¿Existe la novela argentina?

"¿Existe la novela argentina?"
by Ricardo Piglia
Argentina, 1986

Let's say, to put it modestly, that [Roberto] Arlt is Jesus Christ.  Argentina is Israel, of course, and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem.  Arlt is born and lives a rather short life, dying at forty-two if I'm not mistaken...  But it wasn't the end of everything, because like Jesus Christ, Arlt had his St. Paul.  Arlt's St. Paul, the founder of his church, is Ricardo Piglia.  I often ask myself: what would have happened if Piglia, instead of falling in love with Arlt, had fallen in love with Gombrowicz?  Why didn't Piglia devote himself to spreading the Gombrowiczian good news...?

(Roberto Bolaño, "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom," 97-98 [ellipses added])

Fun w/Argentinean Gombrowicz Criticism, Part I.  Long before Roberto Bolaño started riffing on the vagaries of the Argentinean Literature of Doom, fellow big deal novelist/longtime Caravana favorite/alleged St. Paul to Roberto Arlt's Jesus Christ Ricardo Piglia (photo above) took up the question "¿Existe la novela argentina?" ["Is There Such a Thing as the Argentinean Novel?"] to propose a pre-Doom Argentinean long form canon of sorts centered on the works of Roberto Arlt, Macedonio Fernández, and--apparently unbeknownst to our good friend Bolaño--a wacky Polish party crasher by the name of Witold Gombrowicz.  In any event, the seven pillars of wisdom buttressing Piglia's action-packed 1986 essay go something like this.  1) Gombrowicz's 1953 novel Trans-Atlantyk, written in Polish a little more than halfway through the writer's World War II-prompted 24-year stay in Argentina and only later translated into the Spanish of his country of refuge as Transatlántico, is "una de las mejores novelas escritas en este país" ["one of the best novels written in this country"] (35).  Beyond its artistic qualities, though, Trans-Atlantyk poses fundamental questions about identity--in particular, "¿Qué pasa cuando uno pertenece a una cultura secundaria? ¿Qué pasa cuando uno escribe en una lengua marginal?" ["What happens when one belongs to a culture of lesser importance?  What happens when one writes in a non-mainstream language?"]--to which Gombrowicz would return again in his nonfiction Diary.  For Piglia, Argentinean culture thus inadvertently provided the rascally Polish writer who sometimes pretended to be a count with a living laboratory in which to put his art-and-exile hypotheses to the test while living in a South American nation "of lesser importance" in terms of the country's cultural presence on the world stage (36).  2) In terms of Gombrowicz's points of contact with the Argentinean literary tradition, on the other hand, Piglia reminds us that one of the main thrusts of Jorge Luis Borges' 1932 essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición" ["The Argentine Writer and Tradition"] bears a striking similarity to some of the Polish author's concerns as far as Borges' highlighting of the manner in which so-called "literaturas secundarias y marginales" ["minor and non-mainstream literatures"], due to the very fact that they are "desplazadas de las grandes corrientes europeas...de las grandes tradiciones" ["displaced from the great European currents...from the grand traditions"], actually afford what Borges deems the advantage of an "irreverente" ["irreverent"], liberating free hand in the sense that the so-called inferior tradition isn't tethered to the dominant tradition (Ibid., ellipses added).  Of course, whether that isn't really always true for iconoclasts by definition is another question for el señor Borges.  Still,  "para Borges (como para Gombrowicz)" ["for Borges (as for Gombrowicz)"], the essayist adds, "este lugar incierto permite un uso específico de la herencia cultural: los mecanismos de falsificación, la tentación del robo, la traducción como plagio, la mezcla, la combinación de registros, el entrevero de filiaciones.  Ésa sería la tradición argentina" ["this no man's land invites a specific use of one's cultural patrimony: in the process of falsification; the invitation to robbery; translation as plagiarism; the blending, the combination of registers; the mash-up of lines of descent.  That would be the Argentinean tradition"] (Ibid.).  3)  Had I not read the hysterical Borges- and Adolfo Bioy Casares-penned Crónicas de Bustos Domecq [Chronicles of Bustos Domecq] over the summer, I might have found that last bit a little over the top on Piglia's part.  However, that slender volume of spurious criticism alone corroborates everything the man's just said!  Piglia takes an unexpected critical detour at this point, though, to ask what would have happened if Gombrowicz had written Trans-Atlantyk in Spanish instead of in his native Polish.  That is, would the great "Gombro" have been able to pull off a master stylist act in a foreign language like Joseph Conrad did or would the results have been something more like the infamously rough-hewn Spanish of Roberto Arlt, who was born in Buenos Aires but grew up in a German-speaking home courtesy of first generation immigrant parents from Germany and Italy?  Piglia understandably supposes the latter, but the explanation he gives hints at the increasingly language-obsessed direction of the remainder of his piece: "Alguien que quiso denigrarlo dijo que Arlt hablaba el lunfardo con acento extranjero.  Ésa es una excelente definición del efecto que produce su estilo.  Y sirve también para imaginar lo que pudo haber sido el español de Gombrowicz: esa mezcla rara de formas populares y acento eslavo" ["Somebody who wanted to denigrate him said that Arlt spoke lunfardo with a foreign accent. That is an excellent description of the effect that his style produces.  And it also helps us imagine what Gombrowicz's Spanish could have been like: that strange mix of colloquialisms and a Slavic accent"] (37).  4) While "Arlt's St. Paul" acknowledges the truth behind the saying that "vivir en otra lengua" ["living in another language"] as practiced by the likes of Conrad, Jerzy Kosinski, Nabokov, Beckett and Isak Dinesen among others ''es la experiencia de la novela moderna" ["is the experience of the modern novel"], he emphasizes the point that Polish was a language that Gombrowicz "usaba casi exclusivamente en la escritura, como si fuera un idiolecto, una lengua privada" ["used almost exclusively in writing, as if it were an idiolect, a private language"] in his day to day life in Argentina (Ibid.)  Because of that, Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk, the first novel which he wrote in exile, "establece un pacto extremo con la lengua polaca" ["establishes an extreme covenant with the Polish language"].  How so?  "La novela es casi intraducible, como sucede siempre que un artista está lejos de su lengua y mantiene con ella una relación excesiva donde se mezclan el odio y la nostalgia" ["The novel is almost untranslatable, as always happens when an artist is far removed from his native tongue and maintains an excessive relationship with it in which hate and nostalgia freely mingle"].  That debatable point notwithstanding, Piglia's conclusion to this section was very arresting to this Argentinean Literature of Doomophile:  "Digo esto" ["I say this"], he explains, "porque me parece que la extrañeza es la marca de los dos grandes estilos que se han producido en la novela argentina del siglo xx: el de Roberto Arlt y el de Macedonio Fernández.  Parecen lenguas exiliadas: suenan como el español de Gombrowicz" ["because it seems to me that strangeness is the hallmark of the two great styles that have been produced in the 20th century Argentinean novel: Roberto Arlt's and Macedonio Fernández's"] (Ibid.).  5)  Naturally, all this talk of language and "strangeness" leads Piglia like a ping pong ball back to Borges and his "preciso y claro, casi perfecto" ["precise and clear, almost perfect"] Spanish (Ibid.).  In a digression that should be of great interest to translation geeks in general and to Borges geeks in particular, Piglia notes that Borges himself admits to having been greatly indebted to Paul Groussac--another European turned Rio de la Plata expat who, unlike Gombrowicz, abandoned his native tongue and went on to help define the norms of early Argentinean literary style along with people like Leopoldo Lugones.  Piglia: "En este sentido hay que decir que nuestro Conrad es Groussac" ["In this sense, we have to say that our Conrad is Groussac"].  And: "Allí busca Borges los origines 'argentinos' de su estilo" ["That's where Borges searches for the 'Argentinean' origins of his style"] (38).  To add to the irony of a French-born transplant like Groussac being a forerunner of Borges' in matters of Spanish language style, Piglia suggests that Borges himself might have constructed his style out of a misplaced relationship with his mother tongue.  Citing an anecdote which is very amusing but maybe not entirely reliable from a factual standpoint, Piglia shares the story about how the first book Borges supposedly read in his life was a translation of Don Quixote in English.  Borges: "Cuando lo leí en el original pensé que era una mala traducción" ["When I read it in the original Spanish, I thought that it was a bad translation"]!  Remarking that this anecdote reveals the mind of the prankster behind the great short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Piglia opines that when Borges eventually resolved the dilemma of how to write with the precision of English but the rhythms and tones of the Spanish of his everyday life, he was well on his way to developing one of the best prose styles in the language since Francisco de Quevedo (38).  6)  The 1947 "traducción argentina" ["Argentinean translation"] of Gombrowicz's 1937 novel Ferdydurke is the next item on the agenda, and like the preceding one it's a fairly awesome one indeed for a language freak.  Piglia begins by saying that the translation was one of the most "extravagantes" ["extravagant"] and "significativas" ["significant"] literary experiences he's aware of (39).  Although this sounds like a generous dollop of typical academic rhetorical overkill, anybody who's familiar with Gombrowicz's endearing penchant for referring to himself as "yo, Gombrowicz" ["I, Gombrowicz"] as if he were a character of his own creation won't doubt the "extravagant" part at all!  More to the point, in this case the translation endeavor just might have lived up to Piglia's hype inasmuch as the process entailed Gombrowicz creating a first draft of the novel by translating the original Polish into an "inesperado" ["unexpected"] and "casi onírico" ["almost dreamlike"] Spanish, and then arranging to have a team of native Spanish speakers working under the direction of the Cuban Virgilio Piñera hammer out the final version with the assistance of a veritable soccer team of others.  Who were these unnamed assistants?  "Los parroquianos y los jugadores de ajedrez y de codillo que frecuentaban la confitería Rex y que aportaban sus opiniones lingüísticas cuando las discusiones subían demasiado de tono" ["The regulars and the chess players and the codillo-playing card sharps who frequented the confitería Rex café/pastry shop and who chimed in with their own linguistic opinions whenever the discussions would get too heated"].  Piglia explains that "este equipo no conocía el polaco y los debates se trasladan a menudo al francés, lengua a la Gombrowicz y Piñera se cruzaban cuando el español ya no admitía nuevas torsiones" ["this team didn't know Polish and the debates were often carried over into French, a language where Gombrowicz and Piñera would find common ground when Spanish no longer accommodated new contortions"].  The result?  Gombrowicz essentially rewrote Ferdydurke in its entirety for the Argentinean translation, employing a blend of "Cuban," French, Polish, and "Argentinean" to form a new "materia viva" ["living/organic matter"] (Ibid.).  Piglia calls this mutation "uno de los textos más singulares de nuestra literatura" ["one of the most singular texts in our literature"], the "our" part stemming from the fact that "antes que nada hay que decir que es una mala traducción en el sentido en que Borges hablaba así de la lengua de Cervantes" ["first of all, it has to be said that it's a bad translation in the same sense in which Borges was talking about Cervantes' language"] and--more to the point, that little piece of mischievousness aside--secondly, that "en la versión argentina de Ferdydurke el español está forzado casi hasta la ruptura, crispado y artificial, parece una lengua futura.  Suena en realidad como una combinacion (una cruza) de los estilos de Roberto Arlt y de Macedonio Fernández" ["in the Argentinean version of Ferdydurke, the Spanish is strained almost to the breaking point; contorted and artificial, it seems like a future language.  It sounds, in reality, like a combination (a hybrid) of the styles of Roberto Arlt and of Macedonio Fernández"] (40).  7)  In the final page or two of the essay, "the founder of [Arlt's] church" prepares to seal the deal literary history-wise with the twin declarations that he believes the Argentinean translation of Ferdydurke to have merged with "las líneas centrales de la novela argentina contemporánea" ["the main currents of the contemporary Argentinean novel"] over time and that Gombrowicz himself probably deserves credit for having been "uno de los primeros" ["one of the first people"] in the country to pave the way for a reading of Arlt and Macedonio that legitimized them rather than disavowed them for their nonconformity.  Gombrowicz himself might have disdained such credit; after all, the well known provocateur famously lashed out at snobbish Argentinean literati with the accusation that "éste es un país donde el canillita que vocea la revista literaria de la élite refinada tiene más estilo que todos los redactores de esa misma revista" ["this is a country where the newspaper and magazine peddlers who shout out the names of the literary magazines of the elite have more style than all the contributors to that same rag"]!  That being said, Piglia notes that Macedonio was the first person to publish Gombrowicz in Spanish in his magazine Los papeles de Buenos Aires.  Did the two ever actually meet?  Probably not according to Piglia because "en aquellos años los dos vivían aislados, en pobrísimas piezas de pensión, seguros de su valor pero indecisos sobre el futuro de sus obras" ["in those years, the two lived isolated lives, in the poorest of boarding house rooms, confident about their worth as writers and yet undecided about the posterity of their works"] (40-41).  Which is a shame not least because "en más de uno sentido eran, el uno para el otro, el único lector posible" ["in more than one sense, each was the only possible reader for the other"].  In any case, "Arlt, Macedonio, Gombrowicz," writes the man Bolaño somewhat jokingly took to task for failing to spread "the Gombrowiczian good news."  "La novela argentina se construye en esos cruces (pero también con otras intrigas).  La novela argentina sería una novela polaca: quiero decir una novela polaca traducida a un español futuro, en un café de Buenos Aires, por una banda de conspiradores liderados por un conde apócrifo. Toda verdadera tradición es clandestina y se construye retrospectivamente y tiene la forma de un complot" ["The Argentinean novel is constructed out of those intersections (but also with other intrigues).  The Argentinean novel would be a Polish novel: by which I mean a Polish novel translated into a future Spanish, in a Buenos Aires café, by a band of conspirators led by a fake count.  All true tradition is clandestine and is constructed retrospectively and has all the attributes of a conspiracy"] (41).

