Excerpt:
2666 [Roberto Bolaño] (Part I)
It is a heavy book in all aspects. In weight and in the weight of the blood and toil invested in the writing of it. Also the weight of humor which pokes at us like the edges of a wire strung across the top of a wall built to stay intruders, yet low enough that the most agile could still leap over. Or if one had the thickest head of hair imaginable, so that the thorns from a sacred crown would not actually pierce the scalp but annoyingly press against it. 2666. When I heard of its existence I became so agitated with desire for it that I sent an agent out to find it, as I was on my hands and knees in the center of a large drawing, and I could not break the thread of the line I was executing. So I sent another in my stead and watched with one eye impatiently even as I was supposedly concentrating on my work.
When at last I had the book in my hands I was satisfied and I placed it by my bed and there it stayed for quite some time...
It is a heavy book in all aspects. In weight and in the weight of the blood and toil invested in the writing of it. Also the weight of humor which pokes at us like the edges of a wire strung across the top of a wall built to stay intruders, yet low enough that the most agile could still leap over. Or if one had the thickest head of hair imaginable, so that the thorns from a sacred crown would not actually pierce the scalp but annoyingly press against it. 2666. When I heard of its existence I became so agitated with desire for it that I sent an agent out to find it, as I was on my hands and knees in the center of a large drawing, and I could not break the thread of the line I was executing. So I sent another in my stead and watched with one eye impatiently even as I was supposedly concentrating on my work.
When at last I had the book in my hands I was satisfied and I placed it by my bed and there it stayed for quite some time...
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My Intro: It’s That Arsenic Lobster Again, Alice…and in 2666 to boot…
If the point was to make the murders in Santa Teresa (a thinly disguised Ciudad Juárez) seem less aberrant in a world gone mad, then Bolaño was successful.
Some things seem overblown, such as one character saying about the Santa Teresa murders “the secret of the world is hidden in them.” The confluence of the maquiladoras located in Santa Teresa with narcos acting with impunity provides fertile ground for the murders. But the key is the broken justice system, where politics impede investigations.
Maybe the ultimate key comes from an artist held in an asylum who believes that “we find communion” from the maelstrom of the world with a “senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.” Seen from this vantage point, the structure of the book reflects the chaos surrounding us. What if instead of an Arcimboldo painting, Bolaño’s five books construct a mirror in which we are supposed to see ourselves and the world around us?...Dwight at Common Reader
Some things seem overblown, such as one character saying about the Santa Teresa murders “the secret of the world is hidden in them.” The confluence of the maquiladoras located in Santa Teresa with narcos acting with impunity provides fertile ground for the murders. But the key is the broken justice system, where politics impede investigations.
Maybe the ultimate key comes from an artist held in an asylum who believes that “we find communion” from the maelstrom of the world with a “senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.” Seen from this vantage point, the structure of the book reflects the chaos surrounding us. What if instead of an Arcimboldo painting, Bolaño’s five books construct a mirror in which we are supposed to see ourselves and the world around us?...Dwight at Common Reader
Santa Teresa: …“the secret of the world is hidden in them”…~Bat galim
This statement is not an ‘overblown’ commentary but a visceral indictment.
I keep pounding on that anvil, Primo Levi, hoping the ringing blows of the ‘lager’ bell, no mere orange flower, mind you, will resonate through the “maelstrom of this world’. There is a developing ‘chaos surrounding us’ reflecting through all the fluid‘matrices’, disheveled notes of the creeping captivity of the dimensions of alienation. There is an ensnaring dimension which wishes us to believe there is no God ["a senseless God…with senseless creatures"], at least not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus.
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Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,Ev’n all my heart, and what is lodged there:
I passe not, I, what of the rest become,So Thou art still my God, be out of fear. He will be pleased with that dittie;And if I please him, I write fine and wittie. .... ~Herbert, 'Harbingers are come...'
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