Cosmopoetica

The stories in Flash Fiction Forward can generally be divided into a few basic categories:

1. miniaturized conventional stories

2. absurdist stories along the lines of James Tate or Russell Edson’s prose poems (the former is represented here)

3. extended prose poems

4. clever plays on type: stories in the form of quizzes, questionnaires, one-sided interviews

5. experimental and unclassifiable pieces that are usually some blend of 2 & 3

Of these I prefer the prose poems and experimental pieces (when they remain intelligible). The clever, gimmicky stories barely reward a single reading… they leave nothing to come back to in my mind. The absurdist thing’s been done– and is still being done well– but not by most of those who try it here.

Category #1, conventional "flash fiction," makes up the bulk of the volume, and is at times a thin gruel indeed. Unless adjusted for the form, the conventional stories suffer the most and most obviously, becoming anecdotes or story seedling harvested too early, neither allowed to grow into full-fledged works nor pruned and worked into bonsai.

There are good examples here of every type, most by names readers of short fiction of any length probably already know– Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Jack Handey, Rick Moody– and those alone make this collection of 80 stories a worthwhile investment of time and a few dollars. But while Flash Fiction Forward makes clear the dangers of the form, the benefits are less obvious. In my ears most of the offerings here fall flat with the same kind of disappointment one feels upon hearing three dominoes fall and then nothing… the rest of the chain squelched and squibbed. Rather than being short, flash, sudden fictions they are merely unfinished or simply too small.

I’ve blogged a few of the better stories:

I’ve blogged a few of the best pieces:

• "The Fallguy’s Faith" (Robert Coover)

• "The Hardest Questions" (Bruce Holland Rogers)

• "Bill" (Dan Kaplan)

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I’ve held off reading the last few poems in Jack Gilbert’s latest (The Dance Most of All) for months. Literally. Gilbert is one of those rare touchstone authors I was just ruminating about (finishing this book, in fact, inspired those brief thoughts) and– as much as I hate to mention it again– I really do worry, selfishly, that this might be his last.

Many of the poems in this collection convey a sense of finality. Not of the end, but of ending. Of being able to accept the ineffable and that doing so isn’t giving up even if it isn’t transcending it either… at least not in the way we might dream of for most of our life.

More than any other poems except, perhaps, Ray Carver’s, Gilbert writes a poetry that I cannot (and will no longer attempt to) explicate. I can only point to it and ask– even plead– "See? See?" Gilbert’s poetry is unadorned. He has a manner without being mannered, but is wholly identifiable– I can easily tell a Jack Gilbert poem in a few lines and just as easily distinguish an imitator. It’s a kind of poetry that is easy to parody, filled with references and words that we’re all taught not to use because they aren’t "poetic" or specific enough– love, dark, beauty, pleasure– but apparently practically impossible to duplicate.

Which isn’t to say that Gilbert’s poems are monotonic or predictable, but that they are, whether reflecting on the profound or the absurd, consistent and still of a single, often spectacular, nature. I’m sharing just a few poems here which illustrate some of this diverse singularity…

"Going Home"

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

"Trying"

Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional,
and according to which moment. Whether in the burgeoning
of July or the strict beauty of January. The language
itself is mutable. The word way is equally an avenue
and a matter of being. Our way into the woods
is according to the speed. To stroll into the loveliness
or leaves blowing so fast they would shred
birds in an explosion of blood. It’s the Devil’s
mathematics that Blake spoke of, which I failed
all three times. Everyone remembers the wonderful day
in Canada when the water was perfect. I remember
the Italian afternoon when I carried Gianna on my shoulders
in the pool, her thighs straining around my head.
My falling awkwardly and getting water in my nose.
The embarrassment forty-nine years ago which I have rejoiced in.
"To war with a god-lover is not a war," Edith Hamilton write,
"It is despair." What of the terribly poor Monet
scrounging for the almost empty tubes of paint his students
left. Or Watteau dying so long near Versailles. Always
the music of the court and the taste of his beautiful
goddesses constantly going away.

