.
Retrospective. The story of filmmaker I ain’t know. A novel I bought just because of its aesthetics (when fixing gaze upon its paperback on its shelf). A novel I read nonetheless. A novel that teaches a new facet of ideology. When it is fervour.
AND BOLANO seeps through other novels. Novels assigned in other classes. In Soldiers of Salamis and Faces in the Crowd. He is an intertext. And a character.
This semester, after navigating many programs, I settled on RMST. Even if it will only get me a job as a barista (this is a meme). RMST gives me access to many novels. A network of stories adapted, concurrent, electrical amongst its branches of literary appreciation. RMST makes me erudite. Makes me want to write a novel. Films adapted from novels.
This semester assigned many good authors. That shall be revisited. Authors that sadly will be left behind, if not assigned on a different chance. Or encountered on a total arbitrary condition: They are on vacations at Vancouver. Stop at my workplace to sign a few paperbacks. Hardcovers if we have them. Or encountered on a new course syllabus.
Ave Barrera. She’s a contemporary. Translated by Charco Press. I wonder how a modern Savage Detectives would reference her? And how would it reference Ana Paula Maia, Fernanda Triaz, Claudia Pinero, Selva Almada, Dahlia de La Cerda, Mateo García Elizondo (El Gabo’s grandson)? The post-post-boom-literary movement is here. It manifests itself as new gothic and new Latin American fiction. They are creating our own version of the canon.
Reflection: I read this last spring when I first picked up my copy of TSD. Then I put it down. It is revisited this semester.
ABOUT RESTROSPECTIVE
Since when I left off, Marianella and Sergio go on to take military training in China. They march with the Red Army and see Mao up-close. Finally, Luz Elena and Fausto contact them, to explain, they are ready to go back to Colombia and take up the armed revolution. Sergio goes from Peking to Paris to renew his (and Marianella) Colombian passport (cannot do so in China). He spends some days in Paris watching movies. As they leave China, David Crooks, the father of Carl Crooks, Marianella’s boyfriend, is arrested by the Red Army for espionage. He is arrested for 4 years.
When they arrive in Colombia, they find Luz Elena exploiting her bourgeoisie appearance to do clandestine work for her communist cell. Fausto does clandestine work, exploiting his Theatre-director role. They know the day is imminent, the day they will be told to join the guerrillas. And it does, Sergio meets with a secret agent when he breaks the news. He has to bring rubber boots, a hammock and two pairs of clothes (the same for Marianella). The next morning, they would take a bus, sit far apart and then arrive to a spot wherein they would be taken to the mountains (they are told there’s two other secret recruits on the bus, not to attempt recognizing anyone). Guerrilla life is hard for both from the start. They both receive nom de guerre, Sergio becomes Raul. Marianella becomes Sol. Luz Elena becomes Valentina, and Fausto is rarely mentioned in part three. The texts starts referring to them by these names.
There is General Fernando who picks on Raul. Picks (bullies him, humiliates) on him for his “bourgeoisie” upbringing (studying in China, speaking French, utilizing communal radio and depleting radio battery to listen to Opera). Moreover, General Fernando attempts to have sex with Sol (she refuses his advances, cites military law that comrades are not to “mingle”). Raul, starts getting attacked for suggesting the guerrillas’ tactics are deviating from Mao’s techniques, tactics and even ideologies. The other members reply: “We are in Colombia, not China”
Eventually Sol is transferred to another “detachment” group, there are more girls. Delusion arrives, for both. Sol starts to get sick. Raul has many accidents. While trying to cut with a machete he had no experience with, he cut his leg. A deep wound. He breaks military codes: revealing medicine locations. For someone to bring to him. Sol is disillusioned; this is nothing what her fervour ideological indoctrination had her believe. So she escapes, gets home to Medellin quite sick, with anemia. She has broken military law. While Raul experiences his own disillusionment, Valentina takes care of Sol. She decides to go back otherwise they would be looking for reprisals. For abandoning the party. When she goes back, she is fed up. Lashes at the general and is in turn shot in the back. Valentina is arrested on one of her operations. Raul recovers and does many missions, but experiences things such as a comrade, Alberto with mental health problems. He is chained to a train, then he disappears. Nobody explains to Raul anything, not even that his mom is in prison. When Sol is shot, Guillermo (a comrade) leaves the guerrillas, takes Sol to her grandparents’ house. And the grandparents help bring Valentina out of jail. She has one last trick up her sleeve, negotiate getting kids out of the welfare system. Kids that from the guerrillas’, kids abandoned by their mothers, abandoned by their father, who go up to fight in the mountain. She manages to take Sergio and Fausto from their guerrilla positions, they flight back to China. Marianella starts in Colombia, married to Guillermo. Sergio starts to study medicine, but realizes film is his passion. His dad does not approve. But an opportunity comes, Sergio is able to work with a director, translating from Mandarin to French. He takes a soft spot for Sergio, and gets him accepted in a London Film School. It stays a secret from Fausto, for he does not approve. He is enraged when Sergio is to flight to Britain, but says a bittersweet goodbye anyway. The book ends with the diegetic text’s “present-day Sergio” explaining his children’s name, Raul, for his past. Valentina (his youngest daughter) because of Luz Elena’s nom de guerre. Sol (his eldest girl) because of Marianella.
