I've been feeling unexpectedly harsh toward a lot of books lately. Too much time in the corporate sector? Too much time thinking about ways to get messaging across in the shortest, most efficient manner possible? Or is it too much time taking design classes, too much heeding of the notion that design, presentation, of text, of content, is largely about helping people not read (which I think I may have picked up from Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type though my copy is on my desk at work so I'm having a hard time confirming that).
I don't know. Point is, I've got this clip of Al Pacino in the movie Heat running through my head every time I pick up a book anymore, in which he politely requests an informant to respect the value of his time. Please, book, recognize that I come to you as someone with a million other things I could be doing: teaching myself JavaScript, learning to draw, figuring out how white space works, leveling up in Final Fantasy, reading Twitter, angsting over eBooks, waiting to die. Recognize, book, story, text, that the world you and I inhabit today is not what it once was, when we may have met when I was a child, or even just five years ago. There are limits, now, and time is running out. Use what of it I offer you well. Please.
And, I don't know, a lot of the time, lately, the last year or two, it seems like I feel less return on my investment. I've probably abandoned more books in the last two years than the thirty that preceded them. Used to be I wouldn't quit a book if you held a gun to my head. These days, I'll drop a book if you wave a tasty sandwich at me from across the room. And if the sandwich is bad? Who wants to look back? There's other things on the other side of the room. Always other things.
My most notable failure to complete of late is 2666. Which leaves me convinced that if there is such a thing as Team Bolaño, then I might as well be the captain of Team, Like, I Don't Get It, Man, because, like, I don't get it, man. I think there might be something in your water that is not in my water because I've read all of The Savage Detectives and 650 pages worth of 2666 and I'll tell you flat-out I have no desire to read even one more word the guy has written. I'm not saying I won't, I may try again someday, or I may get curious about what happens in the last third of 2666, which I could now safely read as a nicely sized novel in its own right. But I certainly don't feel like I'm going to want to read enough Bolaño to "get it." (I'm sorry, guys, but I shouldn't have to read other shit to find out what's going on in what I'm already reading. Maybe if I was 12 and impressionable and thoughts cults were, you know, sort of cool, maybe?)
The thing about it is is that I don't think 2666 is a bad book, I think it's just generally too bloated and too revered for its own good. I found the opening section about the critics largely pleasant enough of a read; the second part, I, uh, don't remember all so well; and the third part pretty rock-solid, interesting stuff. But then we come to the fourth part, the part with all the murders in it, the part everybody talks about when they talk about this book, the part I felt was meant to change the way I see fiction, the part that would move me and disturb me and leave me dizzy and dazzled for days.
That part bored me to tears.
Which, how did that happen? I know I'm talking about myself as much as the book, here; there's a reason this is a rambling, generally unrevised blog post and not a piece of formal criticism. You couldn't pay me enough to go back into that section to do an actual formal critique. I just didn't like it, didn't feel engaged by it, didn't feel like the book was making any effort to make actual art of the events its portrayed. I know, I know, I'm probably not sophisticated enough of a reader, or critical enough, or attentive enough; I was probably the wrong audience. But then I'm still left here questioning what it is I was supposed to get out of this: the long-winded reminder that killing people is bad? That it's weird that sometimes things can't be done about it? Huh?
I know there's others who feel the same way and I know there's plenty of people who do not. I know this book has affected people deeply, but I don't know why; I don't know if it's stylistic or just the content, because the content and the presentation left me cold. Cold enough to quit a 900 page book after I was over two-thirds of the way through it; as decisions go, it sucks to decide this preceding effort is no longer worth what payout may come.
It's not the only long book I've felt some measure of distaste for lately. More on which topic anon, perhaps. I also recognize it's inherently silly to write a long rant about a long thing that I felt wasted (to some degree) my time while, with the other hand, I start picking up and reading a William Vollmann book (Imperial, which I've finally begun, with the vague intent of tackling fifty-or-so pages a week, ish). It's also not a slam against length in literature, either; I still want long books, I just want them to be awesome long books, books that justify their weight. There's a book I'm reading now, The American Girl, by Monika Fagerholm, a book that's about 500 pages long, and though it would be fair to call it over-written, I would call it over-written to a specific stylistic intent, which I'm finding generally agreeable, agreeable enough to keep going in a day and age of my life when "keeping going" is no longer a certainty. I've also caught myself wondering if I'd still like some of the long wandering books I've read in the past if I came across them today, in my current mental state, and I think that, even now, if I were reading Infinite Jest or Against the Day or just about anything I've liked by Stephen King for the first time--well, okay, maybe only the Dark Tower books, a lot of his other stuff would probably drive me nuts, though I do still look forward to reading Under the Dome, as I feel like I could use an epic page turner--that I'd still dig on 'em pretty firmly. Style making substance palatable and substance supporting style to worthwhile effect. So hopefully there's better things around the corner but I'll forgive myself for feeling gun shy when it comes to doorstoppers for a while.
