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Now that the sun is shining, I’m finally in the mood for reading a long book recreationally (in the sun, at the beach, with an iced matcha). I just started reading a hardcover version of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai which, while not written in a romance language, is certainly a long book (670 pages). It will be interesting to see if I can enjoy reading a long book for what it is without being bombarded with all the ideas and critiques raised in class this semester (narrative, pacing, form, even materiality).

As I’m looking to start writing my final paper, I’m thinking a lot about form and time and how our long books (self-selected and Bolaño) have been altered or influenced by conventions. I left a comment on somebody’s post the other week where I was left wondering what a story would look like if an author were free from the constraints of the publishing industry (length, alternate endings, character choices, etc.). I think even beyond publishing standards, so much of how we write is done because that’s just what’s done (am I advocating to abolish standardized spelling like they had in the middle ages?) (what would a story look like if it didn’t have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, a rising action and a climax?).

This class has given me the space to think about what it would look like to push the boundaries of what is expected, what is given, what is flexible, and what is necessary for a (narrative fiction) book to be a book.

Beyond this, I look forward to applying some of the course themes to the rest of my studies, especially ideas on the phenomenology of reading, theories of narrative, and commodification/marketing. Plus, I got to discover that reading two long books at a time isn’t all that scary or hard, and so I’ll have the confidence going forward to choose books based on content without filtering by length.

I’m looking forward to our class discussion tomorrow, and wrapping up whatever loose threads remain!

(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 think I’ve been trying to sit with the why of it all. Why is this the ending Bolaño chose? What does ending on a short flashback section achieve for the story? Is it to sandwich the book between two Garcia Madero sections for symmetry? Did he want a chance to play around with the idea of a travelogue/ road trip novel in a more traditional way, outside of the interviews in the middle sections?

This section was fun and I love the idea of a road trip, especially one where you’re out looking for clues, but the mention of all the different spiders they were facing ruined the fun vibes for me (I’ll stay home, thank you): “Night noises: wolf spiders, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, black widows, desert toads” (630). Garcia Madero was as insufferable as ever. He spent so many words making sure we knew he found Cesárea overweight and how he couldn’t believe he was sleeping with Lupe. It doesn’t seem like he likes his friends much, not even Belano or Lima, constantly making comments and sounding annoyed at what they say or how they act.

I was also thinking a lot about the flow of the text/ the pacing as I was reading, mainly how Bolaño slows the text down when it starts to pick up pace. Like when they’re going through the drawings of the sombrero over lines and guessing what was drawn, and Lupe’s guesses are coming quicker and quicker. Then, she gets stumped for one second and suddenly Garcia Madero is commenting on a dead plant he sees approaching in the distance, narrating a bit of the landscape (612). It takes the readers out of the game for those few lines and slows down the narrative before resuming the game for four more drawings. I don’t know what, exactly, his aim was with this but it helped remind me that they’re still on the road and that the journey is still moving forward? Or is it just his placement of an omen, like on the next page when they end on the drawing of “[f]our Mexicans keeping vigil over a body” (613). A little foreshadowing.

Throughout the book, there were certain parts where I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be funny and I just don’t understand the joke, or if the audience is purposefully being left out of the joke and it isn’t supposed to make sense outside of the “in” crowd. An example in this section is when the group was stopped by patrolmen when leaving Nacozari: “Are you from Nacozari, officer? Lupe asks him. The patrolman looks at her and says no, why would she think that, he’s from Hermosillo. Belano and Lima laugh” (602). Or, later on, with “Just the mention of Maximilian’s army cracks us right up… A Belgian head of a Belgian regiment. It cracks us up. A Belgian-Mexican regiment” (638). Literally what are they talking about?

To conclude my thoughts on this conclusion to The Savage Detectives, I enjoyed this section (maybe?) more than the previous ones. It felt like a Christmas special in a tv series. This could have been because it was shorter, or because it was a story where the main characters are all together in an isolated sort of tale. Overall, I’ll probably give The Savage Detectives a 3.75/5 star rating, in that it was good for what it was but I probably won’t reread it or recommend/ lend it out to friends.

I only read five chapters of The Shadow of the Wind this week (maybeeee 65 pages), which means I have about 190 pages to read next time to finish off the book (hoping for some nice weather so I can read outside). I did read some spoilers on another blog post, which was my own fault, but I am looking forward to seeing where the ending goes. I mentioned in last week’s blog post how I wondered whether authors of long books owe their readers something in their ending that differs from short books, but now I’m wondering whether/how that changes when the long book is not a standalone but rather the first of a series.

