Welcome to week five! We are now over halfway there, and I’m very thankful for this section. Where for the last couple of sections I’d felt a bit directionless, here I felt things were developing. I particularly enjoyed the passage of time leading to a sense of lost youth and lost ideals. I’m feeling emotionally connected to the book again!
This week’s reading is up to page 373 in the U.S. edition. For those reading other editions, it is through the end of Part 2, Chapter 15!
The spoiler discussion for this section starts now!
The plot thickens… As Trevor said, the momentum definitely builds in this section, especially towards the end. I, too, was struck by how the passage of time is taking its toll on the various characters, both their ideals and their lives.
I’m fascinated to see where all of the mysteries will lead!
as anyone else struck by the uniqueness and diversity of narrative voices in this section?
This could just be me getting accustomed to the book, but I really loved how strange and out there some of the sections were. In particular, the Joaquim section and the Heimito (aka, “my good friend Ulises”) section were great.
I also loved how we shifted from chasing Cesárea to chasing Ulises
I found Heimito's section a bit creepy! What the heck was he involved in? Some kind of neo-Nazi terrorist cell?
Interesting, in Spanish he just calls Ulises "el buen Ulises" - "the good Ulises", which is more saying someone is a good chap, or someone you hold in esteem, it has a different feel than "good friend", which to me implies more reciprocity.
And as much as Heimito finds him a good chap, we see him regularly beating up old folks for money, so I'm not sure he's coming off as so 'good' in this section...
100% agree, Erin. Heimito gave me extreme neo-nazi vibes. And what the heck was he doing in Israel? While Ulises may just be trying to survive, this section really turned me against Ulises as a person. (I didn't find him great previously but I generally felt ok or more neutral about him.)
I have been using Wikipedia to help me keep track of characters (impressive scholarship, I know!) and here’s the description of Heimito: “In jail with Ulises in Israel. Lived with him in Vienna. Paranoid, possibly mad.”
I feel like that is underestimating who Heimito really was. Mad? Yes, possibly. Neo-nazi? Also yes, possibly.
Found a blog post from a dozen years ago, found this paragraph interesting:
"There is a clear relationship with the more direct satire of Nazi Literature in the Americas. Many of the poets and writers who inhabit the book are such in no more than their desires. Nazi's are also present in the gang who attack Ulises Lima in a park in Vienna, in the pages of Nietzsche ("We talked about Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, how every time Norman reread it he found (to his dismay) more and more points in common between the philosopher and the Nazis who would soon take over Germany.") and, of course, the neo-nazi regime that toppled Salvator Allende in Chile in 1973. Belano leaves Mexico to help Allende and spends time in prison. "And when Arturo returned, in 1974, he was a different person."
Unrelated to this section but I have a friend who started reading the book yesterday and told me she wants to buy a Cesárea Tinajero book, looked online and didn't find any, if I can lend her one. I have no idea what to tell her.
When thinking about how we view Belano or Lima and all of the different perspectives I was reminded of Marcel Proust’s quote from Swanns Way “our social personality is a creation of the minds of others”.
I am looking back at section one which is titled, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico".
Section two is "The Savage Detectives".
And this fits well with what you say, I think. Initially, we have a Mexican who is trying to find himself. Next, we have a chorus of voices giving their own opinions on Belano, Lima, & life in general.
Both really refer to finding the self at the center of the person, I think, whether internally or externally.
There's also the idea that "a different version of you exists in the mind of everyone you meet" (don't know who first penned the idea) which is similar. And if you synthesize the hundred different versions of a person, all you get is version one-hundred-and-one of that person, rather than any sum total or objective truth of a person.
Chapter 14 was an absolute delight to read and arguably my favorite thus far. The Mexican delegation of poets going to a post-revolution Nicaragua, Hugo Montero cursing himself for choosing to bring Ulises and potentially getting them all into trouble, Labarca getting into an argument about Cuban tobacco and Delicados with the inspector after declaring Ulises missing, Don Pancracio the Borges imitator telling a riddle but not remembering the end of it—all of it was just so hilarious. It felt like a school field trip but for poets. I was cackling throughout the chapter.
