I had this odd moment last night when I realized I don’t write about books here very often (selected sex scenes of Michael Chabon excepted), even though when it comes to popular culture, they are my first love, probably the medium I would choose if I had to take one with me into eternity.  I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that I had this feeling as I finished Roberto Bolano’s 2666, which cut me to the quick as no book has in quite some time.

For those of you not familiar with it, 2666 is Bolano’s last novel.  It consists of five interlinked parts, which Bolano intended to be released as separate novels (though some are more like novellas), a year apart, to provide a financial legacy for his family after his death.  It concerns, among other things, academic literary criticism, how to raise a daughter, how to cover a boxing match, the murders of women in Juarez, Mexico, the relationships between brothers and sisters, the operations of publishing houses, and life in post-War Germany.  Sprawling is a generous term for the novel, and I’ll admit to feeling frustrated with it after I began reading it in Cambodia.  I actually recommended to a number of people that they read the first section, skip the second and third, and read the fourth and fifth sections.  I still maintain that the novel, as a whole, probably works better that way.  But damn, did I not expect how the book would come together in the final pages of the final section, and how powerfully it would affect me.

I’d warn you, if you decide to take on 2666, that it will not provide you with a satisfying conclusion.  The murders of 400 women in a fictionalized border town in Mexico are not resolved.  The professors whose story encompasses the first section never meet the object of their literary study.  It’s not clear if said object ever wins the Nobel Prize.  All of these things irked me while I was reading the book.  And now that I’m done, they don’t matter in the slightest.  Bolano’s writing on the murdered women in Juarez is a powerful act of witness, an insistence on assigning humanity to women who have been reduced to pieces of meat, their murders unsolved, and seemingly not worth solving.  His bildungsroman in the final section is astonishing.  And the book provides a powerful testament to the impact of a truly great book:

The novel was The Blind Woman, and she liked it, but not so much that it made her go running out to buy everything else that Benno von Archimboldi had ever written….Five months later, back in England again, Liz Norton received a gift in the mail from her German friend.  As one might guess, it was another novel by Archimboldi.  She read it, liked it, went to her college library to look for more books by the German with the Itlaian name, and found two: one was the book she had already read in Berlin, and the other was Bitzius.  Reading the latter really did make her go running out.  It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness.  The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would ahv emade no difference if they had slid up.

It’s audacious as all hell to write a novel, in part about an novelist, that includes a passage like that.  Accusations of invitations of comparison are inevitable.  And 2666 isn’t going to make me run out to become a literature professor with a deeply complicated love life.  But the novel’s disparate strands come together in a way that’s moving, surprising, and ultimately deeply gratifying.  And that left me with tears in my eyes from the sting.

The literary possibilities of their own ambivalence are what beguile this new generation, rather than anything that takes place in the bedroom. In Michael Chabon’s “Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” a woman in a green leather miniskirt and no underwear reads aloud from “The Story of O,” and the protagonist says primly, “I refuse to flog you.”

“Are you in full possession of your faculties?”

“I can’t be certain; no.”

“Well, it’s about time,” he said.  He pinched my earlobe.  ”Let’s go exhaust all the possibilities.”

“Could we please do it slowly?”

“No, he said, and he was right.  We did it very rapidly, in the Weatherwoman’s bed, passing from toothed kisses through each backward and alien, but familiar, station on the old road to intercourse, which loomed there always before me, black and brutal and smiling, more alien, more backward, and more familiar than anything else.  Then, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after my arrival at the house, with a hard, spongy fistful of him in my right hand, and my left had flat against his stomach, I was overcome with a feeling that made our black destination cease to seem looming.  My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust.

“Ow!” Sammy said, dropping his lighter.  ”Ouch!”

Bacon let his own flame go out.  ”You have to kind of pad it with your necktie, dopey,” he said.  He grabbed Sammy’s hand.  ”This is the one?”

“Yeah,” Sammy said.  ”The first two fingers.  Oh.  Okay?”

They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, with Sammy’s sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon’s mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.