REFLECTION: This was a great book. I learned so much history! And the book has an interesting analepsis/prolepsis format. It also includes diary entries, real-life photos of the characters.
It is heavily narrative. The text explores themes of ideals, and betrayals, particularly believing in an ideology (no matter what “side” it manifests on) so strong, even when following it has done harm to one’s life. The author’s notes explains the paradox: all accounts in this novel are true, taken from long conversations, archives, memoirs. Yet it is a fictional novel because of its form. Hence the novel’s epigraph, taken from a biography on Joseph Conrad.
“For, according to our view of the thing, a novel should be the biography of a man or of an affair, and a biography whether of a man or of an affair should be a novel.” – Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance
This text provides rich history of Latin American. I really enjoyed it.
(Note: I don’t have page numbers this week because I am using the Apple Books ebook version which changes its page numbers based on the size of the app window)
I cheated a little bit and finished The Shadow of the Wind just before I finished The Savage Detectives, so I think the distance between then and this blog post has allowed me to take a step back from the initial “woah” of it all.
I will say, that after complaining about how repetitive most of the book was, this ending section picked up considerably. We finally find Carax (hiding in plain sight?), have a scandal that I didn’t see coming (Penélope’s incestual pregnancy), figure out what happened with Carax’s missing/destroyed books (an author committing suicide by setting fire to his creation/legacy?), and find Daniel some closure (first concluding the mystery of Carax and then continuing on the legacy of the family bookstore alongside his son, Julián.)
Luckily for us readers, Carax doesn’t lose his mysterious vibes just because we now know his life story. When Daniel is lying in his clinic bed, he sees Carax one last time, knowing it was a farewell and telling him to take one of his pens and start writing again. Upon waking, Bea and the nurse on duty tell him that nobody has come to visit him, least of all Carax, and yet the pen had disappeared from its case. At the very end of the book, we see that Carax has dedicated his final book: “For my friend Daniel, who gave me back my voice and my pen.” What is real and what is imagined? Who is Carax?
Another thing I would like to highlight is how much the prose improved in the final chapters. For most of the novel, it has felt like genre fiction. It was a book telling a story. These last couple of chapters have had a bit of a tone shift, where the writing seems to be more artful, the prose elevated. Maybe this was because there was a lot more existential reflection than the everyday discussions we had been seeing previously.
After Daniel’s “death” in the ambulance (his heart stopping for over a minute), he reflected a lot on life, and I feel like the descriptions were more vivid than previously written: “I remember that Fermin looked white and thin, like the backbone of a fish. They told me that the blood running through my veins was his, that I’d lost all mine, and that my friend had been spending days stuffing himself with meat sandwiches in the hospital’s canteen to breed more red blood corpuscles, in case I should need them. Perhaps that explains why I felt wiser and less like Daniel.”
I think that, all in all, this was a good book. It would not be at the top of my list of recommendations, but if you were in a cabin without wifi and no other books to read, it would be a pleasant enough way to pass the time. My concluding thoughts are that this book was longer than it needed to be, and the twists and turns (outside of Penélope being a half-sister) were predictable and didn’t bring me much of anything as a reader (not intrigue, joy, food for thought, or depth). It was a good concept and has allowed me to consider long-book-themes like pacing and endings, but at the end of the day was mediocre. I’ll rate it a 3/5.
