My Post-2666 World

I’ve been promising a post-2666 post for a while now. There have been many versions, many variations, many ways I tried to get at the heart of what 2666 did to me.  They are on the cutting room floor, in the trash bin, in the proverbial ether, never to materialize.

I wasn’t ready immediately after 2666 to write at length about it.  I needed distance, perspective.  Now that I have that distance, no tangible perspective has come other than this: nothing else I’ve read since has been 2666. No other book has done to me what 2666 did. And I’ve read some excellent books in the past few weeks. I just can’t move on.  So much so that I don’t even want to read more Bolano – I just want to sit with whatever this is for a bit longer.  As the TBR pile grows, as the opportunities to interview much-respected writers come up, as promised review deadlines loom, I really need to move on.

Yet, I feel as if I’m in a post-2666 haze.  It is similar to my post-Human Smoke haze.  What do these books have in common? A very high body count.  A true life body count, not a fictional one.  I suspect this is central in my inability to move forward.  I have always had a particular sensitivity to mass, senseless death.  Sounds nutty to say as I’m sure everyone does.  Yet  I’m so averse to such material that I faint in movie theaters. Get queasy during art exhibits. Shaky at certain museums and monuments that deal with these very issues. It is difficult for me to process – as it should be. 

"Part Four – The Part About The Crimes" was my “I’m about to faint” movie, my “I think I need to sit down” art exhibit.  I felt I was plodding through the murders of those women in Santa Teresa in a way that I knew I had to get through, had to try and understand, yet the body count was overwhelming. Each night I fought the impulse to skip the murder section, even a few pages, because I knew that to honor these deaths in the way Bolano intended meant that I needed to read the terrible details of each one.  It was difficult.  There were days I wasn’t up to it.  There were days I longed for the professors of Part I and their ridiculous (by comparison) intellectual concerns and love affairs. Alongside the carnage in Part Four, all other parts of the novel seem superfluous…but only after you’ve  made your way through the land mines of Part Four.

When people ask me if I liked 2666, I can’t say I did.  I did not enjoy it.  It was not a pleasure to read.  It was hard work.  I felt uncomfortable during most of it.  But do I recommend it? Oh yes. Setting aside all the hullabaloo about Bolano’s last book and is it unfinished and the oh my goodness what will we do hand-wringing, this is a novel that forced me to confront the things that upset me most in life and sit with that discomfort for 1,000 pages.

What is most interesting to me about this is my tongue-in-cheek post about the early parts of the book & my view that Bolano was chiding any reader who didn’t have the cojones to handle his work.  What I viewed early on as Bolano’s great caveat (my novel is big and messy, please excuse) I now see as something more potent.  Perhaps he really meant it – that there are those who could handle what was about to come and those who couldn’t.  Or at least, that what was to come required work, uneasy work.  An early warning to any reader to either take up the cause or move on so as not to waste your time or his.

There is more to say here. Much more.  I suspect this will continue to come in waves over the next few weeks. Possibly months.  I’ve not yet read any of the posts at what I’m sure is the excellent 2666 reading group.  I’ve not read anyone’s perspective on 2666 so I could be way out in left field.  This novel affected me in such a way that I felt I needed to stay in my own 2666 world long enough to fully understand my own reaction to it before I let the flood of other opinions in.  All in good time.

For now I’ll say this: if you haven’t read this book, please do. I’d really like to talk to you about it.