Digital Sextant

The title tells you how many hours you'll spend on this book.

I’ll admit that I’m envious of people who can read and dissect Literature with the wide-vocabulary and witty allusions that an English Ph.D. usually implies.  The epitome of this kind of erudite dissection is, for me, Jonathan Goodwin, who regularly writes reviews of books and films that I find both inscrutable and make me monstrously jealous.

That envy rears its ugly head whenever I read one of the more mystifying works of High Literature that my ivory tower colleagues bubble about, and find myself struggling to gain purchase on any value the book carries.  The last time I wandered down that road, which involves self-recrimination and a death march to the end of a book I stubbornly insisted I would finish no matter what, I found myself shaking my head at The Magus.

This time it’s Roberto Bolano’s 2666. I got this book as a gift and understand why it was given — the reviews are quite laudatory — but I found it interminable and inscrutable.  A chunk from the NYT review of books describes it nicely:

Its 893 pages are indisputably brilliant, but they are not, by any definition, brisk—they’re tall, crowded, brutal, dense. In fact, one possible explanation of the mysterious title is that it would take any normal author 2,666 pages to convey what Bolaño manages to convey (or half-convey, or almost possibly begin to suggest he might convey) in just under 900. Reading 2666 demands a degree of sustained artistic communion that strikes me as deeply old-fashioned, practically Victorian. There are underwhelming patches, tonal dead spots, and even stretches that border on self-parody. The opening chapter is, at times, prohibitively dry. (It took me a second reading, immediately after finishing the book, to pick up much of its resonance.) Even when Bolaño is absolutely on fire, hypnotizing you with his dirty magic (which is often), the pages don’t fly by—if anything, they drag you right down into the dense fudgy core of time, where moments congeal into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into eons.

Plot summary, I’m afraid, is futile. Bolaño has a lyric poet’s feel for narrative logic, and 2666 is a modular epic—a novel built out of five linked novellas, each of which is itself a collage of endless stand-alone parts: riffs, nightmares, set pieces, monologues, dead ends, stories within stories, descriptive flourishes. (link)

Sam Anderson’s comments are pretty apt, if you cut out the “indisputably brilliant” part.  I couldn’t help but think about how this book reminded me of the line from the film Wonder Boys, when the Katie Holmes character says something like “You always told us that writing is about making choices.  You haven’t made any choices here.”  I feel the same way about 2666.  It chooses to include everything he thought of, with no effort toward telling a story that actually goes anywhere.   So, all that vitriol aside, here are my patented “five bullets” about the book:

• While the initial section about the literary professors searching for the mysterious author Archimbaldi drags a bit, it ended up being my favorite part.
• The monumental middle section in which Bolano spends hundreds of pages telling the two-or-three page stories of women murdered in the border town of Mexico would have been an excellent standalone way to call attention to the real town where this has been happening.  Alas, in the middle of this book it becomes a death march.  I suspect most readers who make it past 50 pages but still quit the book do so somewhere in this vast terrain of rapes and murders.  It was even worse for me, as I read before I go to bed.
• I’ll agree  with Anderson that Bolano tells innumerable little stories in the book that shimmer and delight.  Perhaps if this book were marketed not as a novel but as a monstrous short story collection, I wouldn’t have minded so much.
• It’s important to note, as Anderson does, that Bolano uses the detective trope but doesn’t really follow through on the mystery.  I’ll tell you right now, Archimbaldi seems to have nothing to do with the murders (?), and we don’t find out who the murderer is.  I’m not calling this a “spoiler” though because if you’re reading this book for plot, you’re fscked.
• I am most disappointed that we never got anything explaining or having to do with the title.  I read online a reference to another book that seems to be part of his previous works, but come on!  Bah.

I would not recommend this book except to the most die-hard literary titans, and even then I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

Finally, this may seem petty, but I’m annoyingly attentive to how many books I read each year.  I aim for 100 and have hit that the last two times.  While I haven’t let 2666 slow me down, I’m still somewhat resentful of the time it’s taken away from my reading of other books.  Perhaps I should start compiling two totals–books read and pages read.  Having both lists would make my reading history more like the bicameral legislature of the U.S. — the Number of Books read is like the Senate, where each book counts equally regardless of its size.  The pages read is like the House, where doorstops (or blunt bludgeoning weapons) like 2666 would carry a lot more weight than the 150-page 50s pulp novels and comic book trade paperbacks.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, I started the book on 30 January 2010.