I’ve noticed recently that I don’t really know the best way to start off a blog post, assuming that a best way even exists. When I was about to start typing I was going to write something like “Well folks, we’ve finally reached the end of 2666!“, and then I took a moment and looked at like my last three blog posts and they all started in a similar fashion. So… instead of thinking of a better way to start off this blog post, I just decided to start it by commenting on my poor starts to blog posts, making an even worse start to a blog post… Anyways, yes, here we are, the end of 2666, concluding with The Part About Archimboldi, whom we haven’t heard about since the first Part, The Part About The Critics. I have so many initial thoughts about my reading that I’d like to share, but first as with all my blog posts on 2666, I’ll have to start with a brief (and sort of “scuffed”) summary (luckily for you guys, this will be my last one you’ll have to read). Similarly to The Part About The Crimes, The Part About Archimboldi spans well over 200 pages, however, I feel like lots more actually happens as it doesn’t follow that repetitive pattern of detailing the femicides in Santa Teresa. Anyways, let’s just dive right in!
The Part About Archimboldi begins with the introduction of Hans Reiter (the real name of our mysterious Archimboldi), who was first mentioned in The Part About The Critics when our critics were on the trail for Archimboldi in Mexico and came across the name “Hans Reiter” in a hotel’s records. Hans Reiter, born in Prussia to a one-legged father and one-eyed mother, is a pretty tall and interesting child who likes to swim and is kind of obsessed over this book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Later when Hans is 10, his parents have a daughter named Lotte whom Hans adores. Hans quits school and works some odd jobs but eventually works with his mother in a house belonging to a baron. He befriends the baron’s nephew, Hugo Halder, and remarks upon the baron’s daughter, Baroness Von Zumpe, who brings home many friends for parties (she’s actually quite important so keep her in mind for later). Hans is later drafted to fight in World War II and a whole bunch of things happen including: staying at a castle with some generals and Baroness Von Zumpe (no, this isn’t the later I was talking about, keep waiting), meeting a strange girl kind of in love with him (Ingeborg Bauer, also important later) when he was on a brief leave looking for Hugo Halder, finding the hiding place and reading papers of this guy Boris Abramovich Ansky (stories within stories abundant here!), nearly dying several times, coming across one of the generals from earlier crucified and naked, and finally returning to Germany and surrendering to some American soldiers. Oh, and one more thing to note, in Ansky’s notebook he reads about “the Italian painter Arcimboldo, Giuseppe or Joseph or Josepho or Josephus Arcimboldo or Arcimboldi or Arcimboldus” which perhaps inspires his pseudonym Benno von Archimboldi later (729). In the prisoner-of-war-camp, Hans meets a man named Zeller (actually Leo Sammer) who was in charge of “disposing” a group of Jews… Zeller is found dead one morning (strangled, specifically). Hans is later allowed to leave the camp and goes to Cologne where he works at a bar. He meets Ingeborg Bauer again and they begin a pretty happy, romantic relationship. Hans confesses to her that he was the one who had killed Zeller and worries about the police coming after him one day, though Ingeborg doesn’t mind. It should be noted that throughout this Part Ingeborg suffers from some sicknesses and at one point she’s even told she has only two or three months to live, but she miraculously recovers (she eventually does die but we’ll cross that bridge in a moment). Ingeborg works at a seamstress shop and Hans begins to write his first book after renting a typewriter under his new pseudonym, Benno von Archimboldi. They’re pretty poor at the time and Hans sends the copies of his manuscript (of which he only has two, the original and typed carbon copy) to a few publishing houses, one of which belongs to Mr. Bubis!
