Category Archives: time

2666 I

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This blog post is something of a placeholder… I admit that for various reasons I have yet to get fully into Bolaño’s novel. I am a little past page 100, almost exactly halfway through the first of the five “parts” that comprise the novel as a whole: “The Part of the Critics.”

The first part of the novel features four critics, university professors, from four countries: Jean-Claude Pelletier, from France; Piero Morini, from Italy; Manuel Espinoza, from Spain; and Liz Norton, from England.

What these four critics have in common is that each is a specialist in an elusive, but apparently highly-regarded, German writer who goes by the name of Benno von Archimboldi. Of Archimboldi, little is known but much is (it seems) said, as Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton are endlessly meeting up at conferences and seminars across Europe (Bologna, Paris, Stuttgart…) to discuss his work, at times to take issue with rival Achimboldists whose interpretation of the object of their obsession differs in some way from their own.

Archimboldi is, we are told, a pseudonym, and at various points some of our critics try to track down the man behind the literary mask, for instance by visiting the offices of his publisher, but to no avail. Peeking ahead in Bolaño’s novel, I see that the last of the book’s parts (from page 795 on) is “The Part of Archimboldi,” so here I am not exactly expecting many revelations. 2666 will, I assume, make me wait another 700 pages before Achimboldi’s face is revealed. (And perhaps not even then, if I have learned anything from the somewhat similar quest that structures Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.)

In the meantime, then, the focus is on the relations between the critics more than what these critics may have to say about (or even see in) the object of their criticism.

These relations revolve around a sort of love triangle between Norton, Pelletier, and Espinoza. (Moroni is an occasional confidante of all three.) For some time, both the Frenchman and the Spaniard were sleeping with the Englishwoman. By this stage of the novel, both these affairs have been suspended while Norton is (perhaps) choosing between the two of them, who remain friends despite their mutual knowledge (and continual discussion) of their rivalry.

For the reader–or for this reader, at least–the problem is to discern what if anything is at stake in all this off-and-on bed-hopping, conducted for the most part with remarkably civilized equanimity by all concerned. There are certainly passions beneath the surface: in a rather shocking scene, the two men take out their frustrations on an unfortunate Pakistani taxi-driver in London, leaving him half-dead in an incident that is compared in erotic terms to a displaced ménage à trois.

A little knowledge is dangerous. What I know about the book has to do mostly with its fourth part, “The Part of the Crimes” (pages 443-791), which is concerned, so I understand, with the femicides on the US/Mexico border. Should we then take this violence in London to be an anticipation of the violence (inflicted, however, on women rather than men) to which the novel will turn in another 300 or so pages? And what to make at this point of the very brief mention of “the Sonora murders” about which Morini reads in an article in Il Manifesto on page 64, but to which Bolaño’s novel has yet to return?

A long novel keeps you guessing. 

Similarly, what should we think of the brief stories that are embedded within the narrative, that seem at first sight to be digressions that take us nowhere in particular? The lengthy anecdote, for instance, about a husband and wife visiting an estancia in Argentina, that is told at a dinner at which Archimboldi was once present and relayed indirectly to the critics? Or the encounter between Morini and a London beggar who asks the Italian critic to read out the titles of recipes attributed to the Mexican poet Sor Juan de la Cruz?

Long books are inevitably full of stuff, and it can be hard to know what matters (or can it all matter?) and where to pay attention (or can we pay attention to everything?). They pose a challenge of discernment and focus.

There is then perhaps an instance of this problem that the book poses in the telephone calls that we are told at one stage Espinoza and Pelletier (separately, sequentially, “three or four times each afternoon” and “two of three times each morning” [49]) make to Norton. “Both were careful to dress these calls up with archimboldian pretexts” before going on “directly to address what they really wanted” (50). But even the conversations that follow the achimboldian pretexts seem to be circling the main point, as they concern variously the men’s problems with their colleagues or with noisy neighbors. They appear still to be postponing any real revelation of their real desires and anxieties.

Likewise with this novel: it even takes some delight in stringing its readers along. Unless what matters has already been said, and we are (or I am) missing it.

Long TV, affect, and mortality

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Some thoughts on long TV from another old Harpers article, this time Adam Wilson’s “Good Bad Bad Good: What was the Golden Age of TV?” (vol. 339, no. 2033 [October 2019]:43–53):

One reason that TV shows develop cult followings is that to watch one from beginning to end—NBC’s The Office, say, which ran for nine seasons and over two hundred episodes across eight years—is to spend a significant portion of your life among its characters. You could read To the Lighthouse or watch The Big Lebowski half a dozen times and not come close to approaching those numbers.

In other words, the sheer time spent on a long show leads to a sense of ownership, defensive self-justification: it must have been worth it, if I spent so much time on it!

Similarly, on watching the same actor over an extended period of time:

When we first meet Tony Soprano, in 1999, he is robust and handsome, if not exactly svelte. By the Season 4 finale, some five human years and forty-three TV hours later, Tony looks significantly worse for wear. His marriage is ending, and we watch its death knell. The time we’ve spent with this couple increases our investment. And by the end of the series—by this point we’re eight years and more than seventy hours in—we’ve witnessed Tony and Carmela reconcile, resigned to their chosen lot. Tony—and, by extension, James Gandolfini—is obese now, breathing heavily. (Gandolfini would die of a heart attack six years later, imbuing his performance with the retrospective feel of cinéma vérité.) The series ends with the screen going black on this family unit, waiting for death. It’s been said that the theme of The Sopranos is that people don’t change. What makes it a powerful show is that we feel them not change across those cumulative hours. The felt passage of time runs hauntingly perpendicular to this emotional stasis.