"Winter in the Night Fields"

I was getting water tonight
off guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted
by those Chinese poets
and their immaculate pain.

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As I wrote about a few years ago, Charles Simic is a poet that hip poets love to hate. But I returned to The World Doesn’t End anticipating a pleasurable read and I wasn’t disappointed. Simic is often labeled a "soft surrealist" as if that’s a bad thing. But I have no problem with it. I’ll shamelessly take my surrealism with a dollop of understandability even if that makes me the equivalent of the guy who asks for catsup with his fine steak. I derive little pleasure– and even less glory– from reading poems from which I can derive no meaning.

None of this frittering should be necessary, but that’s the sorry state of poetry affairs at the moment. With that, I’ll dispense with analysis and simply share a few prose poems from the book I enjoyed…

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Ambiguity created by a growing uncertainty of antecedents bade us welcome.

"The Art of Making Gods" is what the advertisement said. We were given buckets of mud and shown a star atlas. "The Minotaur doesn’t like whistling," someone whispered, so we resumed our work in silence.

Evening classes. The sky like a mirror of a dead beauty to use as a model. The spit of melancholia’s plague carrier to make it stick.

Things were not as black as somebody painted them. There was a pretty child dressed in black and playing with two black apples. It was either a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed as a girl. Whatever, it had small white teeth. The landscape outside its window had been blackened with a heavy and coarse paint brush. It was all every teleological, except when a child stuck out its red tongue.

She’s pressing me gently with a hot steam iron, or she slips her hand inside me as if I were a sock that needed mending. The thread she uses is like the trickle of my blood, but the needle’s sharpness is all her own.

"You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light," hr mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

The ideal spectator who lives only for art, hands folded behind his back. A blank canvas appropriately entitled "Blank" before him. It’s exactly 11 a.m. in the provincial museum. One can hear the rumbling stomach of the uniformed guard, who has the face of someone drowned by moonlight.

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I don’t remember the chain of events that brought me to this extended rumination on "blue"– as color, characteristic and quality– but it wasn’t, as a I first suspected, a treatise on depression. Rather, Gass’ short (91pp) book considers blue as the color of "interior life" and sexuality and what that means in word and mind. I’m not sure how to classify this meandering essay (which is a good thing). It’s part philosophy, part criticism, part personal essay, but at all times happily lead by language:

Blue: bright, with certain affinities for bael (fire, pyre), with certain affinities for bald (ballede), with certain affinities for bold. Odd. Well, a bald brant is a blue goose. And these slippery blue-green sources ease, like sleeves of grease, each separate use into a single–we think–fair and squarely ordered thought machine. Never mind degrees, deep differences, contrasting sizes. The same blue sock fits every leg. Never mind the noses of those Nova Scotian potatoes, blue noses are the consequences of sexual freeze, or they are noses buried far too long in bawdy books, or rubbed too often harshly up and down on wool-blue thighs. Not alone is love the desire and pursuit of the whole. It is one of the passions of the mind. Furthermore, if among a perfect mélange of meanings there is one which has a more immediate appeal, as among the contents of a pocket one item is a peppermint, it will assume a center like the sun and quire all others take their docile turn to go around.

This thought is itself a center. I shall not return to it.

Gass skillfully brings together examples and thoughts from a variety of sources– Beckett, Joyce, Lucretius, Aristotle, Rilke, Stein– without ever seeming forced:

…As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.

From which he derives sometimes aphoristic metaphors and analogies:

A flashlight held against the skin might just as well be off. Art, like light, needs distance…

It’s hard to describe what Gass is doing (and what he attempts to do) in this sometimes paradoxically dense-but-never-heavy essay full of allusions to both external sources and itself.

