The Awful Possibilities

aka men on books, 1.2. we dare you to read the whole thing.

oh yeah, this is the second part of our discussion about the savage detectives by roberto bolano. read the first part here.

from timothy:

i am about 280 in now, and i agree with yr assessment of the oral history section as compared to the first, now that i’m there. i am awed by the fluidity of the voices and how well he maintains so many. i am glad that he trusts the reader enough to not begin by stating his purpose, such as a note from the interviewers, what they are specifically looking for and what they believe to be true.

if it comes later, it will be welcome, but for now to have venn diagrams of narrative in which a broad picture emerges, allows the book itself to mirror belano and lima’s own search for tinajero. the stories are bouncing off each other: i’m not sure what happened with the impala- juan mentions that quim offered it, and maria states that her mother is angry with them for stealing it. and then the whole priapo’s scene makes differences in perception obvious by having the narrators juxtaposed- contradicting and enhancing one another.

i’m interested to see if the interlocutors themselves become a story. from the way that people seem to be introducing the major players to the interviewers, its unlikely they were major players who were present themselves, which would preclude juan and anyone who gives testimony.

in fact, to this point, juan hasn’t been mentioned. what does it mean that these characters are allowed to be introduced in the first section by a person thus far not due a mention from any interviewee? (btw, i am with you on the backjacket/major character tip. at this point they’re more spectral figures, though the tinajero parallel i mentioned above does satisfy me greatly).

on a practical level, i think poetic and literary language are very different. i see yr point, but i do think that juan fancies himself a poet but still separates narrative/journal from poetry. panning out, i think bolano’s writing is very literary without the poetic-novelistic digression that so many writers think adds to the seriousness of their work. i also agree that the poetry is endemic to the characters and this is embodied throughout the interviews, some being matter of fact and others filled with metaphor and digression. regardless, i’m reading this book at the right time, coming off lowry and fitzgerald, both of whom love them some poetic ruminatin.

you mentioned ‘please kill me’ i was thinking just as ‘low culture’ (not a judgment), thinking of all those oral histories that vanity fair does, or even just documentary film, which the pacing often mimics.

the stories are fantastic, and i like bolano’s willingness to let the current narrator introduce characters at his own pace. the shifting focus, such as the few stories that mention luscious and never belano and lima actually add depth to the scene as a whole. and the narrators add to the ‘contemporaneous past-tense’ i mentioned before, with the lack of datelines, re-interviews and salvatierra kind of serving as a reset- his one interview apparently having happened at the beginning of the process.

anyway, one last note. i ain’t claiming misogyny cause i love it, but all the female interviewees are nuts. laura thinks v.r. is all about her; the mother of mexican poetry!;  and angelica’s ambivalence about everything. anyway, it just reinforces the fact that every narrator is a distinct character.

from me:

ok, most of this you’ve put better than i’d be able to, so i’m going to respond with a couple quibbles to your points, and then add one of my own, which is a larger quibble leading into a new issue, and all of these are interconnected, which makes sense given the structure of the book itself.

for the record, i’m about 350 in.

you said you were “interested to see if the interlocutors themselves become a story.” i think we’d both agree by now that he/she/they (whoever he/she/they is/are) do, and i’m enjoying this to varying degrees. there are sections where you’re led to believe that the interlocutor(s) follow(s) (ok, i’m going to stop doing that now) clues: luis-alberto-luscious, rafael-barbara (on which more soon), norman-heimito, etc. but there’s one section that strains credulity for me: the mary watson section with “the night watchman.” it’s a very pretty story, maybe a little grating to the extent that mary refuses to call the night watchman belano, but that leads to a bigger problem for me: how the hell did the interlocutor find her if she never refers to him by name? maybe this will be resolved in the course, but it’s the kind of thing that can really fuck with my take on a book. also, i feel cheap writing this because i mentioned this to you in conversation three nights ago.

juan’s disappearance. i assume he’ll reappear, but it’s just a feeling and not something i’ve seen hint of in the text. but. i think it would be awesome if there was no further mention of him in the whole book. this is something i really love about this book and also 2666 — bolano as author seems very comfortable just up and abandoning things. in fact, it seems to reinforce the circumambulatory style of the greater work. think about how long the book goes without mention of tinajero. i hope they never find her too. and i like when people say that belano and lima weren’t actually poets.

we are in full agreement on literary versus poetic language. or at least literary. what you seem to be calling poetic i would call flowery or self-consciously stylized (neither in a pejorative sense). i am sorry i used your phrasing in the last post as a strawman.

