Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“2666” by Roberto Bolano (first published in Spanish in 2004; English
translation by Natasha Wimmer first published 2008)
You
have now seen me do this two or three times on this blog, and here I am about
to do it again. I am about to serve you as a “Something Old”, unaltered from
its first appearance in print, a review of mine, which appeared in another
publication.
Five
years ago, an indulgent books page editor of the Sunday Star-Times allowed me much more space than newspaper reviews
usually permit, to review Roberto Bolano’s 2666. This was because I argued that the novel had
already been a huge cultural phenomenon and I wanted to respond to it in some
detail.
My
main grouch was what I call “premature evaluation”. I’m always on my guard when
everybody seems all too eager to label a new novel a masterpiece. In my view,
time is the only winnowing fan in the sorting of masterpieces. Wait fifty or a
hundred years before you call a book a masterpiece. Only then will it have
proven its enduring worth. In reading Bolano’s 2666, I was reacting in part against what I saw as excessive praise
of the novel. I am fairly sure that my review was the longest review of this
novel to appear in any New Zealand newspaper or magazine. I am also fairly sure
that it received a (veiled) rebuke in one highbrow publication, where it was
contended (without any reviewer being named) that “some people” hadn’t
appreciated the novel’s many ironies.
I
do not have delusions of infallibility (despite some of the things I say on
this blog). I know my opinions are perishable and worthy of no more respect
than those of other informed people. I also understand that, when a lot of
powerful reviewers and critics salute the high merits of something, it is hard
for lesser critics and reviewers to contradict them.
Anyway,
for all its defects (and demotic style), here is my original review of Roberto
Bolano’s 2666, which appeared in the Sunday-Star Times on 31 January 2010. As
newspaper book reviews go, it is long; but it is shorter (and less analytical)
than the reviews that usually appear on this blog. Having the space to talk
about books in more detail was one of the reasons I set up this blog. If I were
writing this review in a more specialised context, I might have quoted parts of
the text to validate my views, and I would have handled it with a little more
finesse. For all that, I still stand by this judgment. So here is my review:
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Here
is a massive problem for a reviewer – a book that comes so laden with praise
that any criticism of it will seem impertinence.
Let’s explain.
Roberto
Bolano was a minor poet, born in Chile in 1953, exiled from the military coup
there, who spent most of his life in Mexico and Spain. Though he was a fervent
left-winger himself, he had a reputation for seeing South America’s leftist
literary establishment as gutless, elitist and complacent. He was notorious for
his fierce criticisms of the revered novelist Isabel Allende.
In the 1990s,
needing to earn a living for his family, Bolano turned from poetry to fiction.
He began to turn out dark, satirical and often oddly surreal short novels that
gradually gained critical praise. But for the last four or five years of his
life, we was working on something really big. In 2003, at the age of fifty, he
died of liver failure (exacerbated by a history of drug abuse). He left behind
him a huge, unfinished manuscript divided into five parts. His literary
executors debated whether they should publish it as five shorter novels or one
big one. They decided to go with the big one.
2666 was published in Spanish in 2004.
It was at once hailed by Spanish and Latin American critics and became a huge
bestseller. Natasha Wimmer’s English language translation came out in 2008. The
praise continued. 2666 was seen as
the most stunning Spanish-language novel since Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude, but
completely different in tone from the old macho poseur. The Picador paperback
edition quotes enthusiastic reviews by John Banville, Susan Sontag, Colm Toibin
and Edmund White among others. The word “masterpiece” is frequently used. On
YouTube I have accessed Spanish and Portuguese language promos, which sell it
to readers in a style usually reserved for movie blockbusters.
So
here is a certified masterpiece, a critical and popular success. Now how dare I
say, after making my way through its 900 pages, that I have not been knocked
over in the tsunami?
Let’s
make it clear that I am not at all scared of long novels. In fact there are
some that are among my best friends. Cervantes, Richardson, Balzac, Dickens,
Eliot, Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Morante – bring ‘em on, I say.
