As I recently, dorkily tweeted, today I became the foursquare “mayor” of 57th St. Books. (Please don’t ask why I use foursquare; sometimes I latch onto shiny things.) To celebrate the honor, I picked up The True Deceiver and Borges’ collected fiction. Yum!
I’ve also been tweeting a bit about 2666, where I’m now past the middle of The Part About the Crimes. I hadn’t realized how strictly this would follow the police procedural form, which I feel has made it “easier” for me to read. Frances says this made it more disturbing for her, to read about such personal crimes in such a clinical, distant way. I think the coldness and repetitiveness of the section is genuinely disturbing, but in terms of the immediate reading experience I do find the adoption of this genre easier to deal with than something truly grisly. (God, what is wrong with me, that this is somehow not “truly grisly” for me? But that’s what I’m saying…it’s awful, goodness knows, I’ve been cataloguing the deaths and they are brutal and horrible and upsetting. But no, the language is not grisly; I don’t feel like I’m reading a horror story. But then, that makes it more disturbing—this is the, um, horror story of the real world, or whatever.)
So I am both having issues and not having issues reading The Part About the Crimes, but what I’m definitely not having are the activist sort of impulses I mentioned before in others. Mostly, I don’t think I’ll really know anything until I’m done with The Part About Archimboldi, too. So, not for a while.
Coming up this week: I’m going to attempt to wrap up my actually-sort-of-long-whirlwind-tour of Russian literature. Some people (e.g., Turgenev) are only going to get a slot for a short story; this morning that made me feel like the whole thing was pointless and I almost swore off reading altogether. But I need to tie off all these loose ends before April, when I’ll be doing three massive group reads: most of the end of 2666, Parade’s End, and The Brothers Karamazov. And yes, I’m hoping I’ll have time for some “personal” reading in there too, somewhere. Ha.
Think many have your same detached view of the violence of The Part About the Crimes. Written in the language of the unengaged detectives, it seems like smple descriptions of person, dress, possessions. But given that the victims of these crimes have no voice within the text, they “speak” through those physical details. To me, poignant, overwhelmingly sad.
Also like you, I read through 2666 in a constant state of waiting, not wanting to come to any conclusion before it was presented to me because I was so uncertain of where the book might be heading. But that did keep me reading. Hungrily.
Cleaning reading house today too in preparation for a big reading April. Remembering what I love so much about Tennessee Williams.
I finally decided to put a thumbs down on 2666. Not my cuppa, I think. Too many other books that might offer both thoughtful insight into the universe and actual enjoyment.
nicole, you have shed light! Of course the genre framework matters. How else do people stomach CSI or grim Swedish detective novels? Maybe the people fleeing 2666 don’tread or watch that sort of thing, either.
Have you read much Borges before? He is central for Bolaño, absolutely central. And for W. G. Sebald, and Orhan Pamuk, etc., etc., etc. It’s only recently that I have really understood how big he is now.
AR—yeah, I keep thinking of Bones and CSI and whatnot, showing really gruesome stuff. But in stuff like that, the cops really, really want to catch the bad guys, because they see the gruesome stuff they’ve done. The audience is encouraged to also want to get the bad guys, even if it means fudging a warrant or improperly using state power to gain evidence. We sympathize with the cops who want “justice” even if the means are unjust. In 2666, though, the cops care so much less. They’re part of a slightly-differently-corrupted machine, where they just don’t really bother.
Actually, I hadn’t thought that through so much before. There is something to that. I will keep at it.
As far as Borges, I have read “some stuff” (and loved it, natch); but like you, it’s only recently that I realized I need to get a lot more into him than I have before because he is all over the freaking place.