okay, let me admit something here. i could conceive of this book becoming tiresome. i see the point about nonessentiality being part of its essence (editor: there are things here that could be cut; bolano: duh), but there have been a few sections that did nothing for me. perez camargo’s first monologue, for example, seems to go out of its way to make belano and lima nonentities. i know this is part of the point, but stuff like this…

“But as they got more comfortable, as you got to know them or started to listen to them more carefully, their pose seemed more sad than anything else, off-putting. They weren’t poets, certainly, and they weren’t revolutionaries. I don’t even think they were sexualized. What do I mean by that? Just that sex didn’t seem to interest them (the only thing that interested them was the money they could squeeze out of us), nor did poetry or politics, although their look seemed modeled on the hackneyed archetype of the young leftist poet.”

…threatens to overdo it. on its own it’s fine, and in context it makes sense, but it’s a point made so much better so much more subtly everywhere else in the book.

heimito, though — that shit was a tour de force. and all of the voices are excellent, different levels of subtlety, but you always get a sense quickly of whose speaking.

speaking of. here’s that big quibble i mentioned. women. i could see an argument for misogyny (i know you didn’t accuse that), but i’m not going there. i’m also not going to go all the way to crazy either, though. the one that really sticks out is barbara patterson. obviously “crazy,” but also american as in u.s. of, one of very few even mentioned in the book. i actually like her sections, but they don’t ring true to me in any way (whereas, for example, the fonts do, even if that’s problematic). i felt very similarly about the oscar fate section of 2666 (also u.s.american ). basically i’m saying his americans don’t ring true to me, even though i enjoy them.

a few months back, sal told me bolano’s mexicans didn’t ring true to him. i took that with a grain of salt because sal obviously has a vested interest in keeping mexico magical, but let’s get to the bottom of this. who better than two gringos with fancy college degrees, only one of whom has ever been to mexico and read lowry, to discuss the authenticity of bolano’s depictions?

it's just human nature

from timothy:

well, brother, this will be my final missive before finishing the book. and it will follow yr rules and concern itself with only up til 590- the end of the 2nd section. i had most of it drafted in my head before you wrote, but you took forever, so i decided to save myself the embarrassment and see the section to its conclusion before committing myself to literary hunches, though several characters, and i would say belano’s authorial voice, authorized me to do so, but i’m getting ahead of myself.

you’ve set me up pretty well to be both a self-revisionist and a critical apologist. so be it. im also repetitive since quite a bit of this you heard in a more unrefined state a few days ago. avaunt…

i’m as big a fan of literary economy as you, so its strange to defend the bloat (sing it with me: not a judgment, not saying you don’t like it either; oh that old refrain) i’d even go so far as to say that beginning with andres ramirez’s tales and all subsequent tales of belano and barcelona we lose the original plot of the novel altogether. it’s obviously not accidental, the play of time i’ve talked about several times before allows for constant revision even of the project itself.

if yr looking for a poem and find an african revolution, well… the whole idea of an investigation: were we ever looking for belano’s and lima’s literature? and wasn’t it their collective goal in the first place to make their lives literature? i’ve always been troubled by this idea, its happens often enough in 20th century literature (i wrote my thesis on london fields after all), but i do believe that once a sufficiently interesting character has been developed he can become a cipher for a whole lot of shit, ruminations on whatever. im being intentionally vague because i’m on shakey ground here.

but the rushed nature of the final 5 years or so of the novel is troubling. it could not really be done any other way, and yet there are hundreds of pages spent on navel-gazing, and 20 spent on belano in africa. but then there’s belano’s pretty epic pisstake through ernesto grajales:

“Anyway, these are labyrinths I prefer not to lose myself in. I limit myself to the material at hand and let readers and scholars draw their own conclusions.”

this of course after he has denied the existence of the curtain-raising garcia madero and just before he ends the body of the novel with the conclusion of a single 20-year old conversation that has intentionally been piece-mealed throughout the novel. it is at once maddening and exciting, deflating and exhilarating. sorry to get rapturous, but it really was one of my favorite things in the book. akin to moments in amis, nabokov or ‘master and margarita.’ i’m sure madero would know the literary term for a climax (or is it a denouement?) that elevates and cuts down the entire project at the same time.

he never allows us the sentimentality of seeing belano’s death, or a touching moment with salvatierra, instead having him bug out at lima’s being asleep.