Now let’s pause for a moment. You might be wondering “Who is Mr. Bubis?” Well, in my very first blog post on 2666, before writing the summary, I said “I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible without missing any important details, but I’m sure I’ll miss a few and there will also most likely be some details that I will have left out thinking they were unimportant now, but realize that they were very important later.” Now just like the book, my blog posts have even come full circle in a sense. In The Part About The Critics, the critics do actually take a visit to Mrs. Bubis’ publishing house (Mr. Bubis had passed away by then) in hopes of getting into contact with Archimboldi. They were actually somewhat successful in the sense that they even got to speak with Mrs. Bubis, but I deemed this unimportant and didn’t include it in my summary because it didn’t result in any leads to Archimboldi. Maybe this isn’t actually an important detail, but it’s at least a relevant detail that I have to pay the price of bringing up now. Anyhoo, Mr. Bubis takes great interest in Hans’, or as he knows him, Archimboldi’s book and agrees to publish his work. Hans goes to Hamburg to meet Mr. Bubis and sign the contract. Then, in what I would consider a pretty funny series of events, Mr. Bubis presses Hans on his fake name “Benno von Archimboldi” to which Hans insists is his real name and wants to just leave with his manuscript. Mr. Bubis still wants to publish him, fake name or not, and wants him to meet his wife, Mrs. Bubis. Now you can stop the waiting because guess who Mrs. Bubis is? That’s right! Baroness Von Zumpe! Hans and Baroness Von Zumpe talk privately and catch up on their lives since their last encounter. They end up making love and continue to do so many times when they meet in the future. But anyways, Hans’ book does get published by Mr. Bubis, he returns to Cologne, writes many more books which receive only a little success, but by no means complete failures (Mr. Bubis also remains very resolute to keep publishing Hans’ books and even sends Hans advanced sums larger than he probably deserved). Ingeborg suffers from a pulmonary condition and she does eventually die now, but not before travelling around Europe with Hans. Although, Mrs. Bubis or Baroness Von Zumpe (I’ll be using Hans/Archimboldi and Mrs. Bubis/Baroness Von Zumpe interchangeably from now on) finds out from some villagers that she had allegedly died from drowning (not really an important detail so don’t put on your detective hat or anything, I just added it for fun, my blog, my rules). Archimboldi’s books begin to gain more success and popularity but he goes radio silent for four years. After those four years, Mr. Bubis receives another manuscript from Archimboldi, Mrs. Bubis visits Archimboldi again, Archimboldi visits Mr. Bubis, Archimboldi sends a few more manuscripts to Mr. Bubis, Mr. Bubis dies, Mrs. Bubis takes over the publishing house continuing to publish Archimboldi’s books, and Mrs. Bubis becomes the sole person Archimboldi contacts, only sporadically though.
Now we’re almost done the summary portion of this blog post, with about 30 pages to go, we switch to Lotte’s perspective, Hans’ sister. Note that they have lost contact with each other and the last time Hans visited his family was sometime after the war. We start with a bit about her childhood, a bit about her time during the war, and then her dating and eventually marrying Werner Haas! Haas? That sounds familiar. Indeed! Lotte and Werner Haas’ child is Klaus Haas from The Part About The Crimes. Klaus is a bit of a problem child and he later moves to America and loses contact with his parents. Werner Haas dies of heart disease but Lotte later receives a telegram form Santa Teresa informing her that Klaus had been imprisoned. Then Lotte visits her son multiple times in prison over a few years with his case being postponed, found guilty, and then appealed, still pending another retrial. Lotte grows older and of course, weaker, so her travels to Mexico are a lot more strenuous. Then one time, in a hurry at an airport bookshop, Lotte buys a book by Benno Von Archimboldi about “a one-legged father and a one-eyed mother and their two children, a boy who liked to swim and a girl who followed her brother to the cliffs” (887). Upon rereading certain parts about the family in the book, Lotte becomes confident that Benno von Archimboldi is in fact her brother, Hans. She calls the publishing house and gets into contact with Mrs. Bubis. Lotte tells Mrs. Bubis that she’s Bennno Von Archimboldi’s sister, or Hans Rieter’s sister, and Mrs. Bubis takes note of Lotte’s address. Three months later, Hans finally visits his sister at her place and they talk for a while. In a kind of heartwarming moment Hans “touched his books with the tips of his fingers. There were all different kinds of editions: hardcover, paperback, pocket-size” (perhaps Bolaño also had a moment like this in his life) (891). Lotte mentions her son and she says “Will you take care of it all?” to her brother a couple of times. Finally, and I mean finally for real this time, in the last three pages, we have Hans talking to this guy Alexander Furst Puckler who in classic Bolaño fashion goes on about the history surrounding the Furst Puckler ice cream (or as we know it, classic Neopolitan ice cream), right before Hans is about to leave for Mexico.
