Everything Matters!

After tearing through Bolaño's 2666, I took a while to process everything. In page length as well as in the time-space continuum it occupies, 2666 is a massive book. In fact, in this one novel Bolaño recreated an entire universe from the piecemeal of our own.  The breadth is at oftentimes startling, but in way that I can only describe as desirable. His work, one of things I love about him, exists at once within our world and somehow beyond it, imploding and exploding both at the same time, and somehow within the confines of that splintered reality he's able to evoke imagery and stories that are very real, very close to us, frightening, troubling, and luminary tales that show us who we are as a planet and a people. In general, I loathe didactic book reviews. So all I'll say is this book was mind-blowingly powerful. Once I finished the book, a wonderful gift given to me by a wonderful friend, I quickly went on to read By Night in Chile and then proceeded to order some of his other English translations, despite protestations from the beleaguered bank account. The rest of his catalogue, that which has yet to be published in English, is all set to be published within the next few years. 2666 is incomparable to The Savage Detectives, a great book by any measure, but this went further and further and further than where he left of. They both share similarities with the Sonora Desert. Detectives ended there, with Arturo Belano and company struggling to close the gap between themselves and the elusive poetess Tinajera while keeping a step or two ahead of a corrupt cop and a pimp on their heels. 2666 picks up from there with a different cast of characters and the Sonora Desert behaving as a sort of centripetal force pulling together all five sections of the novel, all five stories magically having nothing and everything to do with the other.  One gets the feeling that Bolaño was digging much deeper than he was in The Savage Detectives - he was, after all, working on the most terminal of deadlines, his own life - and whether or not this dig is a successful one is obviously up to the reader, but in this reader's opinion: yes, yes, yes, again and again. 

“What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercise of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no real interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” Part 2, pg. 227

 “Listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I’m going to explain what the third leg to of the human table is…Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to, but that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play.” Part 2, pg. 228

“Isn’t reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?” Part 4, pg. 588

“Beneath these walls I became what I am and what I’ll be until I die. I told them that the time for pieties and mealymouthed platitudes was over. I told them I wasn’t going to stand for any more limp wrists in the family.” Part 4, pg. 601

“Beginning this stormy night, I said (because lightning really was flashing all over the city, and we could see it from the windows), there would be no more alms for the church, which promised us heaven but for more than one hundred years had been bleeding us here on earth.” Part 4, pg. 601

“One never knows anything about one’s father.” Part 5, pg. 657

“A father, he said, is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out.” Part 5, pg. 657

“With a little effort everything in this world can be filled.” Part 5, 657

“Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion—so vague, so malleable, so warped—of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

“The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it’s the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails along the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast flowing) river of fate. The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music.” Part 5, pg. 664

“Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.” Part 5, 666

“That was precisely it, the whole point, maybe the only thing that mattered, abolishing death, abolishing it forever, immersing ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment, abolishment, abolishment.” Part 5, pg. 710

“’Reality,’ murmured Ansky, ‘can be pure desire.’” Part 4, pg. 715

“’It has nothing to do with belief,’ said Ansky, ‘it has to with understanding, and then changing.’” Part 5, pg. 716

“Not the dream but the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.” Part 5, pg. 728

“Everything in everything…A single lesson, but one of vital importance.” Part 5, 733

“Only in chaos are we conceivable.” Part 5, 736

“Behind every indisputable answer lies an even more complex question.” Part 5, 736

“Youth is the semblance of strength and love is the semblance of peace.” Part 5, 741

“All poetry, of any style, was contained or could be contained in fiction.” Part 5

“I don’t have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don’t have much time, I have to breathe, eat, drink, sleep. I don’t have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don’t have much time, I’m busy living. I don’t have much time, I’m busy dying.” Part 5, 790.

“History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.” Part 5, 794

“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.” Part 5, 800

“Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.” Part 5, 823

“What did it matter, a sum, a thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one’s fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were approximate. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one’s way through the dark.” Part 5, 823

“There could be music in anything.” Part 5, 825

“’All this light is dead’, said Ingeborg. ‘All this light was emitted thousands and millions of yeas ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory and guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.’” Part 5, 831

“According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something he’ll come back to Earth, Archimboldi ended his letter.” Part 5, 847

 “Thanatos is the biggest tourist on Earth.”