La Mexicana

I wish you could have seen La Mexicana's furrowed brow as she fanned through her dictionary while studying this post of yours this morning, _________. It would have tugged at your heartstrings. We had an extended discussion of the words “irrefutable” and “nuance.” I have recommended that she no longer sound the “b” in the word “subtle.” Any metaphor that partakes of a feature of women's clothing makes for instant communication. She reconciles the irreconcilable in her style of dress, which I refer to as haute mode flash and trash. As I recall, you are passing familiar with that fashion statement.

In any event, you now have another admirer, instantly and totally loyal to an extent that is a bit frightening to me. She is worried about your family and hopes you are prospering. She is upset with me because I know nothing about your current state of affairs. I am now forbidden ever to disagree with you about anything. Is there anyone that you wish to have rubbed out? La Mexicana awaits your orders.

Here is the latest, an example of what I am up against here. La Mexicana smelled a rat as she read of Liz Norton's reaction to Edwin Johns' death. She locked in on me with narrowed eye and informed me that there is something more here than we are being told. Her current working theory is that Liz Norton was formerly married or is married to Edwin Johns or something.

Jesus, what am I supposed to do with that? I had forgotten that Liz Norton had previously been married or is still married or something. So of course, I must go back and paw through Part I in order to set her straight. There it is on page 35:

For a while they were silent and then Norton started to talk about her husband. This time the horror stories she told didn't affect Espinoza in the slightest.

I am still wandering around in Part I fooling with this startling theory to an accompaniment in the background of a constant staccato monologue from her about the Lola story at the beginning of Part II. Staccato means she is outraged about something.

I wanted to talk a bit about translation issues today as we are about to leave Part I, but that will have to wait until tomorrow

Almost comical? Jeff, it is hilarious! As a matter of fact, I was just laughing with a friend earlier today about this business of the orderly grabbing at empty space where Johns’ hand ought to have been as Johns plummets into this abyss in the Alps just like Sherlock Holmes. That was before I stumbled upon your great post here. From my point of view, this is the absurd taken to the sublime.

Liz Norton is apparently very serious about this all, but I think that she too sees the absurdity in the story. Let me give you my take for what little it is worth. I cannot believe that I have the nerve to try this, but I am gonna.

Let us consider a choice that Natasha Wimmer faced when translating the phrase fábula tramposa, the phrase that troubles you. She chose “false representation.” I believe that she might have translated this as “deceptive fable.” I have checked this out with a native Spanish speaker and former English teacher here. In fact, she said that of those two choices, she prefers “deceptive fable” after reading the thing in context in Spanish.

In that case the fable clearly appears to me to be what you first thought, the story of the circumstances of Johns’ death. It is a comic fable about unforeseen consequences. The damned fool cut off his own hand for art’s sake little knowing that this would ultimately cost him his life. Norton considers the fable deceptive because the absurd (hilarious, I think) circumstances of Johns’ death cast an unfortunate light on his very serious artistry in a former time. . .from her point of view. I myself have no idea whether he was worth a damn as an artist or not.


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We shall see what Jeff thinks of this. For my part I detect Bolaño's invitation to laughter even when his characters are not laughing. I believe that occurs many times in this book. When he gives us that invitation, we must accept it, even in the midst of the dreariest of circumstances.

We shall also await the Spanish language expert's appearance on the scene. It will be a woman, and in her comment she will tear my ass up about this post.

I will violate my own rule limiting myself to one posting per day to add a side note. My Mexicana companion is reading along with you in a beautiful edition put out by Bolaño's Barcelona publisher. She has been utterly seduced by Bolaño's Spanish, to the extent that I now feel as if I am part of some outré threesome with Bolaño. She has lived in Mexico City, Madrid, and Caracas and has a feel for regional variations in the language. She keeps mumbling something about how she loves that fact that Bolaño does not “put too much cream on the taco like those Argentine writers do.” As I imperfectly understand it.

Anyway, this ultimate liaison of Liz Norton and Morini is not a mystery to her. She contends that Liz's attraction arose from the simple fact that Morini maintained a distance from her. In other words, Liz Norton wanted the thing that was not offered to her. Mixed in with that in a minor way is something about Liz Norton's female caretaker instincts having been juiced up. The Mexicana cites text in support of this. Again, this is my translation of something that I only imperfectly understand.

That business about my reading of Pelletier being more perceptive than yours is so not true, __________. The man demands an entirely subjective response from his readers, our own participation in this novel. It partakes much more of poetry than of prose. Each subjective response is going to be different, sometimes our subjective responses will seem to be in opposition. I am not sure that the active reader that Cortázar envisioned would be active enough to satisfy Bolaño. Bolaño wants everything—every single thing--that we as his readers have to give him.

