Sipped Ink vol 4 issue 9

2666 pp785-898

Housekeeping note: before we start, a quick reminder that this is the last and final of this summer’s newsletters and that it covers the remainder of 2666. If you’re not done with the novel then please re-consider reading this until you are.

It has been a long time since I remarked upon the narrator’s position respective to that of the reader and that of the text of 2666. Back in issue 1 of this summer’s newsletter I made these observations:

Sometimes the narrator is happy to reveal that they know more than us:

‘As for what passed through Liz Norton’s head, it’s better not to say.’ [16]

But, subtly, there’s also a limit imposed on their omniscience:

‘It’s unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call’ [64]

How these narrative dynamics play out over the remainder of the book will be interesting to learn.

In the closing stretch I noticed this creeping back in for what might be the first time since. (There’s every possibility that I’ve missed a few instances throughout the novel, and feel free to flag them up for me, but I’m confident it hasn’t proven to be a prominent aspect of the novel’s construction.) Consider the equivocation here, as the narrator—elsewhere so omniscient—seems to lack some basic facts at which they have to guess:

What did they live on? Probably Archimboldi, who had learned many things working at the bar on the Spenglerstrasse, turned to petty theft. Robbing American tourists was easy. Robbing Italians was only a little more difficult. Archimboldi might have asked for another advance from the publishing house and he might have received it by mail, or perhaps it was the Baroness Von Zumpe herself who delivered it by hand, curious to meet her former servant’s companion. [835]

The above excerpt also begins in an interesting way: with the narrator anticipating a question that the reader might have. This kind of meta-situational awareness (that there is such a thing as a reader, and that therefore the third-person narrator occupies a space between the novel and them) is rare in the text, but does appear again late on:

And at last we come to Archimboldi’s sister, Lotte Reiter. [864]

Here we have another direct address to the reader, and a similar meta-awareness of the structure of the narrative. There’s actually something of the magician’s stage-craft to this one too: it can be read as Bolaño saying “and for my final trick”, being as it introduces the closing act of the novel (and the most revelatory in terms of the narrative underpinnings (more of which later)). But that in itself introduces a question that, at least in my edition, is addressed in Ignacio Echevarría’s ‘Note to the First Edition’, which closes the volume. The narrator, Echevarría tells us, is identified in a stray note found amongst Bolaño’s materials toward the novel following the author’s death, as Arturo Belano. As indicated by the trailing vowel of the forename and the switched-vowels of the surname, Belano is a stand-in for Bolaño. The character had appeared in or assumed narratorial duties in several of Bolaño’s works since Distant Star (1996), including assuming the role as the main character of Bolaño’s most well-known novel: The Savage Detectives (1998).

I don’t know Bolaño’s oeuvre well enough to analyse with any depth the extent to which Bolaño & Belano are distinct or interchangeable. But I did want to note that I found it interesting that at either end of the novel the narrator was a little bit more visible to me, as though he too had been subsumed by the density of the great mass of the novel, only able to resurface as the end approached.

(As a side note, I wondered when reading these moments (and again whilst reading the ‘Note on the First Edition’), whether these occasions of direct address might actually be Bolaño talking with himself. If we remember that 2666 was left in an almost complete state, but by no means an entirely finished one, it seemed plausible to me that these few moments are glimpses of the author leaving himself a kind of note: there are unanswered questions here, something to return to and tidy up. The Bolaño / Belano distinction probably undermines this theory.)

And now that we’ve been through it, what can we say about the shape of the novel? I had written in last week’s newsletter that I had abandoned all hope of Bolaño attempting to bring 2666’s narrative threads together. And, I have to say (perhaps uncharitably), that the extent to which he did so felt a little underwhelming to me.

In the end I would perhaps have preferred to have been left with 2666 as a sprawling tableau, a panorama without a central focal point. The revelation very late on that one central character is the uncle of another relatively prominent character (last seen ~200 pages before) felt a little hollow to me, like a concessionary move on the author’s part as if to say: “see, it all ties together”. Except it doesn’t all tie together at all. By making these moves in the closing 100 pages Hans Reiter / Benno von Archimboldi, Mrs Bubis / Baroness Von Zumpe, and (almost tangentially) Klaus Haas are afforded a kind of prominence in the novel, the light from which throws the other characters into shade. To me it felt as though this late revelation intended to expose a thread that ran through the novel instead made a great portion of it feel less vital because it did not relate directly to the aspects that were being given new prominence.

To begin and end with Archimboldi, and to reveal late on his ties to two other characters, had the unfortunate effect for me of opening to question the point of Edwin John, Fate, Amalfitano, Florita Almada and countless others. That might seem uncharitable, but in the end I would have preferred 2666 to be a great sprawling tangle of threads thematically related; I found the late-stage reveal of familial relationship as proof of homogeneity unsatisfying.

