"Lolita"

Lolita is so full of beauty and ideas that it is almost impossible to talk about it. So in order to ease this pain or out of sheer laziness I have distilled Lolita into four points.

1. Lolita is about America, an America that Nabokov loved more than Europe.
2. Lolita (the character) may stand for America and Humbert Humbert may stand for Europe, it is difficult to argue either side
3. Nabokov is a writer of virtuosic talent, and sometimes he may be too talented.
4. The backbone of the book is the raw emotional energy of Humbert Humbert.

Other things may be important, but the real soul of the book lies in these four ideas. I promote someone to add something I’ve missed, but I challenge anyone to remove anything from the list.

Untitled Piece

We were sitting outside watching the clouds. In the monsoon season there were these epic cloud formations and especially around sundown they would become particularly intense. We would sit out in the back yard in plastic furniture except for the piece Daddy made for Momma (a beautiful lightly stained cedar Adirondack) drinking soda (I was sobering up) and thinking about the future.

Daddy liked to put a lot of weight into conversation in those days. He valued a good talk and a man on if he could conduct himself in a good talk. But Daddy talked in a different way than the average man. If he wanted to talk about the inherent nature of man to do good and what it means to be just, he would talk about Superman. If he wanted to talk about betrayal and what it meant to lose your hero, he would describe being a folkie watch Bob Dylan (except you never called him Bob Dylan, it was “Zimmie, you don’t turn the man into a god.”) progress in his styles. He could never get out there and say exactly what it was he wanted to. You never heard what was buggin’ the man, you never heard how beautiful the sunset was, or how frustrated he was with being jobless. Instead you got a story about Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s feud and how they were secret lovers or you got a tall tale of Mark Rothko and the Seagram’s commission.

None of us could ever tell it straight in those days those. We had to weave around it, circle around it a couple of times, slowly approaching it and then not pounce. Never did we pounce. We let it lie. And then we moved on.

"amulet"

Is there some sort of rule written that if we like a particular author then we must like their entire body of work?
If the answer is yes then I am in some trouble.

The problem is not that I did not like “amulet” by Roberto Bolaño, but more that I even have to ask. I will be the first to say that Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” did more to influence my writing and me as a person than I can really remember in recent reading. There lies the problem with “amulet” a book taken from a small vignette in Detectives. It has references to all of these characters that I love but it is not really about them. It is about something different.

More confusingly I could never really tell how Bolaño was writing the book. I continually expected the style to become smaller, the stories denser and the writing tighter. I wanted him to switch styles from an epic (Savage) to a novella form (I wanted it to be like the excellent short book “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox a really excellent read and novel/la I would really encourage reading) (The Great Gatsby, The Turn of the Screw, etc.) Bolaño never does this though. He keeps doing what he did before, but with mild variants made more to fit the story than the size of the book. What can be said is that is written in a similar and different manner than “The Savage Detectives”. This work feels less like the work of a visceral realist and more like really good not-so-magical (it is light on magic but heavy on musings on the actualities of modern physics[there is a long diatribe about the nature of time and place that runs through as a general idea as the entire book could be viewed as happening in one moment in a Women's bathroom) realist.

It could be said that I am harping on this book because it is not the book I wanted it to be. To such a question I would respond with “Yes, but why did Roberto Bolaño bother publishing a book that is so similar, but falls so much shorter. Why did he impress us with such skill and talent only to show it used to a lesser extent on a project that from the beginning is going to be second rate.”

Maybe my problem is I have too many expectations of what a book should and should not be. Maybe I invest too much into what a book will be without recognizing that all my favorite literary experiences have been surprises. However, it is impossible to go into some sort of artistic experience without preconceived notions, and in reality mine only existed because I loved the author’s previous work so much which really is not that bad, is it?

It could almost be said in his big books he does not do enough, but in Roberto Bolaño’s small work he tries to do too much.

"The Age of Wire and String"

“…that by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire…”

Surrealist and absurdist Ben Marcus says this fairly early on in his book “The Age of Wire and String”. One would never refer to this slim volume as a novel but more as an epic description of a society. By extension then we can call this a story because society is the grandest (in terms of size) story that can ever be told. Marcus attempts to tell us the story of some culture that simultaneously exists, is extinct and has yet to exist. Between the vagaries and the absurdities of Marcus’ descriptions (they come out as bizarre entries into a grand encyclopedia) one wonders where he actually obtained his source material, what that source material was, what he is manipulating, and when he is actually writing (in the traditional sense of the word). However none of this matters when Mr. Marcus really shines. In a description about eating he is able to bring home the peculiar and ridiculous nature of our most common activity. Another describes an act of home invasion in which the invader confines the family and forces them to witness the invaders suicide. The first works because Marcus has reinvented something that most of us have forgotten to talk about years ago and the second works because it brings the absurd and mixes it with the human for something incredibly visceral. The entry becomes a little too much for words. It may be a stretch to refer to Ben Marcus as a novelist, but it is not stretch to refer to him as a real writer.