(more…)

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I can’t say enough about this collection. Borges was a master at weaving compelling, Escher-like verbal tapestries with threads of obsessions I’ve grown to share in: time, memory, eternity, infinity, fiction and evocation and vocation… the least of these stories is Very Good… a few of them should be considered among the best short fictions ever written:

"The Library of Babel"

Among other things, this story both poses a fascinating philosophical and logical question/conundrum regarding existence, creation and eternity, but it also unknowingly provides the single-most compelling explanation of what I understand to be one of the central projects of much experimental writing, including language and post-avant poetry.

"Pierre Menard: Author of Don Quixote"

A rightly famous tale in which Pierre Menard undertakes to immerse himself so thoroughly in Don Quixote that he will be able to re-create the work (not merely rewrite it), which will be much more interesting than the first– despite being identical to it– by virtue of being composed in the 20th century. Talk about raising serious issues surrounding our conception of originality, authorship, creativity and criticism…

And it’s impossible not to enjoy Borges’ humor recognizing the absurdity of the truth:

The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness.) It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine):

… la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las accciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lopor venir.

[... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "religious layman" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

… la verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las accciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lopor venir.

[... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.]

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses–example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future–are shamelessly pragmatic.

"The Babylon Lottery"

The story of a lottery system that has grown to encompass (and dictate) every aspect of a civilization– despite the fact that no one knows who runs it, if anyone does, beyond the shadowy and possibly non-existent group known only as the Company, or what the rules are, if there are any– is obviously an allegory for the role of fate, chance and determinism in life. But, like every Borges story, it is much more than that because he always manages to keep the focus on people even if the import is about something abstract. As Borges wryly notes in the prologue, after mentioning that one story is a detective story of a kind :

The other pieces are fantasies. One of them, "The Babylon Lottery," is not entirely innocent of symbolism.

And, again, Borges’ humor is both pointed and charming. Note Kafka’s apropos appearance:

… it must be recalled that the individuals of the Company were (and are) all-powerful and astute as well. In many cases, the knowledge that certain joys were the simple doing of chance might have detracted from their excellence; to avoid this inconvenience the Company’s agents made us of suggestion and magic. Their moves, their management, were secret. In the investigation of people’s intimate hopes and intimate terrors, they made use of astrologers and spies. There were certain stone lions, there was a sacred privy called Qaphqa, there were fissures in a dusty aqueduct which, according to general opinion, lead to the Company; malign or benevolent people deposited accusations in these cracks. These denunciations were incorporated into an alphabetical archive of variable veracity.

"The Garden of Forking Paths"

As mentioned earlier, "The Garden of Forking Paths" is a detective fiction, but of a very different kind. Dr. Yu Tsun, Chinese national, German spy, and great-grandson of famous intellectual Ts’ui Pen, seeks out Dr. Albert. But why? And how does what he discovers about Ts’ui Pen and his fabled labyrinth change (or not) what he must do? This brief story is a nesting doll of the mysterious.

I could prattle on about many more stories, but I’ll just end here and implore: read this book!

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My only disappointment with Inspector Imanishi Investigates was discovering that it’s the only novel in the late Seicho Matsumoto’s Imanishi series (at least one blurb implies there is a series) that has been translated into English. Close on the heels of that disappointment was learning that Matsumoto died in 1992.

I was excited to find out, however, that this novel was made into a 1974 film titled Suna no utsuwa (aka Castle of Sand), which not only garnered an impressive number of awards, but has been called “one of the masterpieces of Japanese cinema.”

In the novel, Inspector Imanishi—an older, haiku-writing policeman in Tokyo—is investigating the brutal murder of a retired policeman, found beaten to death near a Tokyo train station. Along with Yoshimura, a younger policeman who sometimes assists him, Imanishi doggedly pursues the killer, through many seemingly hopeless dead ends, for years. Utimately Imanishi uncovers a complex crime that involves members of an elite young group of “Noveau Art” intellectuals: musicians, writers, architects and critics.

