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648 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 1998
’For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.’
„Înţeleg că ar exista oameni care cred în nemurirea sufletului, pot înţelege şi că sînt unii care cred în rai, în iad şi chiar în acea staţie intermediară şi îngrozitoare care e purgatoriul; însă cînd aud un scriitor vorbind despre imortalitatea anumitor opere literare, îmi vine să-l pocnesc. Nu să-l bat, doar să-i trag una în figură, după care să-l iau în braţe şi să-l liniştesc”.
Jason Morais, West Grand Avenue, Old Orchard Beach, Maine, August 2012. I remember it like it was yesterday. Mary and Kris came to see me at my small studio apartment in Chapultepec where I often barricaded myself for days writing love letters and poetry to the waitress Jacinta Rúbin, which I never planned to send. They came to ask about the three Steves. The Steves had left México the previous year and hadn’t been seen since. We found this diary, Mary said, it belonged to one of the Steves, the one they called Hermano Penkí. I told them to sit down, offered them a drink, some Los Suicidas mezcal, a favorite of mine from a distillery that had gone out of business long before the Steves disappeared, but of which I had the sagacity to stock up on and it was only occasions like this along with my own excessive drinking when writing letters to Jacinta Rúbin that threatened to extinguish my supply. The diary was unremarkable, a simple square book with worn edges. I had never seen it before but knew what it would contain. I knew it would heighten the curiosity of its reader to the whereabouts of the three Steves, and even while it may not reveal the truth, it would surely point to me as the one most likely to know it. I read the diary slowly, trying to buy time and hoping to imbue myself with the fortitude to fend off questions from the young señoritas meant to ascertain what information I was not yet ready to give, information that would inevitably lead the conversation over the disappearance of the three Steves back to Jacinta Rúbin.
“To a great extent,” he confessed, “everything that I’ve written is a love letter or a farewell letter to my own generation.”There. That's all I would need on the cover flap or Goodreads description. I knew barely anything about Bolaño when I started this, even less than when I read 2666 four or five years ago, because at least then I was a blank slate. Nowadays my desires for reading are flighty and irritatingly complex, and what I was seeing in this description that I so despise was not the Bolaño I felt behind that cover and in that Part Four but On the Road, some self-aggrandizing shit with bonus literature meanderings and gore porn for depth.
-“Between Parentheses”
I'm not trying to justify myself. I'm just trying to tell a story.This book has three parts, and the first didn't help. Or rather, it did, but it makes me grateful that I finish everything I start, because the Murakami comparisons were becoming increasingly accurate in all the wrong ways and a solipsistic boy receptacle of poetry terminology and bad sex is not my idea of quality literature until, of course, the book grew up. Twenty years the description says, forgetting what happens to those college age dreams of reading and writing in twenty years, omitting any mention of a generation coming to terms with the fact that the love for an ideal doesn't pay. Copy editing does. Cashiering does. Teaching does, as does law, and business, and following the commercial fervor of the masses. Not art.
Literature isn't innocent.No one can live on a revolution, no matter how bloodless or inspirational. Let us speak of famous men, then let us mention their inherited income and every other birthright advantage that sailed their names down to us, the luck of a moment and society's requisites for a livelihood. Notice the lack of women, and any number of unnamed dead. The description mentions violence, but that is not the same as your hairs rising at the mention of Pinochet, Chile in 1973, or Santa Teresa, Ciudad Juárez for those of you who haven't yet read 2666.
Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.Murakami comes back for his Kafka on the Shore questioning of violence, operating in tandem with Vollmann for his ubiquitous empathy without a trace of sentiment. That list of characters in the description tells you nothing of how Bolaño writes them, mythologizing himself as only human in order to give voice with respectful dignity to everyone else. I'll give partial credit to the description for mentioning Pynchon, but the coupling with Borges is unforgivable. I go to Borges when I want skeleton nerves in an ivory tomb belying the very marrow of my existence. Wannabe written word devotee that I am, on the cusp of transition with all the requisite baggage, that marrow is Bolaño.
Some unemployed person could reproach me for being incapable of happiness, even though I had everything. I could reproach a murderer for committing murders, and a murderer could reproach a suicide for his desperate or enigmatic last act. The truth is that one day it was all over and I took a look around me.
All languages seemed detestable to me just then.