as a way to atone for my earlier discussion of women and madness, i just want to assert that it is all for a purpose. barbara patterson is by no means a representative female in the book, she’s much more the embodiment of everything bolano clearly hates about america. and xose lendoiro is clearly someone for whom he has an intense hatred, it’s rare to read a section of a novel from a narrator and yet the author’s venom shows through so obviously. and then to follow this up shortly with the section from the book fair, in which a bunch of authors state whatever they like about the literary scene. and what’s more having this sandwiched by two of the most plot-heavy sections of the book (the duel and africa) is a novelist enjoying the outer limits of the structure he has built.

lastly some notes on play. i ain’t about to get all j.h. miller hunnypot on you, but cesarea allows us some fun and looseness with interpretation. not much needs to be said about the awesomeness of naming the deus ex machina (or maybe just another cipher, whatever you choose) of yr book ‘to my god saviour of the earth’ (amadeo salvatierra). and to have the authors at the book fair allowing you to interpret the book yr reading however you like is inspired. i was going to put a caveat about being ‘inside baseball’ but fuck it, where would the book be without that? besides, i ain’t inside this baseball and i still enjoyed the hell out of it.

so to my outsider/gringo status, sorry, if you can believe it, i even had a ton to say about my trip to mexico (went to puerto angel and norman is right, its beautiful) and lowry (hates mexicans is all i know), but i dont know shit, and bolano’s point seems ot be that that nobody does. the more we rep where we’re from, the more we’re just trying to get away from it…? that may be too trite. (as laura jauregui says, “But that wasn’t what I meant to say.”) requena is the only person in the book who seems to care about mexico, maybe joaquin font, but the first is a burnout and the second is a loonie…

i also loved the heimito section and was troubled by the ‘detectives’ finding mary watson and even jacobo urendo (hell quite a few of the final narrators) but they all end up taking shortcuts, no? not defending, just sayin…

did i ever tell you about the man who taught his mouth to speak?

from me:

you got kind of bolano in your response to my last question in the sense that you seem to brush it off (although the idea about repping where you’re from, trite though it may be, has a lot to do with it, i think), but your whole post actually addresses it in an indirect way. or maybe it’s just what i want to talk about. anyway, i’ll get to your direct points in a second, but i’m going to use your mention of barbara patterson as a jumping off point again.

one thing i didn’t make clear in my last response was that, at the same time i didn’t find barbara patterson convincingly american, i also didn’t find her convincingly crazy. nor, i guess, and as amusing as she was, convincingly human. a lot of folks talk about how bolano doesn’t make convincing humans, but i guess that just shows how wrong i am in my approach to fictional characters, because i find this cast so much more human than most. i have no access to their interior lives, no idea why they make the decisions they make, and no real desire to know any more about most of them. for me, it’s almost exactly like hanging out with the humans i know.

then why do i (and you, i’d say) keep coming back to barbara patterson? my answer is that she’s the one (okay not the only one — xose lendoiro is another good one) example of a character whose motives are perfectly clear to me because she has none. she’s clearly modeled on a very specific type of american sitcom/hollywood stock shrew. where you see beef with america(us), i see more of a misunderstanding of a certain american archetype through the lens of lower-brow media.

and i feel fairly confident about this because i don’t really see it as a critique of the us. i’m sure bolano had issues with us (and it’s certainly refreshing that the characters aren’t all yearning to cross the border), but the whole book, for better or worse, shows that he’s willingly influenced by american culture, particularly beat poetry, hard-boiled fiction, and film. i want to try to make a spectrum to show what i mean. (i was already trying to develop this when we last spoke.)

william s burroughs seemed to foresee the globalized (this sounds redundant but you know what i mean) direction that the world was heading in, but he made that globalization seem gross. i think because he focused on the proximity of globalization but not the potential fluidity. in other words, and now i’m starting to use jargon, everyone not burroughs in burroughs is “other.”

salman rushdie’s worlds seem much closer than burroughs’ to our own, but, at least to my mind, he self-consciously exotices his own experience.

bolano synthesizes these two for me. he describes a world that doesn’t have much in common with mine as far as the details are concerned, and yet seems perfectly in keeping with my experience of my own world.

this raises a few possibilities:

• i’m unable to transcend my white male american imperialistic view of the world
• bolano is playing to my white male imperialistic view of the world
• the white male imperialist view of the world has so thoroughly infected the world that bolano has adopted it unconsciously
• the world is globalized and bolano is the first truly global writer of this era

i know it’s not my place, but his crappy americans incline me toward the latter. of course, it’s also possible that his mexicans and chileans are crappy (which would suggest that either the first or second, or really any but the last possibility is true) and he’s just a terrible writer.