But
when I invest in 900 pages of fine print, I like to think that the author has
actually realised his/her characters, actually believes in them and doesn’t
just see them as pawns in an intellectual game. In 2666, I feel I am reading an intelligent, observant and often
engaging intellectual game.
Again,
let’s explain.
The
title 2666 has nothing to do with the
future and this is not a work of science fiction. (Apparently the title derives
in an obscure way from an earlier work by Bolano.) The novel is set firmly in
the twentieth century. At its core, it questions the meaning and purpose of
literature and art in general in a world of material horror.
The
first of its five parts is literary satire. Four literary critics are on the
trail of an obscure German writer, who lurks behind the improbable pseudonym
Benno von Archimboldi. They think he is Nobel Prize material, but he hides from
the public and virtually nothing is known about him. I read this section with a
happy smirk. Bolano captures perfectly the fatuity of so much academic lit
crit. The backscratching and bedding at literary conferences. The bitching at other critics in snide
articles in refereed journals. The whole academic catastrophe.
So
far, so satirical. But in the second and third parts we get something much
grittier and more disturbing. First a Chilean critic, and then a black American
reporter, are drawn to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, where women are
being murdered by the hundred. (Bolano has based this town closely on the real
Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez and its real history of multiple unsolved
murders.)
Then
we come to the third part, which really threw me.
Across
about 300 pages, Bolano gives us the details of all the women who have been
raped, murdered and mutilated in Santa Teresa. There are side issues about a
nutter who goes around desecrating churches, and vignettes of such fun things
as rape and castration in an all-male prison. There is a subtext of Yanqui
cultural exploitation and a milieu of drug cartels and casual violence. But it
is the endless CSI-type descriptions
of women’s naked and violated bodies which dominate. They go on and on and on.
And on and on and on. And (in case I didn’t mention it) on and on and on, to
the point where I became numbed and indifferent to them.
Of
course, this could have been Bolano’s intention. We get used to (or indifferent
to) the most repulsive things if we experience them often enough. Perhaps
literature is partly responsible for numbing our senses, so there’s another
criticism of literature for Bolano to wave at us. But I can’t shake the sense
that his overblown and overlong section could have been handled more concisely.
Is it in fact evidence that the book hadn’t yet taken final shape when Bolano died?
I’m
not violating any reviewer’s code, or spoiling any secrets, by pointing out
that the search for the serial killer and the search for the obscure German
novelist, are connected. Obviously any reader will quickly understand that they
have some connection, if they appear so pointedly in the same novel.
The
fifth part gives us the pay-off, placing the German writer in the context of
the huge violence of the mid-twentieth century – Stalinism, Nazism, the
Holocaust – and then twisting the story back to Santa Teresa for intentional
comparison. Again, there are all those finely tuned questions about the
importance (or utility) of art in a world of horrors. Is literature really a
trivial game? Or necessary escapism? Or something that ennobles the sordid? Or
mere mystification?
Yes,
it’s much more subtle and complex than this sort of summary makes it sound.
There is much dry wit among the horror. However with the frequent explicit sex
as with the frequent explicit violence, Bolano does appear to be seeing how far
he can push his readers before they choke. He may be critical of the literary
game, but he himself is caught up in it.
It’s
important to add that the prose of this English translation is clear and
readable throughout. My misgivings about 2666
are not misgivings about deliberate obscurity, which is often the case with
self-consciously literary novels. It’s also important to note that these 900
pages may not be definitive. A news report says that a sixth part has been
unearthed among Bolano’s papers.
Still,
while I found it often intriguing, generally readable and filled with
interesting (if sometimes nauseating) detail, in the end I found 2666 an intellectual construct rather
than a novel that engaged my sympathies and senses and enlarged my world. I
would wait another fifty years to see if it was still remembered before I
started singing the word “masterpiece”.
I
know this is a minority report, but there it is.
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