Sources

• Roberto Bolaño's 2002 speech on "Derivas de la pesada," translated by Natasha Wimmer as "The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom," appears in The Hudson Review LXIV, no. 1 (2011): 95-101, and can also be found in Bolaño's Between Parentheses.  The Arlt/Piglia stuff in particular is classic Bolaño.
• Ricardo Piglia's "¿Existe la novela argentina?"--based on his 1982 participation in a conference on the Argentinean novel held at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina--appears on pp. 35-41 of his volume Crítica y ficción (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2000).  A more recent edition of the book retitles the essay as "La novela polaca" ["The Polish Novel"] for reasons unknown.  Whatever, an inspiring storyteller/critic.

Three Readers in "The Part About the Crimes"

2666 (Anagrama, 2007, original; Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008, translation)
by Roberto Bolaño
Spain, 2004

Should I feel guilty about enjoying "La parte de los crímenes" ["The Part About the Crimes"]?  For me, it's by far the most powerful, the most riveting, and maybe even the most intrinsically page-turning of all five of 2666's individual parts and yet both its subject matter--the mostly unsolved murders of hundreds of raped and/or otherwise tortured women as well as the murders that are solved but go unpunished for one reason or another--and its signature stylistic approach to the subject matter--the pairing of a forensic close-up of dozens of the dead bodies discovered in the desert between 1993 and 1997 with a Decameron-like storytelling machine dedicated to spitting out jagged biographical chunks of the lives of a host of characters either touched by or actively involved in the crimes--lead me to the uncomfortable conclusion that the text inspires me aesthetically at the same time as it arouses indignation in me thematically.  Is this what Bolaño intended?  Did he want me to be "entertained" by his fictionalization of hundreds of real life tragedies?  Or, to borrow the question posed by Theodor Adorno and apply it to the case of Ciudad Juárez, Can One Live after Auschwitz?

Put more simply, what was Bolaño's end game as far as what lessons readers should take away from his novel?  To help answer this, let's back up a bit in acknowledgement of the fact that it's become a commonplace in 2666 blog criticism for readers to assert that Professor Amalfitano's observation about the bookish Barcelona pharmacist who chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, Bartleby over Moby-Dick, A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers, and--presumably--Breakfast at Tiffany's over In Cold Blood reveals Bolaño speaking about himself and what's taking place in 2666.  Fans would argue that Bolaño does this with a wink to the readers, haters that Bolaño does it with a pat on the back and hubris.  In either case, the concluding part of the passage runs as follows (289-290 in the original, 227 in Natasha Wimmer's translation):

Qué triste paradoja, pensó Amalfitano.  Ya ni los farmacéuticos ilustrados se atreven con las grandes obras, imperfectas, torrenciales, las que abren camino en lo desconocido.  Escogen los ejercicios perfectos de los grandes maestros.  O lo que es lo mismo: quieren ver a los grandes maestros en sesisones de esgrima de entrenamiento, pero no quieren saber nada de los combates de verdad, en donde los grandes maestros luchan contra aquello, ese aquello que nos atemoriza a todos, ese aquello que acoquina y encacha, y hay sangre y heridas mortales y fetidez.

[What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano.  Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.  They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters.  Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.]