I feel as if every important novel that I have ever read was simply preparation for reading this man's work. And damn it, even after the better part of a lifetime of reading, I am afraid that I did not read enough to be worthy of him.

As for your question, it is frustrating not to be able to read something written by Archimboldi, isn't it?

Somewhere here Archimboldi is described as a person who didn't pretend to reconcile the irreconcilable, as was the fashion these days. (Sorry. I do not have a cite for that in my notes.) Based only upon that statement, I propose that we simply assume that reading Archimboldi must have been very much like reading Bolaño.

As for the coincidence of these four scholars discovering him independently, let us just swallow that little pill whole without chewing it.

Libertad

At page 803 of this novel, something occurred to me. It was an idea with the same beautiful simplicity and clarity of the little bell that I used to hear inside my head at cocktail hour. When I have finished this novel, there will be no point in reading any other novel for the rest of my life. I will finally be done with all of that.

I have had this vague feeling for some time that there was something else that I needed to correct, some further, last little personal adjustment. Clearly, this is it.

The ways in which novels have tricked up my head throughout my life to this point make the ways that liquor and women tricked up my head look like paltry, harmless eccentricities. First of all, I had no business ever undertaking great novels in the first place. I do not have the intellectual wherewithal to properly metabolize the best of them. And of course, I always tried to read the best. Why fuck around smoking kid's stuff when you can mainline a freight train?

Given that simple fact, to think that I chose English literature as my major at university! That is illustrative on several levels. It never crossed my mind to do my undergraduate work in a field in which one could earn money. Never crossed my mind.

Later, I practiced law--in the sense of the pure work, relatively successfully by the way. But there was never any time, energy, or inclination left over to think about money or care about money. No, all of my quality time, energy, and inclination was devoted to reading goddamned novels, when I was not talking about novels in a bar, that is. Pissing away my time on dreams that I was not mentally equipped to dream.

Second, I had no capability for keeping a proper emotional distance from these bastards. These novelists. Bellow, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hemingway, Camus, and that too clever Updike, to name a few. The females are just as bad or worse. George Eliot. Austen. Those damned Brontë strumpets. I could not read novels for a little harmless escape and relaxation like a normal person not afflicted with this nameless disease. No, I made those novelists' problems my own problems, and let me assure you that their problems are all of the first order of complexity no matter how much some of them may make you laugh.

Perhaps I should have tried to start a conversation with one of those women to whom I was married, but I was too busy with Faulkner or Melville. I was more enamored with Eula Varner of Yoknapatawpha County (downright hot for her in fact) than I was with any of that crowd of real women. God, I feel sorry for them in retrospect.

This has been a bane of my existence. A plague upon my house, when I had a house. A plague upon my apartment, when I had an apartment. Clichés those, but I am too upset thinking about this to be able to come up with something original. I am not upset about myself. I have survived it after all and in a manner of speaking. Those novelists' problems are not going to be my problems any more.

I am upset thinking about those few young people out there starting to read novels. Not only do their parents do nothing to stop it, many times they encourage those young people in this incredibly dangerous endeavor. As for the proper authorities, they seem perfectly oblivious.

My own parents, God bless them, could have done something to save me. But not being readers themselves, they paid no attention whatsoever to what my young self was reading. Furthermore, they were utterly lax about enforcing lights out in my bedroom. They were too preoccupied with whatever was going on in their bedroom. So there I was at the age of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen sitting up until 3:00 a.m. reading The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer or some other such mind rot. (I do remember that the word “naked” in that title caught my attention at the time.) I did not even have to hide under a blanket with the book and a flashlight.

The way that I see it, we could lose some of the best and brightest of another generation in just that way. Young people who might otherwise accumulate capital and invest it for the general benefit of mankind. Where would we be, for example, if Bill Gates had been screwing around reading novels and staring off into space instead of devoting every bit of his time, energy, and inclinations to devising MS-DOS and contractually fucking IBM? Now he is applying a chunk of the capital that he accumulated in an effort to help feed the world. (Is that the nature of his philanthropy, or is it some other wonderful thing that he and his bride are doing? I cannot remember.)

So this is Roberto Bolaño's posthumous personal gift to me, this novel entitled 2666. It is as if he handed this to me and said, “Señor Steve, when you finish this novel, you need not read another. It will all be over, you can put it all behind you, and you can truly breathe easily at last.”

If I get the urge to read a novel in the future, if I flirt with a relapse, I will simply reread this one. The book actually consists of five different novels, each of which will be entirely new to me every time I read it. That will do no further harm. In other words, I will never be done with this one and on to another novel with a whole new set of problems. That is the thing to be avoided here.

So that's it. No more. It's all over. I mean it. Don't laugh. I am serious.