I very much admire how Bolaño can create so many different voices in ways that actually sound different and express the personality of the individual speaking. It’s not an easy feat, and it was a very ambitious choice to pursue a form like this.
This week was a mix of emotions for me, as some of the segments (i’m looking at you Heimito) made me want to walk into traffic but also, like some of you mentioned, i feel more emotionally connected to the story and its exploration of nostalgia and loss of ideals.
I’m wondering now if that constant cycle of Bolaño setting up a scene with a sense of anticipation (that something awful, strange, amazing, etc… was going to happen) only for the segment to fall flat and turn into something rather mundane, i’m wondering if he’s not mimicking that feeling of fizzy anticipation specific to youth that get squashed by adulthood where your horizons considerably shrink alongside your ideals and desire to change the world.
Not only he keeps circling that feeling with that narration style but with this story, it feels like he is placing himself (or a version of himself) at that threshold in his own life, in a way that he can live and relive it, over and over again, by writing it and by examining it from different angles (different accounts from different witnesses).
And I can only imagine that that youth feeling where everything felt possible must have been severely amplified (and echoed) by that period in the 70s in Mexico where everyone and their grandmothers was a poet.
It must have felt like such a fertile era for ideals and revolutionary sentiment.
It also follows the 1968 student movement where once the youth thought they had the power and they could change the world. And what became of that? Not much.
It’s like History was matching his young adult’s natural path to disillusion, aka adulthood.
It strikes me that the only way one can keep that youth feeling of being a potential of multitudes, that feeling of being anything we want, is if we die or disappear before growing old. It makes sense to me now that Arturo Belano could only be a ghost in this novel.
I feel like we have a bit more clarification as to the timing of the interviews - a number of characters whose interview dates are in the 80s are talking about events in 1975, and Piel Divina references the start of B&L's obsession with Cesárea Tinajero to a series of interview they did with poets for a magazine, which is obviously what we're seeing talked about in the January 1976 interviews with Amadeo, but must have happened previous to that, as it's said that's when they first found out about her (so at least before GM meets them), so the dates must be when interviewed and the time periods referenced a bit more fuzzy (not always clear how far in the past from interview time the reminisces are...) - or was their interview that day and that's just when they found out where to look for her (Sonora) so then immediately took off and that's what sparked that? So, guess I'm still not 100% sure!
Piel Divina also says that their 'trip' to Europe (and possibly Ulises' disappearance in Managua) are because they're fleeing from fallout from whatever went down in Sonora and are in fear of their lives, so I do feel like the blurbs that say this story is about B&L going on a road trip all over the world looking for a poet are ... misleading to say the least!
It has also become more clear (imo) that Ulises & Belano are drug dealers as much or more than they are poets.
The whole Ulises disappearing in Nicaragua was an interesting piece. I was just reading some overviews of the Nicaraguan Revolution & Civil War to refresh my memory. There is a short blurb about a Cultural Revolution that took place in Nicaragua around the time that Ulises went there (1982) with the group of writers:
It was also an interesting time for Ulises to "get lost" in Nicaragua as that was the timeframe when the Contra War was starting. Probably both an easy & dangerous time to go missing in a country.
I may be wrong but I think Bolano's intent is that the definition of a person is in the eye of the beholder, so some may see dealers; others see poets.
I like that interpretation, i had taken them being described as drug dealers as a way to signal their disappointing transition from idealistic youth to capital earning adults.
Another interesting thing is how Bolaño paints Ulises as a saintlike figure of sorts. Even in the seediest of situations, he still maintains a sort of innocence and thus a sort of... idk, magic I guess. Like, the couple is depicted as larger than life, but Ulises seems to be the larger of both. I take it as a love letter of sorts from Bolaño to Mario Santiago, his best friend upon whom Ulises is based. Apparently Santiago read books while showering and would always return them wet, just like Ulises.