Whatever your take on how Bolaño intended this, it's clear that Amalfitano's observation in this passage--supposedly inspired by another character's declaration that the Austrian poet (and onetime pharmacy worker!) Georg Trakl was one of his favorite writers--offers up one possible interpretation for what readers might take away from 2666: the specter of a great writer engaging in "real combat" on the printed page.  Whether the author is successful or not is a related but secondary question in that every reader will have a scorecard of their own.  However, I think it's important to point out a second interpretation of sorts: just as Amalfitano's observation deals with a "sad paradox" about an enthusiastic but very limited class of readers, 2666 is complex enough in its message that it's neither pro- nor anti-reading as a whole in the sense of pretending to offer up a solution to "that something" which "the great masters" struggle against in Amalfitano's wording.  Bolaño's end game, i.e. what he wants his readers to take away from the novel when the book is closed, would seem to be similarly open-ended--as it should be with one fifth of the novel remaining.

If these two seemingly irreconcilable interpretations only seem to lead to a dead end, let's not forget that there are any numbers of other scenes dedicated to readers and reading (and bad readers and misreading) throughout 2666 that might point us to another way out of the exegetical labyrinth.  In "The Part About the Crimes" alone, for example, some of the more notable readers include the seer Florita Almada, a voracious reader who like Barry Seaman in "La parte de Fate" ["The Part About Fate"] reads for both utility and pleasure, the young cop Lalo Cura, who reads mostly for utility but sometimes for pleasure, and the veteran inspector Juan de Dios Martínez, who wishes he read more cultured works so he could discuss them with his love interest Elvira Campos--the well-read director of the Santa Teresa psychiatric center whose reading tastes tend toward "los libros que leía a él ni le sonaban" ["books he had never heard of"] (527 in the original, 421 in the translation).  If you were to add to this list the minor characters like the priest in the Penitent scenes said to enjoy liberation theology and the occasional detective novel, I think you'd agree that the presence of a good cross-section of "normal" readers could be found without difficulty.  Beyond that, though, there are three other more or less average readers in "The Part About the Crimes" who hold a special interest in that they seem to represent a rather contradictory lesson for how readers can expect to profit from a novel.  Who are they and what can their stories possibly tell us about Bolaño's end game?

The first of the three is Perla Beatriz Ochoterena, a twenty-eight year old poetry and essay fancier, poet, and teacher, found hanged in her room with a suicide note attributing the despondency of her final act on earth to "todas esas niñas muertas" ["all those dead girls"] turning up in Santa Teresa (646 in the original, 517 in the translation).  An extreme case and an outlier, you say, to which Juan de Dios Martínez might agree, characterizing the suicide note as "sentida" ["heartfelt"] but "también un poco cursi" ["also slightly sappy"] (Ibid.).  However, remember that Elvira Campos, who remarks that Ochoterena was probably clinically depressed, had herself entertained similar thoughts while thinking of the crimes: "A veces Elvira Campos pensaba que lo mejor sería irse de México.  O suicidarse antes de cumplir los cincuentaicinco.  ¿Tal vez los ciencuentaiséis?" ["Sometimes Elvira Campos thought it would be best to leave Mexico.  Or kill herself before she turned fifty-five.  Maybe fifty-six?"] (641 in the original, 513 in the translation).  In any event, the dead woman's home library gets a kinder review from the mental health specialist than her suicide note does from the judicial: good books, hard to find in Santa Teresa, we are told.  The second and third of the three readers are forensic scientists who split their time between police work and teaching at the local university and med school.  We learn about their reading habits when they are joined by a third medical examiner, a non-reader partial to TV watching, spending time with his family, and travel, at a work-related breakfast.  Emilio Garibay, it turns out, is an atheist, which is important insofar as "desde hacía años ya no leía ningún libro, pese en que a su casa atesoraba una biblioteca más que decente sobre temas de su especialidad, amén de algunos libros de filosofía, historia de México, y una que otra novela.  A veces pensaba que ya no leía precisamente por ser ateo.  Digamos que la no lectura era el escalón más alto del ateísmo o al menos del ateísmo tal cuál él lo concebía.  Si no crees en Dios, ¿cómo creer en un pinche libro?, pensaba" ["it had been years since he'd read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two.  Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore.  Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it.  If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself?" (687 in the original, 550 in the translation).  Rigoberto Frías, on the other hand, is described simply as a man who "tenía muchos libros y casi ningún amigo" ["had many books and almost no friends"] (688 in the original, 550-551 in the translation].  What does this tell us about looking for meaning in reading in "The Part About the Crimes"?  You tell me!  However, in my next post on the novel, I'll introduce you to a critic, Butler University Associate Professor Gabriela Muniz, who sees 2666 as "una obsesiva búsqueda de las causas de la maldad" ["an obsessive search for the root causes of evil"] and Bolaño's "estética del cuerpo mutilado" ["aesthetic of the mutilated corpse"] as the conceptual response of "una literatura del trauma" ["a literature of trauma"] practiced by a generation of Southern Cone writers who were witness to the "tristemente famosas desapariciones de cuerpos en la época de gobiernos militares" ["sadly famous disappearances of bodies in the era of the military governments"].  These last quotes come from pages 44 and 35 respectively of Muniz's "El discurso de la crueldad: 2666 de Roberto Bolaño" ["Discourse of Cruelty: Roberto Bolaño's 2666"] (Revista Hispánica Moderna, Año 63, No. 1 [June 2010], 35-49): great, seriously eye-opening stuff.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

La dimensión desconocida

"La dimensión desconocida"
by Sergio González Rodríguez
Mexico, 2002

One of the recurring characters in 2666's "La parte de los crímenes" ["The Part About the Crimes"] is a Mexico City city arts reporter turned crime reporter named Sergio González who's first sent to Santa Teresa in 1993 to investigate the desecration of churches in the city by what's thought to be a lone whack job of a vandal.  The narrator blandly introduces the reporter as follows--"Por aquellos días el periódico La Razón, del DF, envió a Sergio González a hacer un reportaje sobre el Penitente" ["Around this time the Mexico City newspaper La Razón sent Sergio González to write a story on the Penitent"] (470 in the original, 376 in the translation)--before briefing us on his age and a few other particulars about his personal circumstances.  An ironic swipe at the newspaperman's work or readership--"Hacía reseñas de libros de filosofía, que por otra parte nadie leía, ni los libros ni sus reseñas, y de vez en cuando escribía sobre música y sobre exposiciones de pintura" ["He wrote reviews of philosophy books that no one read, not the books or his reviews, and sometimes he wrote about art shows or music"] (Ibid.)--could almost be construed as condescending save for the fact that Sergio González will be one of the first outsiders in this part of the novel to take the real Santa Teresa crimes, the mass murders of hundreds of poor women, seriously.  On that note, I guess it's only fitting that the real life model for the character, a Mexico City arts reporter turned crime reporter named...Sergio González Rodríguez (photo above) did much the same thing outside the pages of Bolaño's book.

Not having read Huesos en el desierto [Bones in the Desert, unfortunately still not available in translation], Sergio González Rodríguez's 2002 collection of essays on the Ciudad Juárez killings, in many years, I thought it might be instructive to revisit the work in order to compare the author's own voice with that of his fictionalized double--as a literary matter in part but also as an entrée into the historical backdrop to "the part about the crimes."  Rereading chapter 1 of the book, "La dimensión desconocida" ["The Twilight Zone"], probably the first thing I was immediately reminded of was how personal in tone the flesh and blood author's work is.  Here's his jeremiad-like opening (13):

     Hubo en el origen un deslizamiento fuera de los límites.
     Entre 1993 y 1995, los cadáveres de 30 mujeres víctimas de homicidios dolosos en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, formaban parte de una trama compleja de violencia sexual, cantinas, bares, bandas delincuenciales e inculpaciones mutuas entre diversos protagonistas de la vida colectiva.
     Era el núcleo de una sociedad desgarrada que comenzaba a confrontar sus flaquezas culturales.  Y hacía del espacio público la arena de sus diferencias y contrastes extremos.  La sobrepoblación, la penuria urbana, la violencia externa o intrafamiliar, las inercias de género --presentes en muchas otras partes de la República mexicana-- transformaban lo cotidiano en una pesadilla singular.  Sobre todo para las mujeres, la mitad de la población, poco más de 400.000 de ellas.

