There’s a Group Read going on for the book 2666, and I’ve been following along on the forums and stuff, but here is my first blog post about it. I’ve never read Bolano before and I find it alternating between engaging and frustrating. Often, I have no idea what he is trying to get at mainly because there is just so much there. He throws so much at the book (it is 900 pages long) that it seems inevitable to make connections, but are the connections really there? Or is it just the result of there being so much there?
I kept most of my comments on The Part About the Critics on the forums or to myself, but here are a few things I noticed about the Part About Amalfitano (please excuse the messiness of these notes)
Parallels with Part 1: Right off we start in a similar territory as part 1. Instead of the critics going from Europe to Latin America to look for Archimboldi, we have Lola going to ??? looking for the poet. Interesting: Amalfitano says there is no way she really met him since he introduced him to her. So (knowing this) the long passages where she writes of meeting him and making love to him at a party read to me almost like one of the dream sequences. Also: parallel with part 1 in that a woman (Lola in part 2, Norton in part 1) is leaving/abandoning a man (or 2 men, in part 1) and writing to him/them from the new location.
What strikes me about these looking-for-a-writer scenes: these people don’t know who they are, and they are invested in this other thing that defines them, because they can’t define themselves. The critics write ABOUT Archimboldi’s writings. It seems like a modern condition Bolano is highlighting, wherein people’s identity is so lost and so caught up and dependent on others… but it’s dependent on others not in a close-knit-community kind of way… there is a very ego-centric, selfish neediness in their searches and reliance on some kind of literary hero.
Character notes: we know so little about these characters… who is Lola and what is her background, why did she suddenly leave so mysteriously? Who is Imma and what is her motivation for going along with Lola? We know very little about Amalfitano, though this section is about him… it gave him a page or two and then went head first into Lola’s adventures. Only later in the section do we get more into his head. Also: Lola is an interesting choice of name… traditionally Lola is a name of a prostitute or a drag queen… just based on many songs with the name Lola in it… I’ve actually thought about this before encountering the name here. It’s interesting here considering Lola’s relationship with the poet is through sex, and also how she implicitly allowed the guy who hangs out at the cemetery to pay her for sex.
Stylistic notes: why is part 2 suddenly devoid of paragraph breaks? Except in the last page, where Yeltsin speaks in the dream to him, that is the only paragraph break.
“Madness is contagious”
Neighbor’s fort-like walls w/ broken glass on top. This part compares Amalfitano to a medieval lord. I found this metaphor kind of curious, and out of nowhere, but Bolano returns to it a few times.
A quote:
Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They named the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, breif, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.
p. 189. If you didn’t know he was talking about Amalfitano’s ideas on jet lag, you’d think he was talking about the role of novels like 2666 here.
Testamento geometrico:
“three books ‘each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole’” (sounds like 2666, with its 5 independent parts)
“the friends’ last names had been printed in capitals while the name of the man being honored was in small letters.” (ego? sounds familiar to the Critics)
Book hanging on line = symbolism too much? i.e. literature meets the elements/real world. For those of you wondering, yes I did hang 2666 on the clothesline in the photo above. It seemed a good tribute.
“We’re not animals” Rosa says, about the book hanging on line
“I take it back” p 191, weird rhetorical device here. Anyone get this?
Random thought: I think Bolano is trying to say you can look to art and literature for your answers all you like, you can worship art and forget what you were looking there for to begin with, you can become a professor of literature and scrutinize a piece of text for years, you can even follow the writer, the originator of the art, the questions, but there are some things–in the real world–that you can never understand. (like the murders)
chincuales – 1 flea or bedbug bites 2 a restless scratcher 3 a restless mind
Books It is interesting that in the first part about the critics, we don’t get any sense what Archimboldi’s books are like. And yet in the second part, we get the nitty gritty of 2 books Amalfitano is reading. At least more nitty gritty than the ones mentioned in part 1. The book on Araucanians is described in detail in terms of how Amalfitano is reading it, and I found especially interesting his imagination while reading it, imagining even scenes of the writer trying to publish the book and get a discount (which goes into this region of is-it-imagined or did-it-really-happen-this way). p224. The other book of course is the geometry book, which he hangs out in the elements (also a way of reading?). And which pervades his thoughts in a totally different way, perhaps influencing him to draw geometrical shapes with names of thinkers at different intersections of these diagrams. Maybe Bolano is highlighting the way Amalfitano is “reading” these books and how it is different and unconventional compared to the way the critics are reading their books (which aren’t even worth mentioning in depth). Perhaps Amalf. is the active reader as envisioned by Cortazar, and referenced on p. 224. And then he goes on to imagine Kilipan to have not existed at all, he imagines him as all these other people writing under the name Kilipan. This person who was just made so real to us a second ago by the same imagination.
Young Guerra:
Not sure what I think of this yet. Or how he fits in. He’s a little off his rocker. But then so is Amalfitano. Is it just 2 ways of being mad/dealing? Lola was a little mad too.
{ 0 comments }
“Napoleon was a man, and though sensitive, his flesh was safely covered”
It may be tempting find her exaggerated way of phrasing things amusing and quirky, but they also communicate some incredible and unique insights. I do think she was a genius, in her own odd way, and I found myself agreeing to (and feeling deeply with) a lot of what she says. Her repetition bordered on poetic at times, and her mysterious use of certain phrases (her heart is always a “wooden heart” and her philosophy is always “peripatetic”, she lives in perpetual “sand and barrenness” and always the “red red line of the sky” is a symbol of Happiness to come). Mostly, she writes about how lonely she is, stuck in Butte Montana, and how she would give anything for 3 days of Happiness. For some more history on Mary MacLane’s life before and after this book, visit 
