one wore blue and one wore gray
my brother timothy and i are reading the same book at the same time. and emailing each other about it. we’re like the 21st century version of 21st century middle-aged women sitting at the 21st century coffee shop in a 21st century barnes and noble and talking about which character in the savage detectives we would most like to date. the thing that sucks is that there is no p.s. section at the end of the book with explanations of the themes and an informative interview with the author, so we can’t be sure we’re talking about the right things, but we’re pretty sure the point is either man against nature or man against himself. and we both think ernesto san epifanio is dreamy.
anyway, this is for us, not you, but we’re sharing anyway. witness the power of web 2.0.
from timothy:
im about 120 into sd and i am engulfed; as in, you really should put it down or you will not sleep, friend. i didnt want to bring it on the bus, its a little big for easy portation, but i couldnt bear the thought of reading something else.
the choice of a 17-year-old narrator with contemporaneous (not quite the right word, but you know what i mean) past-tense is so well-used, it almost seems cheap (not at all a knock, just jealous). the back-n-forth between intentional literary myth-making and adolescent over-documentation is so fluid i constantly get sucked in, and only when i’m not reading am i skeptical of him. he tells so much that the few times that he undershares resonate the loudest in my mind. and i love the ability to edit himself as he goes, my favorite being his relation to pancho.
that’s where i am now anyway.
oh, actually i had one more thought. the lack of poetry in his writing (unless using tired cliches): is bolano explicitly addressing this when the narrator lets us know how easily he can journal and write poetry simultaneously in the bar; as if these are 2 distinct modes for him?
actually, one more thought. the natural ebb and flow of juan’s interest in/transcription of conversation, such that when its not that interesting to him the conversations often seem stilted and unreal, until they take a poetic or sexually explicit turn. the best illustration for me is the first conversation with lupe, in which even on a syntactic level it almost seems stale until they begin discussing alberto’s wangknife.
or maybe this is saying more about me as a reader and im only into the wangntang.
better than oprah
from me:
i’m about 40 pages into section 2 and i’m right there with you. i wish i could take a couple days off and just read it straight through, though there’s also the joy of looking forward to it during the day, which happens to me rarely enough (last time: 2666; time before that: i don’t know, maybe when i reread demons when we were in the highlands).
as for your take on the narrator, i agree so much i have nothing to add, except to point out that my view of him, or my view of his view of things, becomes more complicated from the beginning of section 2. the whole rashomon thing is practically as well-used as the technique you mentioned, and yet it seems very natural here, and adds depth to lima and belano while still remaining completely on the surface, ie, we learn about them through the effect they have on others. i find myself thinking about please kill me as much as any fiction.
which, i guess, leads to my take on the whole “lack of poetry” thing. i’m pretty sure you haven’t read much of the press about bolano, but a lot of the major criticism focuses on that, the idea that his style is “unliterary.”
while i see a distinction between “lack of poetry” and “unliterary” (i know i’m putting words in your mouth), i think this is actually the only kind of “literary” prose i like. it’s like stanislavsky method narrating, totallly constrained by what the narrator would or would not be capable of (as opposed to the author).
that’s why the sex stuff doesn’t bother me anymore. at first i thought it was kind of ridiculous — 4 hours etc? that’s fun once in a while — but then i realized that later narrators talk about sex in a much more casual and realistic way. in other words, the young poet is also kind of macho, and cocky. ouch. (this is less clear in 2666, where the 3rd person narrator also makes outlandish claims that are never contradicted.)
that would be why i don’t think he’s saying the poetry’s different than the journal. i’d guess the poetry’s pretty much exactly like the journal — charming, unreliable, but utterly worthless as lit if juan was an actual person, without bolano behind him making it all up and getting ready to smash something else against his version of events.
but then maybe i’m completely wrong. i tend to read and believe jacket copy, so i assume this book is about belano and lima. assuming that much is true, how far can bolano take the technique of circling around them without diving in before it gets old, and can it be as effective as the old plumbing the depths of the traditional novel?
end transmission
we will do this again, with the rest of the book. you’ve been warned.