     [There was, in the beginning, a sliding completely out of control.
     Between 1993 and 1995, the cadavers of 30 female victims of premeditated murder in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, formed part of a complex web of sexual violence, cantinas, bars, criminal gangs, and mutual accusations between diverse protagonists of the collective life in the city.
     It was the nucleus of a society in tatters that was beginning to confront its cultural failings.  And it was converting public spaces into the arena of its extreme contrasts and differences.  Overpopulation, urban poverty, domestic violence or external violence, inertia of that kind--present in many other parts of the Mexican Republic--were transforming daily life into a singular nightmare.  Above all for women, half the population, a little more than 400,000 of them.]

In translating this opening, I was struck by how much the line "transformaban lo cotidiano en una pesadilla singular," which I've rendered as "transforming daily life into a singular nightmare," seems to be echoed by Roberto Bolaño in "The Part About the Crimes" when a forensic scientist leaves a Santa Teresa parking lot in his Grand Marquis "y las calles se lo tragaban como una pesadumbre cotidiana" ["and the streets swallowed it up like a commonplace lament"] (689 in the original, 551 in the translation).  The similarity between the combination of SGR's "pesadilla singular" ["singular nightmare"] and "lo cotidiano" ["daily life, quotidian"] and Bolaño's simile about the "pesadumbre cotidiana" [literally: "quotidian affliction, sorrow" but which Wimmer more legibly translates as "commonplace lament"] may not seem self-evident in English, but it's only one play on words apart in Spanish from being an apparent homage to the Mexican writer's descriptive power (side notes: Bolaño and González Rodríguez exchanged correspondence about Ciudad Juárez for years, and Sergio also appeared as a "character" in Javier Marías' 1998 Negra espalda del tiempo [Dark Back of Time]).

Elsewhere in "La dimensión desconocida," Sergio González Rodríguez mentions at least two other people related to the Juárez crimes who would wind up in Bolaño's 2666 in varyingly fictionalized fashion.  The first is former high profile FBI agent and serial killer profiler Robert K. Ressler (a/k/a Albert Kessler in 2666), who was interviewed by SGR colleague Rossana Fuentes Berain for the Mexico City newspaper Reforma in April 1996 after Ciudad Juárez experienced a 35% increase in violent crime (and in particular the murders of women) from the year before which "ya causaban alarma en México y comenzaban a trascender al exterior del país" ["was already causing alarm in Mexico and was beginning to spread outside the country"] (14).  Ressler, then famous for being the technical advisor for the film The Silence of the Lambs, which SGR claims helped put the serial killer on the map of the popular imagination worldwide as "el emblema de la criminalidad contemporánea" ["the emblem of contemporary criminality"] and the aesthetic purveyor of murder as just "una más de las bellas artes" ["one more of the fine arts"], opines that the frontier between Mexico and the U.S. is "una zona que por su naturaleza misma, por el tráfico de personas y de drogas, se convierte en una dimensión desconocida" ["a zone which, by its very nature, through the trafficking of drugs and people, has turned into a twilight zone"].  He then adds that he expects the Juárez murders will continue (Ibid.).  The second later-to-be-fictionalized by Bolaño person mentioned in the chapter is the Egyptian-born U.S. immigrant Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif, who allegedly fled to Mexico to avoid rape charges in the U.S.  Accused of being the author of at least some of the Juárez killings, Sharif Sharif--like the German-born Klaus Haas in 2666, who is modeled after the Egyptian in some respects--proclaims his innocence via a rambling press conference held while he's in jail and blames the murders of over 50 of the Juárez women--murders which continue while he's behind bars--on figures known to frequent the city's dive bars where "se reúnen los policías con los narcotraficantes" ["the cops and the drug dealers get together"] (21-22).  Was Sharif Sharif framed for the murders?  Possibly.  However, what's chilling in regard to this unsavory character is that SGR reports that other murders blamed on eight people from the gang known as "Los Rebeldes" ["The Rebels"] get called into question amid claims of police brutality (beatings and torture) and an adolescent witness' recanted claim that she was forced to testify against the gang by a cop who put a gun to her head.  In other words, there's a pattern in which the police and other state authorities seem to be more interested in perpetuating the crimes rather than ending them.

Sergio González Rodríguez's partisan reaction to this state of affairs, while dramatically different in tone from the "forensic" narrative register that would be employed by Bolaño throughout much of "The Part About the Crimes," makes for a great counterpoint to the latter for anybody interested in comparing the nonfiction and the fiction approaches to the crimes in the two texts.  Here's just one passage from "La dimensión desconocida" which continues to haunt me (23-24):

Susana Domínguez, la denunciante de abusos policiacos, una adolescente esbelta, morena, de ojos grandes y cabello largo, representaba la imagen promedio de la muchacha juarense.  Vestía pantalones vaqueros y llevaba una playera.  Como todas las muchachas que pululan en los malls de ambos lados de la frontera, como las que abundan en las escuelas, como las que trabajan en oficinas.  Como las que sostienen a sus hijos --casadas, madres solteras-- y sobreviven al margen de lo funesto.  Como las que salen por centenares de las fábricas para irse a su casa o a los bares cada viernes en autobuses suburbanos al concluir su turno.  O como las que terminan con su cuerpo torturado en el desierto.

[Susana Domínguez, the denouncer of police abuses, a slender, brown-skinned adolescent with big eyes and long hair, looked like an average Juárez girl.  She wore jeans and a t-shirt.  Like all the girls who swarm to the malls on both sides of the frontier, like those that abound in the schools, like those that work in offices.  Like those who support their children--married women, single mothers--and survive by the skin of their teeth.  Like those who leave the factories by the hundreds to go home or to the bars in suburban buses each Friday night at the end of their shift.  Or like those who end up with their body tortured in the desert.]

And here's another passage, from the preface, in which Sergio González Rodríguez boldly assigns blame for the crimes.  This one might be even more sobering in its implications (11-12):

     Este libro entrecruza documentos y testimonios múltiples de un suceso que se ubica en el límite de lo delincuencial y el femicidio: entre aquellos crímenes, está detectada la existencia de un centenar de asesinatos en serie.
     Una orgía sacrificial de cariz misógino propiciada por las autoridades: los responsables estarían libres, a la sombra de una pirámide corrupta que tiene su base en la ineficacia policiaca y los delitos impunes en un índice de casi ciento por ciento en la República mexicana.
     Más alla de las cifras, semejantes crímenes dejan traslucir dos hechos de análoga gravedad ahora y hacia el futuro: la inadvertencia o amnesia global ante un fenómeno extremo de signo anárquico; y el impulso de normalizar la barbarie en las sociedades contemporáneas.

[This book interweaves multiple testimonies and documents about an event which is situated on the extreme limits of criminality and femicide: among those crimes, the existence of a hundred serial killings can be detected.
     A sacrificial orgy misogynistic in nature aided by the authorities: those responsible need remain free in the shadow of a corrupt pyramid which has its base in police inefficiency and unpunished crimes at a rate of almost 100% in the Mexican Republic.
     Beyond the numbers, similar crimes suggest two facts of analagous gravity now and for the future: the global overlooking of, or amnesia in the face of, an extreme phenomenon marked by anarchic tendencies, and the impulse of normalizing barbarity in contemporary societies.]

 Sources

"La dimensión desconocida," chapter 1 of 18 of Huesos en el desierto, appears on pp. 13-26 of the third edition of the work (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005).  References to Roberto Bolaño's 2666 refer to pages in the Spanish language original (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007) or in Natasha Wimmer's English language translation (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008).
*
A 2012 Bookforum chat with Sergio González Rodríguez, in English, can be found here.

Authorial Voice(s) in the First Half of 2666 #2

2666 (Anagrama, 2007, original; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, translation)
by Roberto Bolaño
Spain, 2004

     Por aquellos días Pelletier y Espinoza, preocupados por el estado actual de su común amante, mantuvieron dos largas conversaciones telefónicas.
     La primera la hizo el francés y duró una hora y quince minutos.  La segunda la realizó Espinoza, tres días después, y duró dos horas y quince minutos.  Cuando ya llevaban hablando una hora y media Pelletier le dijo que colgara, que la llamada le iba a salir muy cara, y que él lo llamaría de inmediato, a lo que el español se opuso rotundamente.
     La primera conversación telefónica, la que hizo Pelletier, empezó de manera difícil, aunque Espinoza esperaba esa llamada, como si a ambos les costara decirse lo que tarde o temprano iban a tenir que decirse.  Los veinte minutos iniciales tuvieron un tono trágico en donde la palabra destino se empleó diez veces y la palabra amistad veinticuatro.  El nombvre de Liz Norton se pronunció cincuenta veces, nueve de ellas en vano.  La palabra París se dijo en siete ocasiones.  Madrid, en ocho.  La palabra amor se pronunció dos veces, una cada uno.  La palabra horror se pronunció en seis ocasiones y la palabra felicidad en una (la empleó Espinoza).  La palabra resolución se dijo en doce ocasiones.  La palabra solipsismo en siete.  La palabra eufemismo en diez.  La palabra categoría, en singular y en plural, en nueve.  La palabra estructuralismo en una (Pelletier).  El término literatura norteamericana en tres.  Las palabras cena y cenamos y desayuno y sándwich en diecinueve.  La palabra ojos y manos y cabellera en catorce.  Después la conversación se hizo más fluida.  Pelletier le contó un chiste en alemán a Espinoza y éste se rió.  Espinoza le contó un chiste en alemán a Pelletier y éste también se rió.  De hecho, ambos se reían envueltos en las ondas o lo que fuera que unía sus voces y sus oídos a través de los campos oscuros y del viento y de las nieves pirenaicas y ríos y carreteras solitarias y los respectivos e interminables suburbios que rodeaban París y Madrid.

[Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone.
     Pelletier made the first call, which lasted an hour and fifteen minutes.  The second was made three days later by Espinoza and lasted two hours and fifteen minutes.  After they'd been talking for an hour and a half, Pelletier told Espinoza to hang up, the call would be expensive and he'd call right back, but Espinoza firmly refused.
     The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say.  The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times.  Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain.  The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight.  The word love was spoken twice, once by each man.  The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza).  The word solution was said twelve times.  The word solipsism seven times.  The word euphemism ten times.  The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times.  The word structuralism once (Pelletier).  The term American literature three times.  The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times.  The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times.  Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.  Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed.  In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

(2666, Roberto Bolaño, 61-62; ditto, as translated by Natasha Wimmer, 40-41)

As luck would have it, that scene from part one of these two authorial voice(s) posts having to do with Amalfitano's dream and the animistic wind sweeping through Santa Teresa's back alleys and backyards is situated almost midway along the space/time continuum as it were between two others that I wanted to talk about.  And so even though today's sequences could not seem to be any more outwardly different in terms of style or tone, I'd like to take a quick look at some of the narrative parallels and divergences that they present.  In the passage above, approximately 50 pages into "La parte de los críticos" ["The Part About the Critics"], the unsuspecting reader can partake of a particularly saliva-rich example of Bolaño's exuberance, humor, and narrative mischievousness all delivered in one well-aimed spitball.  At first glance, what I feel obligated to refer to as "the part about the telephone call" offers up a lovely tearing down of the omniscient narrator conceit via the arch and over the top enumeration--by an omniscient narrator!--of how long the phone call lasted and how many references were made to specific words.  Internally, the joke is exploited by comparing how many times English critic Liz Norton gets mentioned by her two lovers (fifty) to how many times love gets mentioned (only twice, how sad)--not to mention how many times dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich get mentioned (nineteen times!).  On a personal note, I also like the narrator's light comic touch in drawing attention to the fact that the Spanish critic Espinoza, who is sometimes portrayed as being maybe both a little more "emotional" and a little less "intellectual" than the French critic Pelletier, is the one who mentions "happiness" while the latter is the one who mentions "structuralism."  A good inside joke.  The Javier Marías-like poetic flourish at the end of the passage, captured so well in Natasha Wimmer's translation, makes for a nice exclamation point to the spare, bullet point realism of the sentences that precede it, but I want to hold off commenting on that for now until we get a chance to take a look at a complementary passage from "La parte de Fate" ["The Part About Fate"].  The set-up: Fate, a Harlem-based journalist, is spending the night in a Detroit hotel not long after having interviewed Barry Seaman and having just heard Seaman deliver an in-real-time speech at a church that runs over a dozen pages in my Spanish edition of the work (storytelling style points for that feat: off the charts):

Mientras Fate dormía dieron un reportaje sobre una norteamericana desaparecida en Santa Teresa, en el estado de Sonora, al norte de México.  El reportero era un chicano llamado Dick Medina y hablaba sobre la larga lista de mujeres asesinadas en Santa Teresa, muchas de las cuales iban a parar a la fosa común del cementerio pues nadie reclamaba sus cadáveres.  Medina hablaba en el desierto.  Detrás se veía una carretera y mucho más lejos un promontorio que Medina señalaba en algún momento de la emisión diciendo que aquello era Arizona.  El viento despeinaba el pelo negro y liso del reportero, que iba vestido con una camisa de manga corta.  Después aparecían algunas fábricas de montaje y la voz en off de Medina decía que el desempleo era prácticamente inexistente en aquella franja de la frontera.  Gente haciendo cola en una acera estrecha.  Camionetas cubiertas de polvo muy fino, de color marrón caca de niño.  Depresiones del terreno, como cráteres de la Primera Guerra Mundial, que poco a poco se convertían en vertederos.  El rostro sonriente de un tipo de no más de veinte años, flaco y moreno, de mandíbulas prominentes, a quien Medina identificaba en off como pollero o coyote o guía de ilegales de un lado a otro de la frontera.  Medina decía un nombre.  El nombre de una joven.  Después aparecían las calles de un pueblo de Arizona de donde la joven era originaria.  Casas con jardines raquíticos y cercas de alambre trenzado de color plata sucia.  El rostro compungido de la madre.  Cansada de llorar.  El rostro del padre, un tipo alto, de espaldas anchas, que miraba fíjamente a la cámara y no decía nada.  Detrás de estas dos figuras se perfilaban las sombras de tres adolescentes.  Nuestras otras tres hijas, decía la madre en un inglés con acento.  Las tres niñas, la mayor de no más de quince años, echaban a correr hacia la sombra de la casa.

[While Fate was sleeping, there was a report on an American who had disappeared in Santa Teresa, in the state of Sonora in the north of Mexico.  The reporter, Dick Medina, was a Chicano, and he talked about the long list of women killed in Santa Teresa, many of whom ended up in the common grave at the cementery because no one claimed their bodies.  Medina was talking in the desert.  Behind him was a highway and off in the distance was a rise that Medina gestured toward at some point in the broadcast, saying it was Arizona.  The wind ruffled the reporter's smooth black hair.  He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt.  Then came a shot of some assembly plants and Medina's voice-over saying that unemployment was almost nonexistent along that stretch of the border.  People standing in line on a narrow sidewalk.  Pickup trucks covered in a fine dust the brown color of baby shit.  Hollows in the ground, like World War I bomb craters, that gradually gave way to dumping sites.  The smiling face of some kid who couldn't have been more than twenty, thin and dark-skinned, with prominent cheekbones, whom Medina identified in a voice-over as a pollero or coyote or person who leads illegal immigrants over the border.  Medina said a name.  The name of a girl.  Then there was a shot of the streets of an Arizona town where the girl was from.  Houses with scorched yards and dirty silver-colored chicken-wire fences.  The sad face of the mother.  Exhausted with crying.  The face of the father, a tall man with broad shoulders who stared into the camera saying nothing.  Behind the two of them were the shadowy figures of three teenage girls.  Our other three daughters, said the mother in accented English.  The three girls, the oldest no more than fifteen, went running into the dark of the house.]

 (2666, Bolaño, 328; ditto, as translated by Wimmer, 258)