Perhaps I feel this way in particular because one of the stronger themes towards the end of the novel is exactly this question of the relationship between things. I wrote last week about the continuing dissolution of barriers, and how that was being revealed as an agent of unity (‘All seas were ultimately the same sea.’ [704] / ‘Everything is everything…’ [734]). We see it again this week, though with what seems like a new emphasis on temporal (in addition to spacial) separations:

That night, as he was working the door at the bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either. [800]

and everything seemed to crumble, the river, the boats, the hills, the little stands of trees, each thing going its own way, toward different times and different spaces [826]

For me this began to chime with what seemed to be another newly urgent and related theme: the concept of legacy. Again (and I realise I’m being more equivocal this week than is usual), I couldn’t help but wonder whether this might be Bolaño thinking on the page about his impending mortality and what his own legacy would be.

Around p.831 we have Ingeborg’s ruminations on the fact that all the visible starlight is likely from dead stars. To which Archimboldi adds that old books are, similarly, echoes of the past that live on beyond their authors. There is something hopeful in this, no doubt, for a writer who knows he is gravely ill. Bolaño undercuts the moment, however, in the scene where numerous errata are shared from Le Musée des erreurs (~p.842). Here Zola and Balzac among others are remembered by their mistakes, and not for their great works. It is a writerly fear which echoes that other one, from sixty pages previous:

Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece. When I came to this realization, I gave up writing. [786]

I see Bolaño if not struggling with, at least wrestling with something here. And it is telling that he closes his 900 page novel with a moment that seemingly comes to peace with this problem. The story of Fürst Pückler (both the man and the ice cream) is succinct and touching. There is a reconciliatory note here:

“No one remembers the botanist Fürst Pückler now, no one remembers the model gardener, no one has read the writer. But everyone at some moment has tasted a Fürst Pückler.” [894]

I’ll drop some of my equivocation here and say that this is Bolaño nakedly wondering as to his own ‘mysterious legacy’, and humbly concluding that it is not in his hands to decide.

Finally, having complained above about the manner in which Bolaño makes an attempt at pulling together some of his loose strings, I want to touch briefly on what I found to be the novel’s motivation beyond any half-hearted attempt to wrangle it into a symmetrical shape. In the ‘Note on the First Edition’ that closes my copy of the novel (apologies if this isn’t something you had in your copy) Ignacio Echevarría (about whom I know very little beyond what’s on his Wikipedia page) makes this assertion:

Although the five parts that make up 2666 can be read independently, they not only share many elements (a subtle web of recurring motifs), they also serve a common end. There is no point attempting to justify the relatively “open” structure that contains them [895]

It reads to me almost like a semi-apologia for the novel, with Echevarría hedging his bets as to just how (un)finished the published version of 2666 is. It’s not only unnecessary but also ineffective unless Echevarría wants to expand on what the ‘common end’ of the novel is in his opinion. In his stead then, I would like to suggest that underneath the love triangles, the boxing matches, the dismembered painters and poets and soldiers, the endless parade of brutality and suffering in Santa Teresa and within the spatiotemporal boundaries of World War II, in the dreams and through the mirrors and from the Aztecs to Haas’s jail cell there’s this:

he captured Thanatos and threw him in chains [821]

This phrase, which occurs in the jarring aside about Sisyphus, underpins the novel for me. The thousand ways it’s attempted, and nevertheless the impossibility of it are the whole struggle. Even in the end for Bolaño as the author, there’s an acceptance of mortality and of one’s insignificance in determining what part one ultimately played.

Thank you to everyone for taking part this year. I won’t pretend that I found 2666 to be a great, unmissable reading experience. But the last part having been possibly my favourite (a tie with the first perhaps), I never would have made it without knowing the rest of you were out there reading along with me. I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a great 400 page novel about two generations of the Reiter family, and about two faces of human suffering (in WWII & modern Mexico) in there somewhere. Trim the first section a little, lose the second and third entirely, trim the fourth dramatically, and leave the fifth mostly intact… I don’t know, who am I to say? There were enough moments that made the majority of the novel worth getting lost in, though ‘The Part About the Crimes’ feels merciless and overlong even in retrospect.

I do hope you’ve got something out of the experience, and I really value your companionship on these things. A special thanks to Simon for his series of thematic postcards, which were a treat to receive each week. Simon, you are now free to return to your Nabokov reading programme, but you still owe me a chess move.

That’s it for me for the year. As it happens I have another reading challenge in mind. I’ve long wanted to watch the MAN Booker Prize announcement having read all of the longlisted novels… so I’m going to take a run at reading all 4,664 pages of this year’s longlist in the 78 days remaining before 17 Oct. (That’s about 60 pages a day for 12 weeks. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m going to manage it, but why not try?)

I’m also considering continuing to send out the occasional newsletter. These won’t be every Sunday, and they won’t be entirely about books: frequency and subject matter will be very variable! But, if you’ve enjoyed having me in your inbox maybe you’ll consider signing up here. (Absolutely no expectations though.)

Thanks again for reading with me. Maybe see you next year!