The depiction of Japanese life in the late 50s/early 60s (I think…the exact dates are never given) is fascinating. There’s no question that the events in the novel are of a different time and place, the whole suffused with a foreignness that is enhanced by the very utilitarian translation. Imanishi, representative of the older order, dignified and mannered, is starkly at odds with the young intellectuals who are determined to remake art, architecture, and finally politics into a new form suitable for their perception of modernity. Yoshimura, who is of the same age as the revolutionary-minded Nouveau crew, is nonetheless an admirer of Imanishi, learning from the older, weary detective crucial methods that are in danger of being lost in a new political landscape.

That Imanishi is also a (very modest) author of haiku, a formal and intensely polite man, whose depiction never veers into cliché significantly enhances the complex, but believable plot. Inspector Imanishi Investigates is more than just a murder mystery, but a fascinating cultural artifact.

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Peter Lovesey’s second entry in the (ex)-Detective Peter Diamond series won’t win any awards for plausibility—Diamond, no longer a member of the Bath police force due to a (bogus) charge of unlawful force, has been reduced to working as a security guard at Harrods, where he discovers a young, apparently mute Japanese girl hiding in the store and is then enlisted by one of Japan’s top Sumo wrestlers to engage in a global search to find her when she subsequently goes missing. Like I said, not a particularly plausible plot.

But I found the book enjoyable as further entree into the mind of the rotund, rowdy, and undeniably bright Peter Diamond. I’ll be looking for the next in the series. Recommended.

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[I’m going to have a difficult time catching up with my 999 Challenge reading if I keep reading books that even I can’t creatively fit into one of my categories. Nonetheless, I do keep reading, though I have fallen off the wagon when it comes to making entries here. So…]

Peter Lovesey’s The Last Detective is the first in a series of contemporary British mysteries featuring the—I must invoke the necessary clichés here—irascible and cynical Chief Superintendent Peter Diamond. I picked the book up by chance, intrigued by the description and having been impressed (as you’ll see in future entries here) with other novels in the Soho Crime series.

In many ways, Peter Diamond is one of a number of stereotypical detectives—cantankerous and gruff but with some softness left in his heart, bright and tenacious but not politically adept—but Lovesey portrays him in such a way that it’s impossible not to like him even if the reader sometimes has to cringe while doing so. Given these facts, that Diamond is regularly in the midst of political intrigues in which his continued employment—much less his present position—are at risk almost goes without saying.

The Last Detective’s plot is a bit convoluted, involving the death of a washed-up actress, a complex of events surrounding various suspects—including her English Literature professor husband, and some missing letters by Jane Austen. I did guess who the killer was about 2/3 of the way through, but I couldn’t be sure until the end… and there was plenty of plot left to be interested in.

Lovesey’s novel has an interesting construction, featuring two interludes in which primary suspects tell their story rather than relaying it through the process of interrogation. This worked well, though the voices weren’t wholly convincing… they escaped the fate of sounding too much like the main character, but they didn’t exactly sound authentic either.

All in all, a very satisfying debut of an interesting character in a novel that deservedly won an Anthony Award for Best Novel. In fact, after reading the second in the series (more on that later), I revised my opinion of the novel even higher as I start to see a better picture of how unique Peter Diamond really is. Recommended.

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It turns out Charles McCarry was one of the best spy novelists I’d never heard of. After too many recommendations from those in the know, I finally picked up the earliest locally available example of his work– The Tears of Autumn. I wasn’t disappointed. In this novel– first published in1974 and clearly written while the Vietnam War was a constant concern and the loss of John F. Kennedy still a painful wound– McCarry has established a claim to the heights of Le Carre in my personal pantheon. Tears of Autumn tells a complicated tale of conspiracy and the assassination of JFK… an oft-rehashed idea now, but McCarry’s book withstands the test of time due to the plausibility of the story and his clear, sometimes beautiful prose. The only false note in the book is that the main character is a bit too much of a super hero. Paul Christopher– a patriotic former poet turned CIA spy– is a bit too good at everything. Christopher’s not outlandish ala James Bond, but he touches on the unbelievable. A small weakness in a fine, fine book.