I also shared the sense of the passing of time and with it a bittersweet nostalgia that not only evokes lost youth and ideals but of the sense of mortality that comes from the awareness that, time moves on, things change, and nothing lasts forever. I wanted to note I am approximately the age our author would have been had he not passed, and though I never found time to comment on our reading from last week, it struck me how similar the experiences were to youth my age growing up when he described the various adventures drifting and engaging other youth doing the same during that period, the 1970's. It was a time when disillusionment was setting in and replacing the hope of the 1960's but the youth my age pressed on trying to extend the dream that their older brothers and sisters had already started to dismiss. Bolano captures the atmosphere of that period very well.
In this week's section, one feels the 1980's are very close. I won't define that period, but AIDS and crack really erased the dream of the 1960's. Bolano captures that sense of ending and he does so in a way that is not overly sentimental, by sharing with us the loss, the sense of sadness, the irony, the humor, the waste, the futility, and the magic of the period. I found myself thinking elegy all throughout the reading of this section. And this prompted a thought. Bolano died of liver failure while waiting for a liver transplant. Supposedly, parts of 2666 were written while waiting for that transplant. Although I am not a follower of biographical criticism preferring to just read the text, I am curious if Bolano was already suffering health issues while writing this work.
Last note, I cannot dismiss JGM. Where he is and whether he has any role in the second section is unknown, but he is very much in the back of my mind as I continue to read.
Thanks for your comments, Sam. I wonder how generational divides alter how we perceive this book? I understand the nostalgia of lost youth, the elegy, etc. Yet I'm a Gen X'er (teen in the '80s) so my perspective is more with AIDS & crack, etc. being more forefront without the lens of hope from the '60s when viewing it or even quite the same sense of bohemian freedom as this book shows.
Yes, I was wondering that myself and was wondering how the sense of my own mortality was coloring my reading of the prose. I think Connor has answered for both of us.
I too consistently think about JGM. There’s a moment in chapter 11 where Lisandro Morales says “we published a small militant biography of him by a law student that didn’t do too badly.” I wonder if it’s referring to him? What do others think? He was a law student before dropping out after all.
The complete lack of commentary or reference in this section about JGM honestly has me a bit worried that he made it out of Sonora intact... it's interesting that that whole piece of the story is left for the very very end - we'll just have to wait to find out...
(although if even if something bad did happen to him, I find it odd that Quim, who was such a big fan of his and who is hung up on Laura Damián's early demise, also makes no mention of him)
I honestly hadn't thought of JGM at all in this section. To me it felt like a different timeline, a different history & even though JGM was a visceral realist, he didn't come across (to me) as interacting much with Belano & Lima in section 1. So, when people are describing Belano & Lima in part 2, I don't find it odd that JGM doesn't come up in the memory or conversation of the various people sharing their memories.
I agree that it doesn’t seem like he was super close to Belano and Lima, but at the same time in part 2 even characters who marginally knew them is included, Luis for example only really knows them through Luscious Skin so somehow I feel like even the marginal connections would be included, which would mean JGM as well. But I’m not sure, I think there’s something else going on in terms of why he’s not included or mentioned at all.
Yeah the reveal that Lima (and Bolaño) may be trying to escape from people trying to kill them makes me think of Lupe's pimp and his gang, and we haven't seen JGM or Lupe at all since they joined Bolaño and Lima going up to Sonora. So I am a bit worried about what might have happened.
But maybe JGM and Lupe are just happily living in pseudo-exile? I can hope for that, for the moment.
I definitely feel like the narrative has found its way again as Trevor says. I found it hard at first to connect the first part of the novel which read like a horny teenager's fever dream with the second part, which could honestly be by a different writer, but now I feel like I know what's happening again! (Or should I say what has happened?)
Also struggling to keep track of all the names - obviously I've heard of some of the bigger names, but am I right in thinking a lot of the names dropped will be fictional? Or am I just really under-versed in Latin American literature?
The plot thickens… As Trevor said, the momentum definitely builds in this section, especially towards the end. I, too, was struck by how the passage of time is taking its toll on the various characters, both their ideals and their lives.