And, uh, end rant.
4 comments:
I haven't quite abandoned The Savage Detectives yet, but I feel pretty much the same way. It's boring me to tears. Someone forgot to flip the switch in my brain that makes it interesting.
I kind of want to go back to those bloggers who were flogging Bolano last year and the year before and re-read them to see if their posts explain what I'm missing. But I haven't quite had the gumption to do that yet.
I'm glad you wrote this, because it needed saying. As you know, I ultimately fall into the "moved deeply" camp once I finished this book - but what's interesting is that I was in the moved deeply camp for many of the reasons you cite as problematic.
You say the content left you cold - it left me cold as well. It was a difficult book for me to get through. It felt like the Olympics in many ways (and not even a fun Olympics, more like an Olympics in which I didn't get to choose my sport and it’s my weakest one) and I thought I'd quit it many times. Especially during part four.
The difference for me (and I could be crazy) is that I saw that difficulty and that coldness as the very difficulty & coldness the characters in the story felt towards the murders. The very coldness and futility and WTF that others in the book were feeling, or really not feeling, but by their non-reaction, they were adding to the piling on of bodies and no one doing anything about it.
I felt that piling up of bodies viscerally because it was miserable to get through. Afterwards, I realized that...it was really freaking miserable to get through and was that not in some way the point? I certainly felt miserable enough while reading it to imagine the misery the characters in part four were experiencing and/or the coldness and disinterestedness others felt.
Did I enjoy this book? Absolutely not. Was the language amazing and was the book full of ideas that captivated my imagination? No. I wasn’t even invested in the characters very much – many I didn’t care about at all. I also skipped pages (gasp!) because I couldn’t take it. By most standards (certainly my own), 2666 didn’t meet the criteria of a good book. But what fascinates me about it is that we are still discussing it and you are ranting about it and I struggled with it and in that way, it literally (the very definition of literal) was painful and awful and difficult...and that means I FELT something. You felt something, even if it was anger and disgust and frustration and WTF.
There’s also the whole question of how part four plays with the other parts. I was kind of digging the first professor part and I really wanted more of that. All through part four, the professors seemed to be a welcome antidote to the crazy piling up of bodies and I longed for more about them. Yet, alongside all the bodies, the professor lives and concerns seemed petty by comparison and I had to then think about my own reasons for wanting lighter fare while reading about murder after murder. I wanted something to distract me from how awful that section was. This very struggle made me feel something too, made my question myself in many ways. Very few books do that for me – make me actually rethink and revisit my own ideas of what fiction should be, what it shouldn’t be, what it is for me and what it might mean for others.
Could all this be said about just a really shitty book? Possibly. But I didn’t find Frey’s latest mess of a novel difficult or challenging or worthy of any real angst (outside of the public spectacle of the writer’s own persona, etc.) or capable of making me question so many things. It was just a really bad book. Period. There are so many of those and I don’t think 2666 falls into that camp. Because I’m still trying to figure out, months later, what that was all about and why I had such a strong reaction and that’s with the full knowledge that there are hundreds of references and themes and whathaveyous that I’m sure are in 2666 that I missed entirely and that I wouldn’t even understand if some Bolano scholar pointed them out to me.
And look at that. 2666 got me to write an entire blog post as a comment at 9am on a Sunday morning when I have a million other things to do. That’s something…I think.
These days I almost never pick up a book that's more than 300 or 350 pages. It just seems as if that's enough pages to effectively tell almost any story, and any pages beyond that are just bloat and self-indulgence. Tell a small story and tell it extremely well.
I pushed through 2666 and in retrospect I wish I hadn't. It wasn't entertaining, and I barely remember most of it because there was just so much of it.
I got about 2/3 through Savage Detectives and laid it aside for... several months now despite feeling that it's a much stronger book. I guess I was just really burnt out on Bolano.
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