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A Small Town in Germany is my least favorite John le Carre novel. The setting is Bonn and the British Embassy there, in the years after World War II. Leo Harting, a former German Army officer who is now a minor functionary at the embassy, has disappeared… along with 43 highly sensitive files. Alan Turner is sent to the embassy to find out what happened, and most of the book consists of Turner’s interviews and discussions with the embassy officials and employees who worked with Harting.

To be sure, even le Carre’s weakest effort is a few notches above most of its competition. The plot and setting is interesting, set in the tumultuous time after the war when Germany was trying to regain its footing, accommodate the return of its soldiers, and was about to split right down the center into two countries. I just couldn’t get a grasp of the characters and found myself somewhat lost in the politics of the embassy and the different roles and class relationships between employees, officers, officials and diplomats.

By the time the complex plot was coming together I felt like I should start the book over again to get things straight in my head… but that’s not like to happen anytime soon.

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Ostensibly a children’s book, but one most adults will enjoy, The Number Devil tells the story of Robert, a boy who doesn’t like math, who is befriended by the number devil, a little red, bearded, man who—through simple demonstrations and using colorful language (‘hopping’ for exponents, ‘rutabagas’ for square roots, and others)—demonstrates various fascinating, puzzling and amazing characteristics of numbers, including prime numbers, infinite and irrational numbers, and the Fibonacci Sequence. The tone of the book is much like Alice in Wonderland.

Mathematics fascinates me. I’ll never reach a level where I can wholly appreciate the deeper beauty that I know is there (Calculus I nearly killed this English and Philosophy major), just as I will never reach a level where I can truly appreciate the beauty of chess at the highest level. But in both arenas I know that with just a little bit of time, anyone who wants to can see some of it… and there is a lifetime worth of reward to be had once that first step has been taken.

In The Number Devil, Robert takes that first step—and a few more—and we get to travel with him. Even the math-phobic and math-anxious should find this book amusing… while those who have (or develop) an interest in math will marvel at Enzensberger’s skillful creation.

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When I asked around about spy fiction—particularly older work—everyone told me I had to read Eric Ambler. I wasn’t disappointed. A Coffin for Dimitrios was a fun, fascinating read. Set in the years after World War I, but before Hitler came into power, Ambler ably invokes the milieu (the writing can be a little creaky at times, but it was written in 1939) and brings to life two memorable characters: Charles Latimer, the spy novelist who becomes a reluctant, even terrified, participant in real-life, deadly intrigue and Colonel Haki, the powerful intelligence offer whose admiration for Latimer’s work only slightly tempers the brutal hand he casually wields.

I’m given to understand that pairs of characters like this are a theme for Ambler… I look forward to finding out if that’s true

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Recommended to me by Bruce Bentzman, A Man Called Intrepid is a historical account that reads like great spy fiction. The book documents how William Stephenson (code name: Intrepid) and Wild Bill Donovan created and ran a spy network well before and all through World War II, working with Roosevelt and Churchill and for the most part without any real governmental approval. Yet it seems clear that if this spy network didn’t actually change the final outcome of the war, it certainly changed the way it unfolded (and the duration).

What came to my mind immediately is how, in today’s environment, it would be nearly impossible for a covert spy network like this to operate for 10+ years without being exposed to the general public… and if one were exposed, could you imagine the outrage that would ensue? But it’s hard not to agree that the outcome here justified the means, despite being not just a secret government operation of immense influence, but often operating in direct contravention of various laws and public opinion.

One really interesting story revealed here is that the “failed” DIeppe Raid wasn’t a failure at all, but was a planned sacrifice—an engagement that couldn’t be won undertaken to cover the real operation, which successfully infiltrated a scientist in to the country to examine an important nuclear development facility and back out again.

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I picked up Len Deighton’s Billion-Dollar Brain because his name came up so consistently as a master of the spy novel. I was surprised to learn that he’s still alive and published a book as recently as 2006.