In this passage, approximately 30 pages into "La parte de Fate" ["The Part About Fate"], the exuberance, humor and narrative mischievousness of the phone call scene have been replaced by prose that feels and reads like something that's meant to suggest dry reportorial objectivity.  From a narrative standpoint, the flashiness--if there is any--is purely conceptual in the sense that the narrator, who had previously described the Archimboldi critics Espinoza, Morini, Norton, and Pelletier as "nuestros cuatro amigos" ["our four friends"] happily living a life that "siguió deslizándose o fluyendo por el plácido río de los departamentos de alemán de las universidades europeas ["proceeded smoothly, flowing along on the placid river of European university German departments"] (60 in the original, 40 in the translation), has abandoned his chumminess in favor of a studied neutrality to deliver a sobering bombshell anticipating "The Part About the Crimes."  On that note, I also admire how this scene touches on some of the larger themes in the work--the violence perpetrated against not just young women but young girls, the disproportionate percentage of poor people on both sides of the border affected by the crimes, the manner in which large-scale transnational human migration tends to reduce individuals into groups of predators and prey, and the anonymity of the victims--while subtly commenting on one of the reasons the real life crimes have gone unpunished: people's indifference to or unawareness of the problem.  How can Fate, for example, who like Huck and Jim is about to "light out for the territory" constituting the U.S./Mexico border, be expected to care about the latest nameless victim in Dick Medina's report when the transmission itself is broadcast while Fate is sleeping?  In terms of how this passage relates to both the phone call sequence and the one involving Amalfitano and the wind in terms of the smorgasboard of storytelling dished up in the novel, I think it's a great example of Bolaño's magical realism--not "magical realism," mind you, as practiced by García Marketing and his copycats, but magical...realism in the qualitative and maybe even in the Bioy Casares, Borges, and Cortázar senses.  Note that not only are we increasingly treated to accounts of things that take place in dreams but that things are also being divulged that are happening while the main characters are asleep that have nothing to do with dreams.  Much as in the Divine Comedy, where the three sections of the poem have a distinctive tone depending on whether you and Dante are journeying through Inferno, Purgatorio or Paradiso, the tonal axis of 2666 shifts as its trajectory moves away from the critics' safe European home and gets closer to the scene of the crime(s): Santa Teresa.  The authorial voice itself reflects that as evidenced from the disconnect between the last two lines in each passage above and the way that the second sentence in the fragment on Amalfitano in Wednesday's post seems to suggest that the wind has just as much agency as the expat Chilean professor.  In fact, I think it's clear that the narrator, or the narrative itself if you prefer to speak of it in more impersonal terms, increasingly fragments and even warps under the influence of Santa Teresa as the desert city and the enormity of the crimes come into focus.  Which shouldn't be a surprise, I guess: Santa Teresa, which elsewhere is described as having a sky which "al atardecer, parecía una flor carnívora" ["at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower"] (172 in the original, 129 in the translation) and which was "morado como la piel de una india muerta a palos" ["purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death"] (269 in the original, 210 in the translation), seems to have been sending out bad vibes or releasing noxious fumes into the ether for quite some time.  Is that an SOS?  Or a siren song sung by killers?

*

Please visit my intro post on the novel if you have any interest in checking out the links to the really fine commentary that other 2666 group read members have contributed so far.  We're up to about a dozen posts already with many more in the works.  Updates will be added throughout the end of the month.  Also, I previously wrote about the first three parts of 2666 here, here and here nearly five years ago.  Although all but the last one on "La parte de Fate" ["The Part About Fate"] are pretty much embarrassing to me these days, I'll link to them here in case any gluttons for punishment care to pick over the verbal roadkill manifesting itself as my first impressions of the novel.

Natasha Wimmer's two translations above do a tremendous job of replicating the rhythm and the tone of Bolaño's prose.  People reading those passages in translation rather than in Bolaño's Spanish won't be missing out on much.  However, whether due to an oversight or a translation decision I couldn't say, Wimmer omits Bolaño's penultimate line from the first sequence--"Espinoza le contó un chiste en alemán a Pelletier y éste también se rió" [following Wimmer's lead: "Espinoza told Pelletier a joke in German and Pelletier also laughed"]--a minor thing, to be sure, but one that lessens the parallelism worked at elsewhere in the passage.  In the second sequence, people reading the novel in Spanish would have the advantage of deciding whether the third line from the end which mentions "las sombras de tres adolescentes" and which Wimmer justifiably translates as "the shadowy figures of three teenage girls" might mean that and that alone or might hint at something extra: sombra, in addition to meaning "shadow" in the sense that's probably intended here, can also refer to a "shade" or "ghost" as if hinting at the fate of the missing American girl who had disappeared in Santa Teresa, leaving her three sisters and her parents bereft.

Authorial Voice(s) in the First Half of 2666 #1

2666 (Anagrama, 2007)
by Roberto Bolaño
Spain, 2004

2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)
by Roberto Bolaño [translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer]
Spain, 2004

Aquella noche la voz no volvió a manifestarse y Amalfitano durmió muy mal, un sueño turbado por saltos y respingones, como si alguien le arañara los brazos y las piernas, con el cuerpo empapado en transpiración, aunque a las cinco de la mañana la angustia cesó y en el sueño apareció Lola que lo saludaba desde un parque de grandes rejas (él estaba al otro lado), y dos rostros de amigos a los que hacía años que no veía (y a quienes probablemente no volvería a ver jamás) y una habitación llena de libros de filosofía cubiertos de polvo, mas no por ello menos magníficos.  A esa misma hora la policía de Santa Teresa encontró el cadáver de otra adolescente, semienterrada en un lote baldío de un arrabal de la ciudad, y un viento fuerte, que venía del oeste, se fue a estrellar contra la falda de las montañas del este, levantando polvo y hojas de periódico y cartones tirados en la calle a su paso por Santa Teresa y moviendo la ropa que Rosa había colgado en el jardín trasero, como si el viento, ese viento joven y enérgico y de tan corta vida, se probara las camisas y pantalones de Amalfitano y se metiera dentro de las bragas de su hija y leyera algunas páginas del Testamento geométrico a ver si por allí había algo que le fuera a ser de utilidad, algo que le explicara el paisaje tan curioso de calles y casas a través de las cuales estaba galopando o que lo explicara a él mismo como viento.

[That night there were no further manifestations of the voice and Amalfitano slept very badly, his sleep plagued by jerks and starts, as if someone was scratching his arms and legs, his body drenched in sweat, although at five in the morning the torment ceased and Lola appeared in his sleep, waving to him from a park behind a tall fence (he was on the other side), along with the faces of two friends he hadn't seen for years (and would probably never see again), and a room full of philosophy books covered in dust but still magnificent.  At that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughter's underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geométrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of sreets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.]

(2666, by Roberto Bolaño, 260; ditto, as translated by Natasha Wimmer, 202-203)

A couple of people taking part in our January and February group read of 2666 have made comments to the effect that they think Bolaño is a cold or a distant narrator in the first half of the novel (question: what will they have to say about "The Part About the Crimes"?).  Although that reaction to Bolaño is so different from my own experience of his writing--in this novel and elsewhere, in first- and third-person narrations of his--for the sake of discussion, let's assume that that opinion represents an essentially unassailable viewpoint.  Given the circumstances, what can Bolaño's so-called cold and distant style tell us about the use of the authorial voice in the first half of 2666?  Tonight: a partial answer from "The Part About Amalfitano."  Later: related responses from "The Part About the Critics" and "The Part About Fate."

*

In the merely two sentence-long passage above, which comes about 30 pages from the end of "La parte de Amalfitano" ["The Part About Amalfitano"], the unnamed and seemingly omniscient narrator matter of factly describes the night after Amalfitano first began hearing voices and thought he was going crazy.  We are told that the professor's ex-wife Lola, who has died from AIDS, appears in his dream, as do two friends whom the professor hadn't seen in years.  There's nothing particularly memorable about the first sentence's description apart, perhaps, from the amusing editorial that Amalfitano's full room worth of philosophy books are still "magnificent" despite their accumulation of dust.  As if playing off of the burial service expression "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" [Spanish: "polvo eres y polvo serás"], however, the narrator stealthily takes advantage of this opportunity to link the rather pedestrian description of Amalfitano's dream in the first sentence with the jarring revelation in the second sentence that "at that same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city."  Why the linkage between this information and Amalfitano's dream?  Does Lola's presence in the dream foreshadow the presence of the death of somebody else close to Amalfitano--such as their young daughter Rosa?  Is there any explanation at all?  Whatever the case may be, note that in the continuation of the sequence, the narrator goes on to describe an almost animistic "wind from the west" which is reported as being "young and energetic in its brief life" and maybe even curious enough as an entity to want to flip through the pages of Rafael Dieste's Testamento geométrico which has been hung out on the clothesline Marcel Duchamp style.  For me, on a purely technical level, the unexpected shift in perspective from Amalfitano's dream to the wind from the west is attention grabbing storytelling that rivals that great scene in Madame Bovary where Emma Bovary abandons herself to the cad Rodolfe and her interior world and the natural world seem to join forces to celebrate her orgasm.  On a thematic level, things are a little more distressing: Juan Rulfo fans, like Bolaño was, will remember that an evil wind also figures as a protagonist in Rulfo's short story "Luvina."  More immediately, the mention of the discovery of the dead teenage girl here and the description of the "young and energetic" wind "slipping into" Rosa's panties don't bode well for the future parts of the novel from what we know of the real life rapes and murders that inspired "The Part About the Crimes."  On that note, it probably won't ameliorate the almost perverse intimacy of this scene to explain that the Spanish word for dust, polvo, is also commonly used as slang for the noun form of the f-word.  Not bad for such a cold and distant narrator, eh?