This short part that I read included a twenty page experimental(?) interlude, when the characters were interviewing the elderly Jacinta about Penelope and Carax and how they came about deciding to get engaged.

This was only the second (I thought there was a third but couldn’t find it) time the author has used this interlude style of prose, the first being back when they were asking the priest about Nuria Monfort (209).

The way it’s written feels like a flashback scene in a movie (quite dramatic). It’s all italics and is supposed to be the narrative of the person being interviewed (eg. the priest’s section gets interrupted and they mention that he paused in his narrative) but it’s told in third person and doesn’t sound like it’s being told the characters’ voices: “As a child, María Jacinta Coronado was convinced that the world ended on the outskirts of Toledo and that beyond the town limits there was nothing but darkness and oceans of fire” (268). Following Jacinta’s interlude, she continues her narrative for two half-pages in her own voice.

I thought that this flashback writing style choice was kind of weird in its inconsistency, especially since it’s only happened twice (again, maybe) and not every time the characters interview someone about Carax. Now I’m sitting here wondering if it has a structural purpose or if it is just a neat little writing quirk.

My questions for this week come back to ideas of pacing (from our class discussions) and endings. I would say that The Shadow of the Wind (for all I complain about slogging through it) (and it isn’t just me, here is the top review on Storygraph from when I went to make sure people agreed with me that it was medium-paced) is a medium to fast paced book.

I guess when we’re talking about pacing for a long book, should we have longer beginnings and more drawn-out endings? Would this help our middle sections (which has too many pages to be entirely fast-paced without tiring the reader out) to feel like they can cut out some of the excess that takes away from the main story arc?

I’m running out of things to write about. This is our fifth blog post on Bolaño, which will make about 2000 words by the end of this, and I’m struggling to come up with likes or dislikes that I haven’t already harped on about. I’m liking the book well enough by now, which is more to do with the amount of time I’ve invested than anything else.

My favourite section from this week took place early on in the reading, where we have Edith Oster, “sitting on a bench in the Alameda” (424). She speaks on meeting Belano for the first time, a casual meeting in Mexico City, and then their subsequent acquaintance in Barcelona.

I think mostly I loved the vibes/aesthetic/energy of this entry, of an artist and all her artist connections and experiences in various artsy cities. I also loved the existential thought processes, first causing her to end her relationship with Abraham and then with her both not caring if she died and fostering an intense love of living. This led to the weirdly intense (kind of a one-sided therapy-esque?) relationship she grew with Belano in such a relatively short time: “I knew, I was conscious of the fact, that there were many things I hadn’t told him that I probably needed to tell him or should tell him, and I thought that if I died riding or if the horse threw me or if a branch in the pine forest knocked me to the ground, Arturo would know everything I hadn’t told him and would understand it without needing to hear it from my lips” (429). She had all this trauma and all this inspiration and plans for her film, and yet she chose to spend so much energy making sure that this one specific person understood her. Then, it was like once she finally finished telling her entire life story (after moving in with him), she got bored of him and left for somewhere new to do it all over again (iconic). I also appreciated that the ending of this section, while not particularly happy, was still hopeful (out of medical care and with a new job) (makes for a pleasant enough ending).

I guess my questions going forward into the final section of our reading are predictably pretty focused on the idea of conclusions. How do you conclude a long book and do you have to do it differently than a short book (is there added incentive or responsibility to make it worth the extra effort of suffering through to the end)? How do I myself want/expect/need Bolaño to end this (what kind of final section could be satisfying versus what would feel like a waste of 600 pages)?

I am ready to be finished this book. I know at the beginning of the semester, I commented on the fact that The Shadow of the Wind is the first book in the series and that I was optimistic about being able to continue with the following books. Maybe one day I’ll love picking them up, but I will first need a healthy break from this plot line. It isn’t even a bad book, I think it’s just so drawn out (too long?) that I don’t care what happens anymore.

The characterization has never been particularly deep, but it’s easy to look past that for the first quarter of a book (especially as the main character spent time growing into adulthood). At close to 300 pages in, over the halfway point, I just wish there was some sort of spark (something worth reading about the main character or the plot). The “mystery” of Carax (the author of the books that “chose the main character) hasn’t really developed. I don’t feel further along in the story now than I did at the end of the last section. Everything new that we have learned about Carax, about the protagonist, and about his friends/family/love interests has been more of the same. We’re wandering around the city talking to people and linking together repetitive bits of info (practically chasing wild geese at this point).

