named after the roberto bolaño book, which i'm maybe 80 pages away from finishing. I will finish it soon, and probably moreso now that i started this blog. if i was going to give up, it should have been one page into 'the part about the crimes.' preferably even earlier. i both love and hate 2666, and i don't mean that those two feelings mix together into a lukewarm meh feeling, its more like oil and water. I love 2666, it may be one of my favorite books, and at the same time i do genuinely hate it. not in a quirky tumblr kind of "i heckin hate my skrungly!" way. i loathe a lot about it. i think i loathe most of it. i think bolaño would be proud to have elicited this reaction, but then i don't know much about the man.
i saw this book in the bookstore by my college and i knew i had to read it,
had to read it, even though i didn't actually buy it just then or for a long time after. but for months i would go into the bookstore and walk around and look at the cover and think about it. i do things in weird ways, i guess. what i'm saying is that the book had a weird pull on me and it only intensified once i actually bought it. when you read it, you know what is coming. 351 pages in is 'the part about the crimes' : a 200 page section which lists the hundreds of women murdered in Santa Teresa over the course of a decade. i wanted to put the book down and give up, but i knew i couldn't, i had to keep reading, it was almost like a responsibility. i think giving in the middle of the part about the crimes would have made me feel worse. i wouldn't know what the point of it all was and there wouldn't be closure. i felt compelled to read it in the most lovecraft sense of the word.
2666 is a book about books, and femicide, and all the lives & deaths that are omitted from the world narrative. i think the best description of what 2666 is about is on page 266 (!?) of the novel:
"In the nineteenth century...society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn't want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings....Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear....Maybe it's because polite society was so small back then. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society...take a look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn't just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren't part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren't part of society, wheras the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn't tell you."
.
it's also misogynistic. there are only 2 female characters out of the cast not defined primarily by their sexual relationship to a main male character. one is an elderly seer, the other is a reporter who shows up briefly. at times details about these sexual relationships are inserted in ways that feel weirdly voyeuristic. background women are referred to pretty much exclusively as 'whores'. there
are points in the book where bolaño is writing about misogynistic things because he is making a point about misogyny. but these this isn't that. it is really disheartening because i think the core message of the novel is very impactful: in a misogynistic world, the daily murders of women become background noise. the part about the crimes is a hard read but
worth it, it's the point of the novel to death-by-death, foreground what's uncomfortable and ignored. so it is honestly a bit heartbreaking to read the other female characters reduced down in the same way by the same author in the same book. bolaño does point out how misogyny dehumanizes women but he also does it himself. it undermines the themes of the story and really erodes at its heart. with this and a lot of literature, you sometimes get the sense that the soul of the story and the messages and heart-opening experiences are not intended for you if you are female (or not white). Dostoevsky falls into this, David Foster Wallace falls into this, especially on the racial front. I think that 2666 is going to be the last male author i read for a while, and i'm probably going to take a break from the pretentious literature student canon for the foreseeable future.
so maybe i'll change my blog name, but i kind of like the nonsensical-seeming url. ive never really figured out how to pronounce the book title. i always refer to it as "twenty-sixty-six". saying "two thousand, six hundred, and sixty-six" is a bit of a mouthful though.
my other favorite book is
Transit by Anna Seghers. i want everyone to know that i did in fact finish infinite jest, but im only telling you this so that you picture me in a newsboy cap with a horrible millennial-male hipster beard. get excited for my upcoming post about race in infinite jest & how when (usually white male) authors write racist things, people want to assume it's an intentional social commentary. on the other hand sometimes i wish i could have the blind total love for the books i read back before i went to uni and got the woke mind virus. but in the end it is better to know than not know, and to not blindly fangirl-follow an author who does not respect your kind. yanno?
other than finishing 2666, my reading list is looking like:
- a lot of ward churchill books. i really really need to read more of
A Little Matter of Genocide because my prof loaned it to me two semesters ago and i havent given it back yet because i've only read a chapter and a half because my life is a disaster. i actually have two copies of this book, the one my prof loaned me, and the one i bought on thriftbooks so i could annotate it. both are staring me down from the bookshelf above my desk right now. i am going to have to write that 'lets catch up' email and then speedread. Every day that I wait it just gets worse because so much time has passed that when we do meet up i should have had more than enough time to finish the damn book already. this whole situation has been causing me appreciable mental strain.
-well anyways i also got churchill's
Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Angloamerican Law on the list alongside it. And we can't forget about finishing Dunbar-Ortiz's
An Indigenous People's History of the United States, and Fanon's
Wretched of the Earth. gonna be a scholarly year for me. the sociology department here is so white and i have to take matters into my own hands. the sociology department here had me reading 90 pages of Marx's treatise on grain economics instead of a single nonwhite author.
-
Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier: [social] media studies used to be my number one scholarly interest, excited 2 get back to my roots
So I guess books will feature heavily on this blog. Maybe music, maybe social science stuff, maybe art stuff.
cya 🫡
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