Book Recommendations

2666

At the risk of sounding like I’m jumping on the bandwagon, I’m just going to very quickly say that 2666 is brilliant. At this point in time, I’m sure you have heard all you’ve needed to hear about it, so anything I say is probably not going to mean very much. I wasn’t ever very good at effective hyperbole anyway.

But I’ll say this: 2666 reads like the sprawling novel and towering achievement that you expect it to be. At times, it is wry and funny; at times, it is gruesome and grisly; at times, it is dramatic and crushing; and at times, there is only darkness. It is an enormous poem in disguise, and it cruises along under Bolaño’s assured mastery; and that’s what I think surprised me, that it all went down so easily. It is after all a massive tome, and that it went down like good wine in two weeks was a minor testament to its power.

Sometimes a science fiction book, sometimes a news report, sometimes an exercise in vaudeville, it is a thing of remarkable deftness and ambition. From page to page, Bolaño weaves magic with momentum and lyricism, always defiant and unflinching, and in doing so, crafts a true masterpiece for our time.

And to end off, a quote:

“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 part, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.

“But the truth is that she had only had tea to drink and she felt overwhelmed, as if a voice were repeating a terrible prayer in her ear, the words of which blurred as she walked away from the college, and the rain wetted her gray skirt and bony knees and pretty ankles and little else, because before Liz Norton went running through the park, she hadn’t forgotten to pick up her umbrella.”

That’s extremely early in the book, and I still remember it vividly now.

I know the sort of feeling where you think you shouldn’t join in the chorus, that you should avoid the mob mentality, that you should stay away from everyone’s current favourite writer. But sometimes, the bandwagon is worth jumping on.

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.