As I’m writing this, any tone of frustration (that I’m not allowed to DNF this book and have to slog through it) present is probably just me being dramatic and I very well might turn around in two weeks time and give this book a five star review. There’s a lot of book left (200ish pages?) and we could just be at the lull in the middle of the story (at which point I would say we could have maybe done without some of this repetitive middle fluff and had a shorter novel).

Again, to reiterate my disclaimer from previous weeks, I’m sure the reading experience would be different if I was reading the book in one go over a few days instead of over several weeks. I’ve mentioned before that I wonder if I’m missing things by forgetting them as we read our other class material in between, but also I feel like there’s something to be said about momentum. Riding a bike is not fun if you only pedal once every 100m and just wobble and inch along; maybe I would be more forgiving (in terms of waiting for the story to get to the point) and enjoying the reading more if I wasn’t putting the book down every 100 pages.

I took a break from reading during reading break, for better or worse, which has made for an interesting re-entry into the world of our novel. I caught up on reality tv and scrolled through way more Instagram reels than I should have, consuming all sorts of media that was not written by our beloved Bolaño. Though it was a bit slow to get back into our book, I do think the three (?) weeks between the last time we read The Savage Detectives and now was a good palate cleanser. I felt myself excited to get back into things, especially with the momentum, now that the end is feeling nearer and we’re officially over the halfway point, like when you’re on a kayak and the shore ahead is finally closer than the one you left behind and your arms start to hurt a bit less.

I don’t have much to add about the reading this week that I haven’t said in previous weeks, I think we’re all just waiting to figure out the point of it all and where the story takes us. I think I’m growing to enjoy the episodic narrative more than I did last time, now that we know what to expect a little better. I do wonder about the length of each entry we’re reading, as we talk about long books and why novels end (on a whim?). Our class discussions have made me now look at each mini story and think: why is this entry so short? Why does this entry need to take up twelve pages, what does this say that couldn’t have been said in two?

I highlight a few sections each week that stood out to me. An entry from this week’s reading that I enjoyed was Mary Watson’s, a travelogue of 1977 (p.253-269). It was relatively lengthy, but read like the kind of adventure a twenty year old (or however old, we only know she was older than nineteen) would have, and there were a lot of characters whose stories we only glimpsed from the section. I also loved how she was so infatuated with some guy for the summer only to move on immediately after term started back up, a true summer romance. It wasn’t even particularly interesting (similar to quite a few of the entries), so I’m not sure why it stuck out to me, I think it was the ominous “something bad is going to happen” feeling to keep the reader guessing about each character, and then how the end of the night watchman’s story is told only through someone else’s dealings with him (Hugh). Hugh was an interesting character, especially with his moment of loneliness when he realized there would be nobody to tell that he died now that his girlfriend had dumped him (268). I put a sticky note beside his words about not being able to voice this feeling or explain that loneliness.

I find myself struggling to know what to write about this week’s reading. This was one of those books that I’ll finish and probably not really think about again (besides our incoming class discussion). I neither loved nor hated it. I don’t really feel any particular way about Amulet, I just read it and now it’s over. I did like the prose, and I enjoyed the slightly more bouncy(?) writing/narration style to what we see in The Savage Detectives. By bouncy, I mean like:

Where maybe your most straightforward non-nonsense author (maybe an author really into historical accuracy) might tell the story like the black line, our narrator’s voice is the pink, where everything is a “yes, but…” or a “maybe, while also…”

I found love to be a strong theme throughout the chapters, a love of poetry, of Mexico, of young poets, of language and words and slang, of her friends, and of storytelling.

I also thought a lot about Poulet’s writing on the phenomenology of reading as I was reading. The narrator talks about how much she loves the poets León Felipe and Pedro Garfías, and while she says she worked with them in Mexico before they died, it’s unclear how much of her “knowing” poets is from meeting them versus reading their poetry. It’s Garfías’ poems she’s reading in the bathroom when UNAM was seized, and she then spirals into her stories about various poets she knew. In reading Garfías’ words in this scene, it’s like a part of him (as author) was with her (as reader) in the bathroom stall; her act of reading inspiring the literature to become “a sort of human being,” and linking “a common consciousness with the reader” (Poulet 59).