From the summer of 1986 to the spring of 1988, when they defied the wishes of Bina’s parents and moved in together, Landsman sneaked in and out of the Gelbfish home to make love with her.  Every night unless they were quarreling, and sometimes in the thick of a quarrel, Landsman climbed the drainpipe and tumbled in through Bina’s bedroom window to share her narrow bed.  Just before dawn she would send him back down again.

Tonight it took him longer and cost him more effort than his vanity would care to admit.  As he passed the halfway mark, just above Mr. Oysher’s dining room window, Landsman’s left loafer slipped, and he dangled free and thrilling over the black void of the Gelbfish backyard.  The stars overhead, the Bear, the Snake, exchanged places with the rhododendron and the wreckage of the neighbors’ sukkoh.  In regaining a purchase, Landsman tore the leg of his trousers on the aluminum bracket, his old enemy in the struggle for control of the drainpipe.  Foreplay between the lovers commenced with Bina balling up a tissue to blot the cut on Landsman’s shin.  His shin with its blotches and freckles, with its strange midlife bloom of black hair.

They lie there on their sides, a couple of aging yids stuck together like pages of an album.  Her shoulderblades dig into his chest.  The knobs of his patellas are notched against the soft moist backs of her knees.  His lips can blow softly across the teacup of her ear.  And a part of Landsman that has been the symbol and the site of his loneliness for a very long time has found shelter inside of his commanding officer, to whom he was once married for twelve years.  Although, it’s true, his tenure inside her has grown precarious.  One good sneeze could pop him loose.

“The whole time,” Bina says.  ”Two years.”

“The whole time.”

“Not even once.”

“Not even.”

“Weren’t you lonely?”

“Pretty lonely.”

“And blue?”

“Black.  But never black or lonely enough to kid myself that having sex with a random Jewess was going to make me feel any less.”

“Actually, random sex only makes it worse,” she says.

“You speak from experience.”

“I fucked a couple of men in Yakovy.  If that’s what you want to know.”

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of _guu_.


In response to my musings about the effects work in Lord of the Rings and Avatar, That Fuzzy Bastard weighed in with a strong, and I think persuasive, pro-Lord of the Rings  defense.  He writes in comments:

I think the featureless slickness of Avatar has a lot to do with dependence on CG, specifically with the way that a movie where every shot is CG (even non-Pandora shots got extensive digital reworking), there’s no baseline of reality.

There’s a story that Stanislavsky used to threaten his actors by saying he was going to put an animal on stage with them—”It will be so natural and real on stage, that you will all look artificial by comparison.” Similarly, when there’s a mixture of CGI and analog effects, you have something to compare the CG to. But when you’re in a totally digital environment, it’s very easy to end up creating effects that look cool in the workstation, but would have been altered if you had any real-world examples next to them. I’ve been struck by how lousy Avatar looks in previews, and how much more impressed people are when seeing it, and I think that’s the reason—it looks great so long as you’re not comparing it to anything.

And in a post on his own blog (huge props, by the way, for the Lester Bangs reference), writes:

We may never, as Lester Bangs says, agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis, but the LotR trilogy comes close. And just like the LotR books are a sort of compressed history of Middle Earth, so are the LotR films a compressed history of film. They deploy every special effects technique ever invented, from Meliés-style forced perspective to artificial-intelligence-driven CGI (with plenty of models, makeup, and mattes in between), and also makes use of every directing technique ever conceived, from the Griffith-esque battle scenes to contemporary digitally-controlled camera swoops. Like Joyce’s Dubliners, If every other film was destroyed but these, you could still extract everything that had ever been.

But it’s also definitely not the best.  I’ll admit to liking the somewhat more contemplative and vulnerable Bond in Casino Royale, but I think Mendes’ record is a step beyond that into the realm of Deeply Shaded Emotion.  With one exception, of course.  I always forget that Mendes directed the harsh and lovely Road to Perdition, which one of my friends wisely put on his top-five list of comic book movie adaptations from the aughts.  If Mendes can use Paul Newman that well, if he can make Tom Hanks, and goodness, Jude Law of all people, frightening, he can make a Bond movie.  And given what a silly misfire Quantum of Solace was, perhaps Mendes could provide a good course correction for a reset of the franchise that had such promising beginnings.  And perhaps the vigor of the Bond franchise could set Mendes off on a more promising course himself.