Wow, that was a long summary! And you know what, I still felt like I left out a lot of shorter stories within this Part, the shorter stories that I’ve grown much accustomed to reading The Savage Detectives and 2666, I would even say I’ve grown fond of them. Now here’s the fun part! The part where I ramble endlessly on my initial thoughts… For starters, I will say this was probably my favourite Part among the five Parts, maybe it’s just recency bias, but it felt like I was really immersed in Archimboldi’s entire life. Also, compared to The Part About The Crimes, even though quite a large portion of this Part was during World War II, overall the actual story was a lot more lighthearted and maybe even “happy” at times, although don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, especially during Zeller’s story. Speaking of Zeller’s story, at one point he says:
“I still had more than one hundred Jews and everyone was exhausted, my policemen, my volunteers, and the Polish boys. What to do? The work was too much for us. Man wasn’t made to bear some tasks for very long, I said to myself as I contemplated the horizon from my office window, striped in pink and a cloacal murk. It was too much for me, anyway. I was doing my best, but I couldn’t stand it. Nor could my policemen. Fifteen, all right. Thirty, fine. But when one reaches fifty the stomach turns and the head spins and the restless nights and nightmares begin.” (765-766)
I immediately thought of the parallels to The Part About The Crimes with just the sheer number of femicides and how we were kind of made it to feel numb to it. Okay, let’s move on from that topic though! I became really aware of Bolaño’s love for super long sentences, I was already aware before, but I felt like he used them significantly more (I noted down pages 681-682, 779-781, 806, 820-821 in the Picador edition). I forget the context but I think I recall last class the Professor said something like “can you really fill the void?” (I think it had to do with our discussion on what’s outside the window) so it was kind of cool to see a part that kind of answer it here:
“‘What for?’ asked Hans Reiter.
‘To fill a void.’
‘Voids can’t be filled,’ said Hans Reiter.” (657)
One of the generals from earlier was described to be “nearly a foot long” when erect or half erect which reminded me of Alberto in The Savage Detectives (691). I guess that’s just some crude humor from Bolaño. Anyhow, in my blog on The Part About The Crimes, I briefly mentioned how Bolaño isn’t writing a classic “whodunit” story, funnily enough, there’s a portion in this part that mentions these very same “whodunits”:
“I’m talking about English whodunits,’ said the old woman, ‘those addictive English whodunits that infected the American whodunits first and then the French and German and Swiss.” “‘And what mistake is that?’ I asked. “‘An article of faith,’ said the old woman, ‘an assumption you can sum up in one word: the killer always returns to the scene of the crime.’ (777)
Nothing more to add there, just thought it was funny. Moving on to something perhaps more “important”, there are a couple times where I think Bolaño is using Archimboldi’s story as a writer to mirror his own or at least tell something about his life as a writer. Maybe the time when Archimboldi first struggles to find success, or maybe when Archimboldi finds much success only later in his life, but here’s a part about fame that really stuck out to me:
“Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame. Hitler was famous. Goring was famous. The people he loved or remembered fondly weren’t famous, they just satisfied certain needs. Doblin was his consolation. Ansky was his strength. Ingeborg was his joy. The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun. His sister, about whom he had no news, was his own innocence. Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.” (801-802)
It seems like Bolaño’s trying to share with us his feelings on the fame from his books and maybe when he lists those people he’s listing significant people from his life. I don’t really know though. I feel like I’ll never truly understand Bolaño. But isn’t that actually one of the points he’s trying to make?? Bear with me for a second. The critics in Part I studied Archimboldi’s work more than anyone else in the world to no end and were hopeless in finding him and knowing who he actually was. Yet Archimboldi’s sister, Lotte, read that one book (The King of the Forest) and recognized her brother in a moment’s time. What I’m trying to point out here is that we can study Bolaño’s work forever but can we ever truly know him? Certainly not as much as simply his friends and family! I really don’t know! Let’s just transition that to my discussion question for this week: “After having finished reading your self-selected book, do you think you understand your author more?” I feel like I understand Bolaño more, yet there’s so much I don’t understand and even if I studied him for an eternity I still wouldn’t. There’s just something about his writing… Sorry Bolaño haters, but I’m indeed a fan! 2666‘s conclusion isn’t some neat and tidy wrap-up just like The Savage Detectives, there are still some unanswered questions, there are still some loose ends (looking at you The Part About The Crimes). But that’s the beauty of it! I think I’ve already mentioned in a previousblog post more about not expecting all those answers and coming to that realization. What I loved most about the conclusion of 2666, The Part About Archimboldi is how it tied things back together all the way back to The Part About The Critics, even though we don’t get any typical resolution. In a sense, we do get answers, but we’re left with even more questions… Some would hate that, I loved it!