I’m fascinated to see where all of the mysteries will lead!
as anyone else struck by the uniqueness and diversity of narrative voices in this section?
This could just be me getting accustomed to the book, but I really loved how strange and out there some of the sections were. In particular, the Joaquim section and the Heimito (aka, “my good friend Ulises”) section were great.
I also loved how we shifted from chasing Cesárea to chasing Ulises
I found Heimito's section a bit creepy! What the heck was he involved in? Some kind of neo-Nazi terrorist cell?
Interesting, in Spanish he just calls Ulises "el buen Ulises" - "the good Ulises", which is more saying someone is a good chap, or someone you hold in esteem, it has a different feel than "good friend", which to me implies more reciprocity.
And as much as Heimito finds him a good chap, we see him regularly beating up old folks for money, so I'm not sure he's coming off as so 'good' in this section...
100% agree, Erin. Heimito gave me extreme neo-nazi vibes. And what the heck was he doing in Israel? While Ulises may just be trying to survive, this section really turned me against Ulises as a person. (I didn't find him great previously but I generally felt ok or more neutral about him.)
I have been using Wikipedia to help me keep track of characters (impressive scholarship, I know!) and here’s the description of Heimito: “In jail with Ulises in Israel. Lived with him in Vienna. Paranoid, possibly mad.”
I feel like that is underestimating who Heimito really was. Mad? Yes, possibly. Neo-nazi? Also yes, possibly.
Found a blog post from a dozen years ago, found this paragraph interesting:
"There is a clear relationship with the more direct satire of Nazi Literature in the Americas. Many of the poets and writers who inhabit the book are such in no more than their desires. Nazi's are also present in the gang who attack Ulises Lima in a park in Vienna, in the pages of Nietzsche ("We talked about Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, how every time Norman reread it he found (to his dismay) more and more points in common between the philosopher and the Nazis who would soon take over Germany.") and, of course, the neo-nazi regime that toppled Salvator Allende in Chile in 1973. Belano leaves Mexico to help Allende and spends time in prison. "And when Arturo returned, in 1974, he was a different person."
http://theknockingshop.blogspot.com/2012/01/savage-detectives.html
I agree that he is creepy and I am quickly loosing much of my empathy for Ulises. That is another interesting translation choice. I wonder why.
Unrelated to this section but I have a friend who started reading the book yesterday and told me she wants to buy a Cesárea Tinajero book, looked online and didn't find any, if I can lend her one. I have no idea what to tell her.
Ha! I guess that speaks to the power of Bolano’s world building!
The talk of the homosexual poets and the meeting with Octavio Paz, brushed aside, work as misdirections in this case.
When thinking about how we view Belano or Lima and all of the different perspectives I was reminded of Marcel Proust’s quote from Swanns Way “our social personality is a creation of the minds of others”.
I am looking back at section one which is titled, "Mexicans Lost in Mexico".
Section two is "The Savage Detectives".
And this fits well with what you say, I think. Initially, we have a Mexican who is trying to find himself. Next, we have a chorus of voices giving their own opinions on Belano, Lima, & life in general.
Both really refer to finding the self at the center of the person, I think, whether internally or externally.
There's also the idea that "a different version of you exists in the mind of everyone you meet" (don't know who first penned the idea) which is similar. And if you synthesize the hundred different versions of a person, all you get is version one-hundred-and-one of that person, rather than any sum total or objective truth of a person.
Chapter 14 was an absolute delight to read and arguably my favorite thus far. The Mexican delegation of poets going to a post-revolution Nicaragua, Hugo Montero cursing himself for choosing to bring Ulises and potentially getting them all into trouble, Labarca getting into an argument about Cuban tobacco and Delicados with the inspector after declaring Ulises missing, Don Pancracio the Borges imitator telling a riddle but not remembering the end of it—all of it was just so hilarious. It felt like a school field trip but for poets. I was cackling throughout the chapter.