let me leave that at that except to point out that i know rushdie is not a strong example.

my biggest response to your last post is that i felt precisely the opposite and yet came to the same conclusion. the book definitely dragged, but beginning with the duel i was pulled back in for good, and for me the unrelated writers at the conference were particularly and oddly moving. in other words, rather than seeming potentially out of keeping with the rest, it seemed both natural and justified.

that said, two minor issues.

i hated this quote from guillem pina’s monologue:

“Then he said that there were similarities between his last book and his new book that fell into the realm of games that were impossible to decipher.”

it’s page 502, bolano. no need to start winking at us now. he also pulls similarly corny self-justifying moves in 2666. nothing that breaks it for me, but if you pair that with the quote from my last post, you’ll notice that the moments i like least are when bolano states something directly that he’s spent a couple hundred pages beating us over the head with, even if the glove is velvet. that’s not to say i don’t like getting beat over the head with prose, just not in this combination.

and then the move to africa. on it’s own it’s really engaging. in context, it’s maybe too direct an homage to rimbaud and also maybe narcissistic in the way the author decides to make of his dopellganger a full-on hero of the romatic mode.

still, the section fizzles out beautifully.

end transmission

my bro’s a smart guy, right? listen to his music. we will talk once more. about the very end of the book. i will probably be mean about something in the meantime.

i’m still reading the bolano, but as i’ve mentioned before, when the weather gets warm my thoughts turn to short stories. actually, what i said before was that when the weather gets warm my thoughts turn to barry hannah, but i think we can all agree that the name barry hannah is synonymous with short stories, meaning, even if he’s only my second place spirit animal, he’s definitely the spirit animal of short fiction. my priorities are fucked.

this time when my thoughts turned to short stories they turned to a very specific collection that i’ve been waiting for for six years now on the basis of a single story. i mean, i read that one story and i decided not to read anything else by the author until he put out a book, because i knew it would be so much fun to read the book when it finally came out, and now it has, and i bought it the day it did, but i’ve been putting it off, ostensibly because of the bolano, but also because, even though i successfully managed to avoid reading any other stories by the author, i made the mistake of reading a number of reviews and interviews, and now i’m a little nervous.

let me type about something different but related for a minute.

did anyone see adam kirsch’s review of antonya nelson’s most recent collection in the new york times a couple months back? i’ve never read anything by antonya nelson, and now probably never will. no offense, antonya nelson, but i can’t when somebody (i mean adam kirsch) said this about your work:

The simplest way to summarize the story is to say it describes a man and a woman having a fight in a bar — the kind of banal but psychologically intricate transaction that is a short story writer’s natural terrain.

i could go on about this forever, but what it would all amount to is i don’t want to ever hang out in a short story writer’s natural terrain. also, i don’t want to read anybody who hangs out in a short story writer’s natural terrain. and i don’t think anybody else does either, which may be at the root of all those claims you hear (if you’re listening) about the short story being dead.

speaking of which, this left me cold. does it seem like the new york times is making a bunch of grand claims this year that are ultimately pretty empty? review me, new york times. i’m writing short stories that strive for greatness a long way from the short story writer’s natural terrain.

and i don’t see the appeal of adam kirsch.  i just ignored him when he mostly stuck to poetry criticism (not that i don’t care about poetry criticism; i actually read quite a bit of it, just not the stuff kirsch writes), but when he thinks he’s stepping on my natural terrain he better watch it. and that thing he wrote about keith gessen was bullshit. what was that even supposed to be? maybe if it had been about tao lin it would have made some sense.

you think i’ve gotten off track but you’re wrong i’m just off terrain.

here’s the thing.

who needs nabokov?

i made the mistake of reading reviews and interviews with the writer whose collection i’ve been so excited about, and one of the interviews ended with this:

“The ugly things we tend to deal with… they’re just too gruesome for fiction.”

i’m going to give this book the benefit of the doubt as soon as i’m done with the savage detectives. but shit.

finally, once someone reviewed a journal i had a story in. here is what the reviewer had to say about my contribution:

Christian TeBordo’s lyrically titled “Sweet William, Don’t Even Bother Denying It” has bursts of disjunctive humor but suffers from a first-person narrator hell-bent on bullying both Sweet William and the reader.

that story will be in my collection, by the way. the whole book is on my natural terrain.

my brother and i will discuss bolano again shortly.

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.