Now, originally I would have actually liked to end this blog post on the actual last pages of 2666 which was a “Note to the first edition” containing a couple insights and notes from Bolaño which I think would interest you all (as well as the explanation for the publication of 2666 as a whole or five separate novels). However, this blog post would then exceed 3000 words! So, I’ll be saving that for my concluding blog post next week… look forward to that. Until then, that’ll be it from me this week!
P.S. This week I’ve been suffering from a fever but hopefully that didn’t translate into my blog post to make it even more confusing than usual…
Comments Off on 2666 – The Part About Archimboldi (pp. 637-898)
I’m looking for an X but I have a W. Hubris begets hubris and I have a puzzle that I will never finish—[life a user’s manual by georges perec]
Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère.
And so;
the puzzle is never finished.
good God…
I almost want to leave it at that.
There are no amazing twists and turns in this book, no climaxes really. Instead, there are slow revelations. Epiphanies that come on like goosebumps… goosebumps that trigger because of some kind of nervous, anticipatory awe, rather than from chill.
The ‘ending’ of the book is such: one of the main protagonists dies, and so does another, and then everyone lives their life. Some of the characters’ dreams come true in one form or another, but most don’t. A few live a semblance of their dream, while most live out a quasi-normative tragedy; otherwise known as a tragicomedy version of their hopes and desires.
The main protagonist, Bartlebooth, has dedicated his life to a scheme that is by design meant to accumulate to exactly nothing. He learns how to paint from Valène, travels the world with his butler, paints scenes from every single part of the world, sends the canvas to a puzzle maker (Gaspard Winkler, whose death is the begins the book), eventually does the puzzle, sends the finished puzzle back to the scene from which it was painted, dissolves the paint so that the canvas is blank (save for the cut-marks of the puzzle), and I think he then burns the canvas. (I could be mistaken about this last point). But the accomplishment of this scheme is genuinely to achieve nothing.
Bartlebooth fails in this dream. He dies doing a puzzle. He is at the last piece. The one-step void between an unfinished puzzle and a complete image is an X-shape. The puzzle piece Bartlebooth holds as in his hand is a W-shape. He died on June 23rd, 1975 at 8:00pm.
In the epilogue, Valène, the man who for years taught Bartlebooth how to paint, dies shortly after Bartlebooth does. His last work as a painter was a comprehensive painting of the entire building of which the book itself takes place in. It is mostly empty. It is complete(?). It is true(?).
What I’m telling you is arbitrary. That’s what I’ve learned.
I’m thinking about the epigraphs in this book.
The epigraph for the book:
Look with all your eyes, look
(Jules Verne, Michael Strogoff)
The epigraph for the preamble of the book:
The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work.
(Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch)
The epigraph for the last chapter, i.e., Bartlebooth’s entry:
Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère.
I am simultaneously searching for the eternal and the ephemeral.
I am looking and I am searching, but I don’t think I have enough eyes to see the eternal or the ephemeral. In between my dead, cold fingers I have a W-shaped puzzle piece but the last slot is fucking X-shaped. Is the book the puzzle or the puzzle piece?
Valène’s canvas is the García Madero’s window at the end of Savage Detectives. There’s nothing else to say! In fact, there’s too much to say that I will not say anything more.
Taggedgeorges perec, life: a user's manual|Comments Off on I’m looking for an X but I have a W. Hubris begets hubris and I have a puzzle that I will never finish—[life a user’s manual by georges perec]
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.