I very much admire how Bolaño can create so many different voices in ways that actually sound different and express the personality of the individual speaking. It’s not an easy feat, and it was a very ambitious choice to pursue a form like this.
This week was a mix of emotions for me, as some of the segments (i’m looking at you Heimito) made me want to walk into traffic but also, like some of you mentioned, i feel more emotionally connected to the story and its exploration of nostalgia and loss of ideals.
I’m wondering now if that constant cycle of Bolaño setting up a scene with a sense of anticipation (that something awful, strange, amazing, etc… was going to happen) only for the segment to fall flat and turn into something rather mundane, i’m wondering if he’s not mimicking that feeling of fizzy anticipation specific to youth that get squashed by adulthood where your horizons considerably shrink alongside your ideals and desire to change the world.
Not only he keeps circling that feeling with that narration style but with this story, it feels like he is placing himself (or a version of himself) at that threshold in his own life, in a way that he can live and relive it, over and over again, by writing it and by examining it from different angles (different accounts from different witnesses).
And I can only imagine that that youth feeling where everything felt possible must have been severely amplified (and echoed) by that period in the 70s in Mexico where everyone and their grandmothers was a poet.
It must have felt like such a fertile era for ideals and revolutionary sentiment.
It also follows the 1968 student movement where once the youth thought they had the power and they could change the world. And what became of that? Not much.
It’s like History was matching his young adult’s natural path to disillusion, aka adulthood.
It strikes me that the only way one can keep that youth feeling of being a potential of multitudes, that feeling of being anything we want, is if we die or disappear before growing old. It makes sense to me now that Arturo Belano could only be a ghost in this novel.
I feel like we have a bit more clarification as to the timing of the interviews - a number of characters whose interview dates are in the 80s are talking about events in 1975, and Piel Divina references the start of B&L's obsession with Cesárea Tinajero to a series of interview they did with poets for a magazine, which is obviously what we're seeing talked about in the January 1976 interviews with Amadeo, but must have happened previous to that, as it's said that's when they first found out about her (so at least before GM meets them), so the dates must be when interviewed and the time periods referenced a bit more fuzzy (not always clear how far in the past from interview time the reminisces are...) - or was their interview that day and that's just when they found out where to look for her (Sonora) so then immediately took off and that's what sparked that? So, guess I'm still not 100% sure!
Piel Divina also says that their 'trip' to Europe (and possibly Ulises' disappearance in Managua) are because they're fleeing from fallout from whatever went down in Sonora and are in fear of their lives, so I do feel like the blurbs that say this story is about B&L going on a road trip all over the world looking for a poet are ... misleading to say the least!
It has also become more clear (imo) that Ulises & Belano are drug dealers as much or more than they are poets.
The whole Ulises disappearing in Nicaragua was an interesting piece. I was just reading some overviews of the Nicaraguan Revolution & Civil War to refresh my memory. There is a short blurb about a Cultural Revolution that took place in Nicaragua around the time that Ulises went there (1982) with the group of writers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Revolution#Cultural_Revolution
It was also an interesting time for Ulises to "get lost" in Nicaragua as that was the timeframe when the Contra War was starting. Probably both an easy & dangerous time to go missing in a country.
I may be wrong but I think Bolano's intent is that the definition of a person is in the eye of the beholder, so some may see dealers; others see poets.
I like that interpretation, i had taken them being described as drug dealers as a way to signal their disappointing transition from idealistic youth to capital earning adults.
True. And it does flip throughout the book. They are also wanderers.
Another interesting thing is how Bolaño paints Ulises as a saintlike figure of sorts. Even in the seediest of situations, he still maintains a sort of innocence and thus a sort of... idk, magic I guess. Like, the couple is depicted as larger than life, but Ulises seems to be the larger of both. I take it as a love letter of sorts from Bolaño to Mario Santiago, his best friend upon whom Ulises is based. Apparently Santiago read books while showering and would always return them wet, just like Ulises.
Like the whole Nicaragua thing, he's Aliosha Karamazov meets Darius from Atlanta.