There is a relation, in other words, between duration and affect, both in the sense that temporal investment both comes from and leads to a particular affinity, and because we are made aware of physicality and even mortality: that of the actors and even our own.

The Mahogany Pod

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“The past is another country; they do things differently there.” In her affecting memoir, The Mahogany Pod, my old friend Jill Hopper revisits a past that feels so close and yet so distant, half a lifetime ago, when she was in her early twenties and she fell in love with a man who would die within the year. Her narrative fluidly switches from now to then and back again as she unravels her memories and realizes that she still has lingering questions and loose ends to be resolved from all that time ago.

Things were different back then because Jill was young, and life is always different for the young: more dramatic, more intense, more involved, more highly strung; more of everything. As Jill puts it: “What does a twenty-four-year-old want? To be young, to live to the tips of his fingers, and the ends of his toes, to have wild nights out with friends and wild nights in with lovers, to get crazily drunk, to sing and dance, to travel and see new places” (104). At the same time, Jill and her friends feel like they are in the limbo at the very end of what has been an extended youth. Done with university, but still living like students (sleeping on mattresses on the floor, a collage of postcards decorating the walls), they are waiting for their careers to begin or to take off, and perhaps to settle down with husbands and wives rather than flatmates and flings. Hopper knows in some ways that she is only treading water (“typing, filing and catching moths” [49]), waiting for something to happen, when into her life walks Arif, who, it turns out, will forever be young, will never grow old.

Arif and Jill would never have got together if it were not for his disease. It is only because he has already had a lymphoma, now in remission, that he returns to his hometown of Oxford for treatment and becomes Jill’s housemate. Then when the cancer returns, she compares the situation to seeing a friend drowning: “Everyone else was watching Arif from the shore. But for me it wasn’t enough to stay on dry land, to shout encouragement or throw him a line. I had to be in the experience with him. I couldn’t stand to watch him suffering and now suffer myself. I didn’t want him to be along. I got into the water” (87). In the weeks and months that follow–all in all, Jill knows Arif for nine months, and he dies on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday–the two of them experience the highs and the lows, joy and grief, hope and desperation. They open themselves up to each other, gambling everything on the moment as every moment is precious, overshadowed by Arif’s diagnosis. As Jill puts it in the wake of his death: “The sense of immortality, invincibility, that had swept me along all through my teens and early twenties, had vanished, and I knew I would never get it back. [. . .] My greatest fear was that I’d never again feel so intensely alive as I had with Arif. I had spent months at the highest pitch of existence, when every note of every song dropped right into the center of my heart, when every smell, every touch, penetrated so deeply it could never be forgotten” (67). Of course, you can’t live like that forever. And when Arif dies, in more ways than one Jill ends up saying goodbye to something of herself.

Things were different back then, too, because it was the mid-1990s and we weren’t yet always online, with everything mediated through the Internet or the ether. Hopper is a would-be writer, but has a typewriter rather than a laptop in her room. Nobody ever Googles or texts. A mobile phone features only once, going off inappropriately during a wedding, which “wasn’t exactly an advert for their virtues” (149). Instead, there are letters, post-it notes, mixtapes, which end up as an archive (in a shoebox, of course), alongside the eponymous mahogany pod, a present from Arif, that Jill can consult in the present. It is thanks to these material traces that she can unwind and relive her memories, struck once again by the physical intricacy of handwriting, or by the atmospheric sense of the mixtape, to which she listens finally, for the very first time, and through which she ultimately feels Arif speaks to her once more, as briefly she is can no longer distinguish between then and now: “How have I got from that doorstep [. . .] to this one? The intervening decades have gone; I’m jumped straight from there to here. It’s too much” (211). Could a Spotify playlist have had the same effect? What if the relationship had had to be reconstructed through text messages? Ironically, it’s the almost old-fashioned, time-incrusted materiality of the surviving memory prompts that allow them to come to life once more in the present.

This is a story about then, but it is also a story about now. In the end, Jill decides she has to go see Arif’s mother, to work through a tension she feels has always come between them. And thanks to their conversation, she comes to see her younger self in new light, through someone else’s eyes, doubly distanced by this change of perspective. She also comes to realize that, for all the intense intimacy of her brief time with Arif, he had held something back, perhaps even told her a lie: his father was not, as she had thought, from Sri Lanka, but Pakistan. In fact, much that she thought she knew for sure turns out to be wrong. Even the mahogany pod that gives this book its title transpires (an expert from Kew Gardens reveals) to come not from a Mahogany tree. “Nothing is quite what it was,” muses Jill. “Perhaps the past is no more fixed than the present” (207). Arif comes into focus through her memories, but also shimmers slightly, as if in a mirage.

But it’s in that shimmering, as with the uncertainty that shadows any memoir, all autofiction, that they may get something wrong, that they are somehow untrue, that one person’s story can take on meaning that can be shared, can travel like a river. Jill Hopper’s beautifully-written account takes us all back to our various pasts, even as it reminds us that we can never go back, that the past is something we can only ever reinvent, never truly re-live.