2666
Posts tagged Roberto bolano
“ He asked if the girl who was blind in one eye had married. They said no. That night he went to see her, without changing his clothes or washing, despite his mother’s pleas that he at least shave. When the girl saw him standing at the door to her house, she recognized him instantly. The one-legged man saw her too, looking out the window, and he raised a hand in a formal salute, even a stiff salute, though it could also have been interpreted as a way of saying such is life. From that moment on he told whoever would listen that in his town everyone was blind and the one-eyed girl was queen. ”
Robert Bolano, 2666
The Part About the Insane Amounts of Rapes and Murders
Casey just wrote he’s excited to put part four behind him and I know exactly how he feels. I’ll hold off judgment till I’m done the entire story but wow, hey? Wow.
Reading this section has made me see I’m not as close to being desensitized as I had previously thought. It just keeps going and going. I’ve had my jaw drop a few times and felt like bleh after reading for an hour. Reading about the deaths doesn’t get easier, it gets harder. It feels like it’s all piling on.
What a contrast from the first section.
The folks from Infinite Summer who are gearing up to take on 2666 have asked a few people to keep track of certain parts of the book (having someone keep track of all the dreams is brilliant). Good luck to the two people marking down all the deaths.
As a fan of boxing I always enjoy when the sport finds its way into the story I’m reading. Which happens a lot. Aside from baseball, there is no other sport that is used more by writers of the 20th century.
If you are interested at all Bolano nails how the people of Mexico are desperate for a dominate heavyweight from their country. This past year they pinned their hopes on Mexican-American Christobal Arreola (seen above on the right) much like they did with Lino Fernández in 2666. Both finding basically the same fate.
I did a little digging as to why Bolano was comfortable using boxing as a tool in this story (you might remember he mentions it a few times before section 3). Some writers find the sport and its competitors fascinating (Joyce Carol Oates), some believe they could have been boxers (Hemingway), Bolano was simply around the sport throughout childhood.
I found this quote from him, ”My father was a heavyweight amateur boxing champion. His unchallenged reign was restricted to southern Chile. I never liked boxing, but had been taught since I was a kid; there was always a pair of boxing gloves in the house, whether in Chile or in Mexico.”
Interesting to me at least.
“ Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world. ”
Francine Prose - “The Folklore of Exile”, a review of Last Evenings on Earth (2006) in The New York Times (9 July 2006)
“ The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slide up. The oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. ”
Wha? WoW
Roberto Bolano - 2666 -page 9