One idea I underlined to share this week was her mediation on movement towards the east: “To where night comes from. But then I thought: It’s also where the sun comes from” (Bolaño 54). I have never thought about the night coming from the east, because I guess I’ve always been so fixated on the sun setting in the west.

Then, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts about who the narration is for. When the narrator says “you” (like “I still have to tell you about her”) (41), is she speaking to a generally undefined audience, as in everyone who reads the book, or is she addressing it to something/one more defined (like the young poets she loves and mentors)?

I have now reached the twenty-first chapter in The Shadow of the Wind, where Daniel (main character) has just left his meeting with Nuria (who knew Julián Carax personally) after discussing Julián and his books. I had hoped to finish chapter 24 in this section, but I’ll just have to pick up some slack with the page count in future weeks.

This section wasn’t boring, but it was less immediately grabbing than the previous section (it mostly contains our main character, Daniel, running around the city tracking down clues about who Julián is/was and why it’s all important). Or, maybe the section wasn’t less interesting, but rather the experience of putting a book down and not touching it for a week at a time is taking some of the adrenaline/drive/will to read out of it. I feel like I am normally such a mood reader, so trying to balance a schedule of two alternating books is definitely teaching me a lot about how I read and how my motivation levels rise and fall.

We found out (spoilers ahead) through a letter from Penélope (lots of tension, betrayal, loved Julián, “found out” mysterious information that Julián apparently did not know) that Julián had left Barcelona to “pursue [his] dreams” (143-44). I would love to know more about this man, I feel like we’re getting little scraps of information here and there that are supposed to eventually (presumably) paint a bigger picture, but I might need to start keeping a notebook or something because I feel myself forgetting all the little clues and how they connect.

One passage I bookmarked to share for this week’s blog post was just a couple pages before I stopped reading, on page 175 of my edition: “Julián lived in his books. The body that ended up in the morgue was only a part of him. His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one, That all of his characters were himself.” (Outside of the context of Julián being some mysterious author with mysterious intentions whose books are bringing mysterious people with mysterious backgrounds into Daniel’s life), I thought this quote was kind of inspiring, that authors (but also all of us) live on in our stories. When we create art, of whichever form, we bury parts of ourselves in it, and so each time we read a poem or a novel, we’re keeping the author alive (which is taken more literally in the context of The Shadow of the Wind, where someone destroys all of Julián’s books to kill him completely).

I kind of feel like I cheated a little this week, when I downloaded an .epub copy of The Savage Detectives onto my laptop to read virtually while I was out and about. The whole reading-a-big-book vibe was ruined because I had no real way of conceptualizing how much of the book I had read or had left to read (especially when the page number only changes every few times I “turned” the page).

This section was awful to read. Content-wise, I preferred it to the last section, and I appreciated that we have different voices and perspectives and characters. We are no longer dealing with one insufferable main guy, but rather a blend of interesting people (like others have mentioned, even the characters we heard about in the last section are more three-dimensional in this section). I say it was awful to read not because of the content this week, but because of the structure. While some of it is okay, I found it difficult to read when whole pages are one big block of text, with no paragraph breaks and either very short or very long sentences. I must have lost my place five times while reading, and found that the lack of separation between sentences (monotonous) throughout the page was especially hard on my eyes (eye strain) in a virtual format.

One of the parts in the section that stuck out to me based on our class discussions was when the poet narrator was being interviewed by the group of young poets to discuss the state of Latin American poetry (pg. 153 – 155). The idea of length and long poetry and long books was interesting here. The majority of page 154 is one long run-on sentence, spiralling, as our narrator wonders if he was drugged as he tells his interviewers the story of his publisher taking a poem out of his prize-winning book. The group discusses length and page count requirements, and then the young poets’ “theory about long poems,” which they called “poem-novels” (154). I love this idea of a poem-novel, not just a poem within a novel but a poem so long and full that at some point it starts resembling the prose of a novel.

The other bookmark I have on what I wanted to note is with Laura Jáuregui’s section, mostly because I love her hater status. She describes Arturo Belano as a “stupid, conceited peacock” (172) and the men as “at least twenty and they acted like they were barely fifteen” (173). I loved her stance on the visceral realists being useless and not real, and the idea that “you can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold onto her with a poem” (172).