Roberto Bolaño

2666

2666 (Anagrama, 2007)
by Roberto Bolaño
Spain, 2004

A quick intro post.  Revisiting "La parte de los críticos" ["The Part About the Critics"], "La parte de Amalfitano" ["The Part About Amalfitano"] and "La parte de Fate" ["The Part About Fate"] in the company of our readalong group which is scheduled to move on to the controversial "La parte de los crímenes" ["The Part About the Crimes"] and then "La parte de Archimboldi" ["The Part About Archimboldi"] in February, I found that I'd inadvertently reopened the old internal debate about whether Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives] or 2666 is my favorite Bolaño of them all.  Problem: I'm also fond of La literatura nazi en América [Nazi Literature in the Americas] and its corrosive humor.  And another: perhaps "favorite" isn't the type of descriptor that should be applied to this sort of work.  In any event, for people who haven't read 2666 before, I don't think it'd be revealing too much to remark that the second half of the book frames one set of horrendous crimes--the ones based on the still unsolved femicides in Ciudad Juárez, the real life model for the novel's fictional Santa Teresa--against an altogether different one that I'll pass over in silence for now.  While reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi is the putative protagonist connecting the five parts of the novel (at least in spirit), it should become increasingly clear that Santa Teresa is the real star of the show for better or for worse.  By star of the show, I of course mean vortex of evil.  In this sense, parts 1-3 of the book are something like the calm before the storm or, for Poe fans, the beginning of the descent into the maelstrom.  On that note, the Baudelaire epigraph--"Un oasis de horror en medio de un desierto de aburrimiento" [French original: "Une oasis d'horreur dans un désert d'ennui"; English translation by Natasha Wimmer: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom"]--hints at what lies ahead for while the oasis of horror/desert of boredom imagery sounds like it could be applied to the hellish Santa Teresa, even a cursory glance at Baudelaire's "Le Voyage" from Les Fleurs du Mal reveals that the oasis isn't really a specific place but a reflection of "notre image" ["our image"] or ourselves.  More on whether Santa Teresa is made in our image next month; more on what I enjoyed about the first three parts of 2666, beginning with a few specifics about the narrative voice, by the weekend.  In the meantime, please check back here from time to time as I'll be adding links to other people's 2666 posts once they're ready.

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About The Critics
Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About Amalfitano
Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About Fate

Frances, Nonsuch Book
2666: the part about the critics

Miguel, St. Orberose
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About the Crimes 
The Part About Archimboldi

Richard, Caravana de recuerdos
2666
Authorial Voice(s) in the First Half of 2666 #1
Authorial Voice(s) in the First Half of 2666 #2 
"La dimensión desconocida" by Sergio González Rodríguez 
Three Readers in "The Part About the Crimes" 

Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
2666: 'Ugh, said the critics...'
2666: 'The world is a strange and fascinating place, he thought.'

Scott, seraillon
2666: The Part About the Critics
2666: The Part About Amalfitano
2666: The Part About Fate 
2666: The Part About the Crimes

2666 Group Read

As some of you already know, I'll be hosting a year-long niche reading event under the unfortunately unwieldy moniker of the 2014 Caravana de recuerdos Ibero-American Readalong, which was designed to begin with Bolaño and end with Cervantes--two of my favorite authors, both practically begging for long overdue rereads.  While the original introductory post and sign-up details can be found here, the general idea is to tempt you into reading a quality Ibero-American work of literature with me via one of two user-friendly methods: 1) a series of structured monthly group reads with other readers, where you can drop in and out as often or as little as you like; or 2) for more interactive types, the proposal of an interesting work of your choice (i.e. novel, poem, short story, whatever) that you'll challenge me to read together with you at some point in time.  For the purposes of the event, "Ibero-American" will be defined as having to do with any/all literature ever produced on the Iberian Peninsula (i.e. originally composed in Arabic, Basque, Hebrew, Latin or any of the Romance languages) as well as any/all literature from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the Americas.  The fine print: since I don't expect to have many takers for this second "challenge" option, I've decided to open this up to works from France and Italy if any of you would care to read a work from either of those countries with me.  But back to Bolaño and the 2666 group read.  I first read 2666 (Spain/Chile, 2004) as part of a really rewarding group read hosted by Claire of kiss a cloud and Steph of Steph & Tony Investigate! that was held over the course of five months way back in 2009.  While I don't imagine I'll have the fortune to be surrounded by as many special readers as I was that last time, I'd love to reread the book with you should you be interested in reading it--or rereading it--with me.  To help whet your appetite, here's a page of 2666 and other Bolaño reviews that Rise of Bifurcaria bifurcata put together during his 2011 Roberto Bolaño Reading Challenge--another good time.  The plan here is to read and post on parts 1-3 of 2666 (up through "La parte de Fate" or "The Part About Fate") during the last three days in January and parts 4-5 of the novel (starting with "La parte de los crímenes" or "The Part About the Crimes") during the last three days in February.  I'll list other group read participants below if there are any (right now there's only one "maybe"), but by all means feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.  Before I go, here's a rundown of the other Ibero-American Readalong choices for the rest of the year: Ibn Hazm de Córdoba's Tawq al-Hamamah [Spanish: El collar de la paloma; English: The Ring of the Dove] (Al-Andalus, February); José Saramago's O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis [The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis] (Portugal, March); the Edith Grossman-translated The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance (Spain and New Spain, April); Augusto Roa Bastos' Yo el Supremo [I, the Supreme] (Paraguay, May); Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla [The Trickster of Seville] (Spain, June); Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres [Three Trapped Tigers] (Cuba, July--held in conjunction with the the Kingdom of Redonda Read-along hosted by Richard of Shea's Zibaldone); José Hernández's Martín Fierro [The Gaucho Martín Fierro] (Argentina, August); Macedonio Fernández's Museo de la novela de la Eterna [The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)] (Argentina, September); Nicanor Parra's Poemas y antipoemas [Poems and Antipoems] (Chile, October); Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha [Don Quixote] (Spain, November & December); and Juan Rulfo's El Llano en llamas [The Plain in Flames and/or The Burning Plain and Other Stories] (Mexico, December).

Other 2666 Readers

Bellezza, Dolce Bellezza
Frances, Nonsuch Book
Miguel, St. Orberose
Sarah, what we have here is a failure to communicate
Scott, seraillon
Victoria, Views from the Page and the Oven 

Una novelita lumpen

Una novelita lumpen (Anagrama, 2009)
by Roberto Bolaño
Spain, 2002

Toda escritura es una marranada.

Las personas que salen de la nada intentando precisar cualquier cosa que pasa por su cabeza, son unos cerdos.

Todos los escritores son unos cerdos.  Especialmente los de ahora.

[All writing is a dirty trick.

The people who come out of nowhere trying to pinpoint whatever thing is passing through their heads are a bunch of swine.

All writers are a bunch of swine.  Especially today's writers.]

--Antonin Artaud

As its title, its acerbic Antonin Artaud epigraph, and its first person female narrator's opening line ("Ahora soy una madre y también una mujer casada, pero no hace mucho fui una delincuente" ["Now I'm a mother and also a wife, but not long ago I was a delinquent"]) (13) all take different roads to Rome to suggest, Una novelita lumpen (either A Short Little Lumpen Novel or A Lumpen Novella--I prefer the former for its whiff of self-mockery and not taking itself too seriously), a genre novel set in Roma that Bolaño wrote on commission while trying to put the finishing touches on 2666 before the sands of time ran out on him, is a sort of a crime or female delinquency-oriented bildungsroman having to do with the teenaged orphan Bianca's temporary fling with prostitution in the days when the rest of her non-working girl life began to spiral out of control.  Something about the work made me think of it as a slighter, much less ambitious and just generally lesser version of The Skating Rink, but maybe that's just me.  In any event, the tale about how the teen prostitute's unhealthy relationship with two of her deadbeat brother's even more deadbeat friends eventually escalated into the group's planned robbery of her wealthy client, a former Italian Mr. Universe and one-time B-movie film star reputed to have a strongbox loaded with cash in his mansion on the Via Germanico, is all interesting enough from a giallo/pulp fiction/class war point of view; however, those of you pining for the title to be translated into English should note that, despite a convincing noir ambience and vibe, this novella only hints at the imaginative firepower of the author's best work.  Still, mediocre Bolaño is better than no Bolaño at all and Una novelita lumpen at least sometimes proves it with a swanky Manuel Puig homage (amid all the sordidness, an amusing chapter dedicated to Bianca's taking of a quiz from Donna Moderna magazine), occasional in your face examples of those wild interior monologues that make you feel like you've climbed inside the characters' heads, and--all my other disappointment aside--a terrific final paragraph which cranks things up just like the literary equivalent of a late-'70s punk song ending in a rousing hail of dirty chords and antisocial distortion.  P.S. to Rise: Godzilla!

 Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

Bolaño cercano

Bolaño cercano (Candaya DVD, 2008)
Directed by Erik Haasnoot
Spain, 2008
In Spanish

"Favorite author documentaries" essentially being a brand new film genre to me, I was quadruply jazzed to discover that my hunt for this 45-minute Roberto Bolaño doc--generously included as a bonus disc alongside the 502-page Bolaño salvaje, a book of essays about and reminiscences on the Chilean novelist/poet published by the Barcelona-based Editorial Candaya--would also lead me to four other book and documentary pairings from Candaya with texts such as Ana Rodríguez Fischer's Ronda Marsé (on Juan Marsé), Jorge Carrión's El lugar de Piglia (on Ricardo Piglia), Margarita Heredia Zubieta's Vila-Matas portátil (on Enrique Vila-Matas), and José Ramón Ruisánchez's & Oswaldo Zavala's Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (on Juan Villoro) all accompanied by separate DVDs of their own.  In fact, I almost felt like a niche blogger's version of the f'n Octomom given all this Spanish language literature largesse even before I found out that the Piglia title came with a bonus documental on famous Argentinean wacko Macedonio Fernández.  Score!  While I should have lots more to say about the other essay collections and DVDs in coming weeks, right now I'd like to direct your attention to Dutch filmmaker Erik Haasnoot's low-key Bolaño cercano [a difficult to translate title approximating something like Bolaño, Up Close and Personal], which offers up a sympathetic portrait of Bolaño as a loving family man and tireless reader and writer and teases with ever so brief glimpses of his personal library and countless spiral notebooks filled with rough drafts of his novels and poetry and even comic book-like drawings and illustrations. Since the previously unreleased film's a relatively simple affair that largely switches back and forth between a group interview with Bolaño's widow Carolina López and Bolaño writer friends Enrique Vila-Matas and A.G. Porta in Blanes, Spain (left to right above) and one on one interviews with fellow Bolaño writer pals Rodrigo Fresán in Barcelona and Juan Villoro in Mexico City respectively, I'm going to bypass any further commentary on the work to leave space for the transcription of several exchanges which caught my attention for one reason or another (please note that my Spanish is unsteady enough that I could have easily made a transcription error or two here and there without being aware of it--a translation caveat emptor and all that).

Rodrigo Fresán on what he likes about the experimental aspects of Bolaño's poetry and prose

Yo, me cuesta mucho separar los libros.  Es como una especie de organismo multicelular respondiendo a un único supercerebro.  El caso de Enrique Vila-Matas es el mismo, por ejemplo,  Nabokov es el mismo.  El caso de Borges es el mismo, ¿no?  Son escritores que me parece que les preocupa más la visión total y panorámica de las cosas más que de concentrándose en hechos aislados o en libros o en historias autoconcluyentes, ¿no?

[It's a lot of work for me to sort out the books from one another.  It's like a kind of multicellular organism responding to a lone superbrain.  The case of Enrique Vila-Matas is the same, for example, Nabokov is the same.  Borges' case is the same, no?  They are writers who, it seems to me, are more concerned with the overall panoramic vision of things than with concentrating on isolated facts or in books or in stories that are self-contained, you know?]

Enrique Vila-Matas, in response to a question from A.G. Porta (co-author with Bolaño of the 1984 Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce [Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic]), on the noticeable changes in Bolaño's writing as he raced against the clock of his premature death

Bueno, es asombroso.  Los cambios de Estrella distante a Los detectives y de Los detectives a 2666. hay muchos altos y iba ganando en fuerzas, asombrosamente, en muy poco espacio de tiempo.  La  palabra es intensidad, claro.  Con el tiempo que hay entre la publicación de Estrella distante hasta su último libro es un espacio creo de son de 7 o 8 años en los cuales era una especie de tour de force de gran intensidad y de grandes cambios de registro de que estamos pocos acostumbrados en los escritores.

[Well, it's astonishing.  The changes from Distant Star to the Detectives and from the Detectives to 2666.  There are a lot of high points and he was gaining in power, astonishingly, in a very short space of time.  The word is intensity, clearly.  With the time that there is in between the publication of Distant Star until his last book is a period, I believe, of 7 or 8 years in which there was a sort of tour de force of great intensity and of great changes in register which we're not very accustomed to seeing in writers.]

Bolaño's widow agrees, adding that the confidence he gained from knowing Anagrama would publish each book that he wrote and, especially, "la próximidad de la enfermedad le dió mucha más esfuerza" ["the proximity of his illness gave him much more strength"] to risk more in his final writings.

Fresán on where The Savage Detectives fits in within Latin American literature as a whole

Me parece que la gran proeza de la novela, y al mismo tiempo también la enorme astucia de Roberto, está en manipular, reordenar, resignificar y [?] materiales más transitados, más obvios y incluso más erosionados de la gran novela latinoamericana-- la dictadura, el exilio, cierta épica de la derrota, el malditismo de los poetas  --y presentar eso en una manera completa, y total y absolutamente nueva. ¿No?  Sin traicionar la escenografía habitual de lo que supone es la gran novela latinoamericana.  En el sentido de que Los detectives salvajes o 2666 digamos tienen la misma rareza respetuosa que de repente tuvo en su momento 2001: Odisea del espacio de Stanley Kubrick.  En el sentido de que es una película de ciencia ficción, respeta todas de las variantes bastante conocidas del género como, no sé, la súbita aparencia de una inteligencia extraterrestre de una máquina Hal, problemas tecno de astronauta, pero todas contadas de una manera completamente original y nueva.

[It seems to me that the novel's great feat, and at the same time Roberto's enormous cleverness, is in manipulating, reordering, resignifying and [?] materials more common, more obvious and even more eroded from the great Latin American novel--dictatorship, exile, a certain epic of defeat, the wretchedness of the poets--and presenting that in a completely and totally and absolutely new way.  No?  Without betraying the customary scenography of what one expects in the great Latin American novel.  In the sense that The Savage Detectives or 2666 let's say have the same respectful strangeness that 2001: A Space Odyssey suddenly had in its day.  In the sense that it's a work of science fiction, it respects all the fairly well-known variants of the genre like, I don't know, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence in a machine like Hal, technical problems of astronauts, but all told in a completely original and new way.

Juan Villoro on the appeal of The Savage Detectives

Creo que lo más interesante de este libro es precisamente la figura del detective salvaje.  Es alguien que investiga la realidad de manera rebelde.  Es un poeta que no necesariamente escribe obras poéticas.  O sea, no es un poeta cultural, no es un poeta que esté escribiendo poesía.  Puedo hacerlo, pero lo más importante es que él convierte la poesía en una forma de vida.  Él busca vivir poéticamente y esto es lo que yo creo es el gran atractivo de Los detectives salvajes.  Una obra donde la poesía es una forma de la acción, es lo que hacen los personajes, y de allí lo atractivo de lo que ha tenido.

[I think that the most interesting thing about this book is precisely the figure of the savage detective.  He's somebody who investigates reality in a rebellious way.  He's a poet who doesn't necessarily write poetic works.  Or rather, he's not a cultural poet, he's not a poet who's writing poetry.  He can do that, but the important thing is that he converts poetry into a form of life.  He seeks to live poetically, and this is what I think is what's most appealing about The Savage Detectives.  A work where poetry is a form of action, it's what the characters do, and from that stems the appeal that it's had.

The end: a question put to Bolaño in an old interview

¿Qué es lo que finalmente quiere que nos quede como gesto en el rostro a nosotros, sus lectores, cuando terminamos un libro suyo?

 Aquí hay dos respuestas, ésta es una muy buena pregunta.  Primero, que cada lector es dueño de su propio rostro y que yo no tengo nada que ver con el estado en que quede ese rostro.

Y, segundo, que si por casualidad cada lector ha podido ver en mis libros a alguien cercano a él, pues yo me daría por satisfecho.  Sobre todo a alguien cercano que no cerrara puertas, a alguien cercano que abra puertas y ventanas y que luego desaparezca, porque hay muchas cosas por leer y la vida no es tan breve como se piensa.

[What expression would you ultimately like us, your readers, to have left on our faces when we finish a book of yours?

Here are two answers, this is a very good question.  First, that each reader is master of his own face and that I don't have anything to do with the state in which that face remains.

And, second, that if by chance each reader has been able to see someone in my books that's close to him, then I'd consider myself satisfied.  Above all somebody similar who didn't close doors, somebody similar who opens doors and windows and then disappears, because there are many things to read and life isn't as short as one thinks.]

 Erik Haasnoot