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December 23, 2008

2666 WEEK: CHRIS ANDREWS ON "LIVING OUTSIDE LITERATURE"

Today's 2666 consideration comes courtesy of Chris Andrews, who translated the first four Bolaño titles into English:

Roberto_bolano In an interview Roberto Bolaño once said that in Europe he had learned to live outside literature, by which I think he meant, mainly, that he had learned to live with people for whom books are not important. In the first part of 2666, the critics Pelletier and Espinoza discover that much as they love the work of Archimboldi, it cannot fill their lives; what matters to them most is what is happening in the group they form with their colleagues Norton and Morini. Their voyage to Mexico in search of the great and enigmatic Archimboldi takes them away from literature and towards a world where fiction is a luxury, and journalism a dangerous vocation. Inverting Bolaño’s trajectory, the European critics (Espinoza in particular) learn to live outside literature in Mexico. But of course, their learning is told in literature; this is literature questioning itself from within, not giving up its autonomy.

One of the many reasons why Bolaño exercises such a powerful fascination is that he is both an intensely literary author and one for whom the importance of literature is relative. His books are full of writers and he had a huge reading appetite (a recent memoir by Jaime Quezada portrays the 18-year old Bolaño as a pale, reclusive bookworm, rarely stepping out of his parents’ apartment in the Colonia Guadalupe Tepeyac, Mexico City), but he didn’t use literature as a sanctuary or a sacrificial altar. Nor did he idolize action. He wouldn’t have agreed that “the world was made in order to result in a beautiful book” (as Jules Huret said Mallarmé said), nor that “real life is absent” from the world of letters, to hijack phrase from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. For Bolaño, literature was part of life, as real as the rest, and vitally important, but a part. Bolaño’s books keep sending us to the library (to find out, for example, whether “the supreme skating book, Saint Lydwina or the Subtlety of Ice, by Henri Lefebvre”, which Nuria Martí gives to Enric Rosquelles in The Skating Rink, really exists), but they also, crucially, keep sending us back to what is happening here and now, among us.

Posted at 12:51 AM |

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Comments

vasilis

Mark, can't you give a 2666 giveaway...First of all i don't think it has reached my country greece and secondly i expect it to be quite expensive...so plzzz a giveaway cause it has really kindled my curiosity and i d love to give a shot of getting it....

Posted by: vasilis | December 23, 2008 at 02:52 AM

vasilis

plzzzzz Mark a giveaway of 2666...it hasnt reached every country plus it's too expensive for some to buy...so a giveaway to give it a shot...eh?

Posted by: vasilis | December 23, 2008 at 02:57 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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