Hospital Poem

I grow fat in the summer night as
coffee stains stretch on
my taught white t-shirt.

With this
my mind grows lazy because
they wont’ let me read.
The books weigh down my shelves.

Splashing in puddles of light cast into the heavy summer darkness my mind dreams of birds in the August night but they never stay long enough.

They hang on the branch just long enough to show how they are freer than me.

"The Savage Detectives"

“…there are books for when you’re desperate.”

In the beginning of Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 masterpiece one of his many characters speaks at length at the variety of books there are and their various uses. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that there are various progressions of a reader. One begins as an adolescent (or to quote Bolaño a “fucking idiot”) who reads slowly then begins to read with such a ravenous fervor that they become a desperate reader. This reader eventually becomes exhausted, ceases reading and eventually returns to it as a serene reader. There are books written and designed to specifically attend to each level of reader, books for the novice, the savage, and the serene. “The Savage Detectives” is written for desperate readers. It is written for those who loose sleep over what is happening in their literature. It is written for those who intend to track down every allusion, every literary reference. It is meant for the reader who draws every available symbol and metaphor that he can. More than anything the book is written for anyone who is desperate.

This book can be summed up in this manner because it is a book about desperate characters. It is about characters hungry for knowledge, hungry for experience, hungry for life. Unfortunately, they have reached a point in their lives where that hunger has been satiated. Satiated in an incredibly unpleasant manner. Our two protagonists are involved in some incredibly unfortunate business in the Sonora desert; a businessman watches his family crumble; others watch as their friends succumb to the perils of age. This fulfilled appetite has left the characters lost. They are as unsure of what to do as they are of themselves.

The reader is able to see this fall thanks to Bolaño’s brilliant plotting. The first section takes place in the latter months of 1975, the next from 1976 until 1996, and the last piece retells the events of early 1976. This large expanse of time allows the reader to witness the potential and energy drained from these youths. We are literally forced to sit and watch as the creative drive is sucked out of them. Then at the end we are able to go back in time and see the genesis of their demise. We are allowed a glimpse into what created the void that eventually consumes their ambition.

The story centers around the visceral realists, a group of avant-garde poets in 1970’s Mexico City. The name comes from another group of Mexican poets from the 1920’s who stand as enigmas to the latter group. The leaders of the group, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, (both likely based upon the author) fund their magazines with money from drug deals. They stage protests of poets who they view have sold out or are phonies. Eventually though, Ulises and Belano must leave and the group is put to the test of whether it can stand on its own minus its leaders. The reader also witnesses the demise of the ideals of Ulises and Arturo without any sort of support mechanism for their ideas.

Two of the most harrowing and telling events come near the end of the book as Lima and Arturo have been physically and emotionally pushed to the edge. The first is a duel over a review. More, it is not a review that has been happened but a review that is likely to be written. We see two modern literary characters attacking one another with swords in a feeble attempt to wound the other. The act is such a self-aware display of literary idealism and romanticism that is concurrently sweet and repulsive. Eventually the reader is left pitying Arturo and his opponent for the absurd reaches they have gone to in order to settle their scholarly argument. The other occurrence is Ulises Lima encountering Octavio Paz (the sworn enemy of visceral realism) in a public garden. Both men recognize (Paz much less so) the other across a square walk in circles, approaching each other like two men entering into a duel. In the end, Paz must be reminded of Lima’s identity via his personal assistant and Lima is left speechless. He is left alone with his artistic doppelganger and he can say nothing.

“The Savage Detectives” is nothing short of work of genius. It is a big book full of nuance and characters that are only briefly mentioned but could be discussed for pages. One would be tempted to call this Bolaño’s magnum opus, but he wrote a bigger (and reportedly better) book “2666”. To only add to this is the fact that Bolaño led this life. He was a visceral realist (actually called Infrarealist), who with his compatriots disturbed the status quo of Mexican poetry. He also traveled around Europe in the same manner as his characters. “The Savage Detectives” is an important book meant to be read and re-read.