Written in 1966, the Billion Dollar Brain is the story of an anonymous British intelligence agent who engages in various missions to pentetrate a right-wing private intelligence agency (called Facts for Freedom, or FFF) operating with the help of a supercomputer (the brain) and deal with an American traitor who works for the FFF but is embezzling their money to support his Communism-promoting activities… including destabilizing Latvia.

I can see why Deighton comes so highly recommended– and why Billion-Dollar Brain was made into a movie. The anonymous protagonist is a witty, self-effacing hero, the plot is complicated, full of action, and featuring myriad twists and turns, and there are– of course– beautiful women on both sides.

It’s not great literature, but it’s not meant to be. It is a page-turner and I’ll be seeking more of Deighton’s books!

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I’m a huge fan of John LeCarre’s Cold War era spy fiction. His best novels of this kind are not just among the best espionage fiction, but among the best fiction of any kind. LeCarre has a fine ear for speech and an elegant way of moving the story forward without shortchanging the psychological details of the flawed men and women that work(ed) in the intelligence field.

But, for some reason, I’ve never ventured beyond the Cold War novels. Reading The Constant Gardener makes it clear I’ve been depriving myself for no good reason. The Constant Gardener is just as compelling as his earlier novels and, while there are common threads between the Cold War novels and this one, Gardener never feels strained or stretched as novels often do when authors so completely change the time and place of a work from that they are most familiar with.

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I picked this up on a whim, intrigued by the description of a plot that wove together quite a few true events and historical figures so well that some are convinced the book isn’t fiction at all. That part of the book– which comprised about 4/5 of the text– was great. A secret file compiled by a young Ian Fleming (who was actually an MI-5 operative in addition to being the creator of James Bond) is– after nearly 50 years– revealed to a contemporary relative. The file documents a long, twisted story involving the Duke of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, Winston Churchill, F. D. R., Adolf Hitler, Anthony Blunt and many others caught up in complicated, treasonous intrigue before and during World War II. The contents of the file are elaborate but believable– I found myself constantly going online to try to sort out fact from fiction.

The disappointing part of the book is the contemporary thriller story, in which the young professor slowly comes to realize that the file is still being sought after by a variety of different representing different countries and organizations for whom murder is just a part of doing business. In that part of the story, the characterization was weak and the events not particularly plausible. But ultimately it’s trivial… before the climax of that story the file has been fully revealed to the reader and the rest of the book could be just as productively skipped.

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Continuing my exploration of the graphic novel (and the 999 challenge), I recently read Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen is one of those titles that even I had heard a lot about and it was a practically unanimous recommendation when I inquired about graphic novels that were worth reading.

And it was worth it. I wasn’t weaned on comics like many people my age–until recently my experience with the genre was limited to the zany hijinks of Archie, Jughead, and Richie Rich (mostly given to me by my grandfather) and Mad Magazine (mostly on the sly at the store)–so my experience with the super hero genre comes from television and movies. But I didn’t need that background to enjoy Watchmen, which is both a compelling work of fiction and a visually interesting work. Serendipitously, trailers have started appearing for a Watchmen movie. I was amazed at how faithful the scenes in the trailer are to the graphics in the book… and equally amazed that I remembered them clearly enough to notice.

Thanks to discussions with various people online and off, next on my list will be a few more Alan Moore works such as V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, plus a half-dozen recommendations from a very knowledgeable and talented friend.

Now that I’ve ferreted out a path that makes sense for me, I’m excited at discovering a whole new genre I never knew could appeal to me. How often does that happen?

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On one hand, it would be fair to say I can’t say enough good things about this mammoth book. On the other hand, it left me stunned and I still can’t put a coherent frame around the book or my experience reading it. So, here is a very lightly editing response I made in an online forum to someone who inquired about it:

The book is a sprawling, epic, messy monstrosity that was at one time conceived as 5 somewhat intertwined novels. There are five sections:

Part I “The Part About the Critics” involves the story of four scholars who become obsessed with a reclusive and mysterious author named Benno Von Archimboldi and each other. In addition to their relationship and their thoughts in Archimboldi, art, philsophy, etc, they travel at various times in search of Archimboldi, eventually, traveling to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, where Archimboldi was once spotted. Santa Teresa, and a string of hundreds of murders that occur there, is one of the places and threads that tie all the parts together.

