Sustained Criticism

It might as well be official: I'm having a posthumous affair with Bolano's 2666. The book is in five sections, each about a new set of characters. I've just finished the first, aptly titled "The Part about the Critics". Which is about four haughty, arrogant European intellectuals' search for the author Archimboldi their careers and, incidentally, lives spiral around. The opening description of them is scathing, but grows more subtle. I haven't paid particular attention, but unless I'm very much mistaken it is a sublime example of free indirect style. Accordingly, there is a bit of telling, rather than showing. Which I find refreshing: actions are short, clipped. We get thoughts, descriptions, tangents and digressions. I had thought that his digressions would annoy me: they ended up among my favourite parts. They don't find Archimboldi and in the end it doesn't matter. For he is everywhere, Pelletier and Espinoza conclude.

His descriptions of literature conferences and studies are spot-on and very funny. The artist that is remembered for his one controversial work, where the focal point is his severed hand. There is so much we don't know. Some are hints to other parts of the work, I'm sure. The rest we're not supposed to know anything about.

But I do understand what a reviewer (on Amazon, I suspect) meant when he wrote that it is a novel for academics, and other writers, often commenting on itself and on the creative writing process. Unless you like high-brow literature this is most likely not for you.

This is an insightful review, interesting to read separately.


"I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and can not succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can't get free." Isn't it lovely? From Goethe's Faust, as far as I can tell (/as far as google tells me). I read it on Goodbooksinc


Kristine: the YSL wireframe shoes. If no one makes knock-offs I don't know what I'll do. I must have these shoes. And I just saw Nicholas Kirkwood's S/S09 collection: pearl-platform shoes. Pearls!

I think I mentioned finishing Woolf's A Room of One's Own? A series of lectures (or perhaps just one, I'm not sure) on women and fiction. The pinnacle of it is that a woman must, in order to write fiction, have a room of her own, time and at least 500 a year. I enjoy feminist theory, but often find it too militant. Women must write themselves into literature. Bah! "... she had – I began to think – mastered the first great lesson; she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself." She is right. Great women write not for women, or as women, but as writers. I don't write as a woman, and I have no need of writing myself into literature.

You could argue that I can say this because of feminism, suffrage. And I don't deny that, I just think that it has gone too far. As has the debate over whether or not Willoch's (former Norwegian politican, that has been critical of Israel) statement was anti-semitic. While I appreciate the butthurt, there is a difference in critiquing Israel's politics and being anti-semitic.

Bolano's "'2666' is a writers novel, best appreciated by academics (or so inclined) and other writers, often commenting on itself, the craft of writing and the creative process. For the average reader the ending lacks coherence, seemingly 900 pages of often depressing anecdotal tangents about death," says a review on Amazon. I've finally gotten my hands on it. It allegedly reads a bit like stream of consciousness, lacks proper punctuation at times (post-modernism, anyone?) There is even a sentence with over 2000 words! I know I've ranted about writing a bachelor thesis of sorts before, I'm always on the prowl for suitable topics; this might be it. Bolano. I will not sully Nabokov with analysis, I can't. But this, this might work.