That’s such an excellent comparison! I would’ve never thought of Darius but now that you mention it, both he and A Karamazov are perfectly on point.
I also shared the sense of the passing of time and with it a bittersweet nostalgia that not only evokes lost youth and ideals but of the sense of mortality that comes from the awareness that, time moves on, things change, and nothing lasts forever. I wanted to note I am approximately the age our author would have been had he not passed, and though I never found time to comment on our reading from last week, it struck me how similar the experiences were to youth my age growing up when he described the various adventures drifting and engaging other youth doing the same during that period, the 1970's. It was a time when disillusionment was setting in and replacing the hope of the 1960's but the youth my age pressed on trying to extend the dream that their older brothers and sisters had already started to dismiss. Bolano captures the atmosphere of that period very well.
In this week's section, one feels the 1980's are very close. I won't define that period, but AIDS and crack really erased the dream of the 1960's. Bolano captures that sense of ending and he does so in a way that is not overly sentimental, by sharing with us the loss, the sense of sadness, the irony, the humor, the waste, the futility, and the magic of the period. I found myself thinking elegy all throughout the reading of this section. And this prompted a thought. Bolano died of liver failure while waiting for a liver transplant. Supposedly, parts of 2666 were written while waiting for that transplant. Although I am not a follower of biographical criticism preferring to just read the text, I am curious if Bolano was already suffering health issues while writing this work.
Last note, I cannot dismiss JGM. Where he is and whether he has any role in the second section is unknown, but he is very much in the back of my mind as I continue to read.
Thanks for your comments, Sam. I wonder how generational divides alter how we perceive this book? I understand the nostalgia of lost youth, the elegy, etc. Yet I'm a Gen X'er (teen in the '80s) so my perspective is more with AIDS & crack, etc. being more forefront without the lens of hope from the '60s when viewing it or even quite the same sense of bohemian freedom as this book shows.
Yes, I was wondering that myself and was wondering how the sense of my own mortality was coloring my reading of the prose. I think Connor has answered for both of us.
I too consistently think about JGM. There’s a moment in chapter 11 where Lisandro Morales says “we published a small militant biography of him by a law student that didn’t do too badly.” I wonder if it’s referring to him? What do others think? He was a law student before dropping out after all.
The complete lack of commentary or reference in this section about JGM honestly has me a bit worried that he made it out of Sonora intact... it's interesting that that whole piece of the story is left for the very very end - we'll just have to wait to find out...
(although if even if something bad did happen to him, I find it odd that Quim, who was such a big fan of his and who is hung up on Laura Damián's early demise, also makes no mention of him)
I honestly hadn't thought of JGM at all in this section. To me it felt like a different timeline, a different history & even though JGM was a visceral realist, he didn't come across (to me) as interacting much with Belano & Lima in section 1. So, when people are describing Belano & Lima in part 2, I don't find it odd that JGM doesn't come up in the memory or conversation of the various people sharing their memories.
I agree that it doesn’t seem like he was super close to Belano and Lima, but at the same time in part 2 even characters who marginally knew them is included, Luis for example only really knows them through Luscious Skin so somehow I feel like even the marginal connections would be included, which would mean JGM as well. But I’m not sure, I think there’s something else going on in terms of why he’s not included or mentioned at all.
Yeah the reveal that Lima (and Bolaño) may be trying to escape from people trying to kill them makes me think of Lupe's pimp and his gang, and we haven't seen JGM or Lupe at all since they joined Bolaño and Lima going up to Sonora. So I am a bit worried about what might have happened.
But maybe JGM and Lupe are just happily living in pseudo-exile? I can hope for that, for the moment.
I definitely feel like the narrative has found its way again as Trevor says. I found it hard at first to connect the first part of the novel which read like a horny teenager's fever dream with the second part, which could honestly be by a different writer, but now I feel like I know what's happening again! (Or should I say what has happened?)
Also struggling to keep track of all the names - obviously I've heard of some of the bigger names, but am I right in thinking a lot of the names dropped will be fictional? Or am I just really under-versed in Latin American literature?