Part II – “The Part About Amalfitano” tells the story of a slightly cracked philosophy and lit professor (who the four scholars above met in Santa Teresa) and his daughter, who is in danger because of her political views and, perhaps, the killer who should be terrorizing the populace in and around Santa Teresa

Part III – “The Part About Fate” tells of Oscar Fate, a black (it’s important) journalist for a black-interest newspaper who– despite knowing nothing about the sport– is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match between a (rare) Mexican heavyweight champion-caliber contender and an American. While there he becomes interested in the story of the Santa Teresa killings and tries to investigate it.

Part IV – “The Part About the Crimes” is a couple of hundred pages documenting scores of the killings and some of the circumstances around them and the half-hearted investigations

Part V – “The Part about Archimboldi” is the story of the enigmatic and brilliant “Benno Von Archimboldi’s” life, from his childhood through his part as a German soldier in WW II and his career as an author to very near the end of his life (which also involves events in Santa Teresa)

Some things I loved about it:

The verbal style (and range). Each book has a distinct flavor, from an informal but beautiful slangy voice that incorporates various languages (translation must have been a horrendous task) to a rich literary prose to the flat, expository 4th section. The final part is the most conventional, but somehow it fits perfectly, balancing out what came before.

The aforementioned 4th part is like a bludgeon (I’m apparently not alone in using that specific description). It’s hard to get through because it becomes so hard to read of yet another abduction and killing and to accept how ineptly the police forces are in dealing with it. It became hard to continue, but that was exactly the point, I think…

Like the novels I mentioned before, this is an enterprise trying to really capture something of the captiousness and grandiosity and micro/macro interactions that make up who and what we are– particularly in a shrinking world rife with narrowed but deepening divides– and ultimately of course finds that enterprise impossible because people are uncontainable. But it stakes a whole new kind of enterprise. I think of what David Foster Wallace did with Infinite Jest, bringing into a modern context an enterprise not dissimilar to Pynchon and Mailer… that’s Bolano, incorporating some of what Marquez and the political poets of Latin America were doing but in a new, (dare I say it) post-structural context (but oddly not one in which technology plays many obvious parts, and in some cases the role of technological change is ironic).

If you like Borges and some DeLillo and the fever-dream work of Denis Johnson (ala Fiskadoro or Jesus’ Son), if you can enjoy some hard-boiled fiction and film-noir without losing your taste for Godot’s existential humor and the occasional Pulp Fiction-ist mode of rehabilitations and regeneration of genre, if Cormac McCarthy doesn’t make you blanch… then you might like 2666.

On the other hand, you might be the opposite of all these things and still enjoy it. It’s just that kind of book.

I’m struggling because 2666 contains immense variety: literary and philosophical humor next to horrific crime mixed with politics and war and sex of various kinds and politics, small and large-scale.

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I’d ignored Diaz’s practically universally acclaimed book because of my allergy to hype. But it fit perfectly into the “Recommendations I’d Usually Ignore” category of the 999 Challenge, and once again I was shown the folly of my ways… it would seem that categorically ignoring books that receive too much hype is only marginally better than categorically embracing them!

Oscar Wao is an unforgettable character, an overweight immigrant from the Dominican Republic who has turned to fantasy, comics and science fiction for solace and to find his way in the world. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is many stories– Wao’s, of course, but also the fascinating and disturbing story of Wao’s family, the Dominican Republic and it’s tumultous history, and more or less obliquely, Oscar’s cousin, the narrator.

Diaz slips wholly into the skin of his characters, whether people or countries. None of them are outlines or simply symbols. The Dominican Republic is beautiful and terrifying. Wao is an unscocialized nerd with a huge heart and a bright brilliance. From page to page I might find myself captivated or cringeing, laughing out loud or even crying.

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