It started as a great novel in the first chapter, became a bit more boring in the two next chapters, and is rather dull in the part about the murders.
It's just "here's some woman, she has been vaginally and anally raped, and we just can't find any lead" all over again. Does it get better? Am I missing something?
>does it get better
yes. most people put chapter 5 as the best/2nd best chapter
>am i missing something
also yes
The point is that you become desensitized to the brutality of the crimes, just like those who investigate this shit in real life do. Roberto Bologna is a genuis, and frankly, you should go back to hop on pop if you can't figure this out.
Ciudad Juarez mate. Also Edomex in the 20teens. Mostly this:
>>7645437
Not missing anything, forth chapter was dull too here. Fifth is great, though, so trudge on.
Note that on lit you might deal with teenage posters who picked up this book to be their cult masterpiece and you might get called retarded if you say any sort of criticism towards its contents.
>>7645437
>The point is that you become desensitized to the brutality of the crimes
Saying that the victim has been vaginally and anally raped does not make me feel anything, even the first time I read it.
Still on the critics atm & enjoying it so far. I like the dreams. I think there are a fair few books better than IJ & 2666, but they are both fairly good.
>>7646243
same here /b/ro
>>7646243
Exactly. Life is expendable and pointless in Mexico. He makes his point rather efficiently.
>Not enjoying comfy forensic and cop adventures in the third world
>Not loving the descriptions of the crimes as they hit close to home
>Not liking the growth/death of the cases and the character development of Klaus
>Not getting the criticism to the uselessness and incompetence of the mexican cops
You're a pleb.
Best part, up there, along with Archimboldi.
>>7646283
That's fairly fair of you to say that.
>>7646320
I'm nothing if not fair.
Actually I think there are ALOT of books that are a shit ton better than both of these, but I don't hate either of them. /lit strives for the polemic in everything...
>>7645437
>>7645432
Yeah, chapter 5 was my favorite. Made me cry.
Having said that, while chapter 4 was a trudge, I still enjoyed it in a way. It's brutal and horrifying, and you become desensitized to all the violence.
>>7646243
If you can't empathize enough to be hurt by this, then I don't even understand what you could possibly like about literature other than a smug sense of superiority as you jack off to your bookcase.
"Convertía el dolor de los otros en la memoria de uno. Convertía el dolor, que es largo y natural y que siempre vence, en memoria particular, que es humana y breve y que siempre se escabulle. Convertía un relato bárbaro de injusticias y abusos, un ulular incoherente sin principio ni fin, en una historia bien estructurada en donde siempre cabía la posibilidad de suicidarse. Convertía la fuga en libertad, incluso si la libertad sólo servía para seguir huyendo. Convertía el caos en orden, aunque fuera al precio de lo que comúnmente se conoce como cordura".
"It turned the pain of others into the memory of one. It turned the pain, that is long and natural and always a victor, into particular, human and brief, always slipping away, memory. Turned a barbaric tale of injustice and abuse, an incoherent wail, with no beggining and no end, into a well structured story in which there was always a possibility to kill oneself. Turned escape into freedom, even if that freedom was only good enough to keep escaping. Turned caos into order, even to the price of what is commonly known as sanity".
Amalfitano's part is beautiful in its own way and if you do enjoy it you should really read Los insabores del verdadero policía.
>>7646397
So far I've read 2666 (my favourite), Los Detectives Salvages, (I actually tried to read it side by side with the original Spanish, but it seems I'm much rustier than I had thought- it was a disaster), and By Night In Chile.
I'll probably read either Antwerp or Woes Of the True Policeman next, but I may pick up Distant Star instead.
Which were your favourites?
>>7646495
well I started with Los detectives salvajes (in spanish since I'm chilean) a few years ago and it's been my favorite ever since. 2666 was an interesting read and I enjoyed it a lot, specially the Amalfitano part, but that's mostly because I read it along Los sinsabores del verdadero policía, so I guess that helped it some way. I also really liked Amberes (Antwerp, I'm guessing) because of that whole poetic-prose vibe and the eerie feel of disconnection and being lost there was in it, to me. Amuleto comes close in terms of favorites, mainly because I thought it was interesting to give the narration to a woman for a change, and I believe it's as solid as other novellas of his can get.
I should name Nocturno de Chile as my actual second favorite though, because it gathers great part of our country's recent or contemporary history in a strange and funny and so well crafted manner. I'm still missing a lot, but some day I'll check Estrella distante y El tercer reich.
>>7646345
>If you can't empathize enough to be hurt by this, then I don't even understand what you could possibly like about literature other than a smug sense of superiority as you jack off to your bookcase.
The characters are introduced in a line or two. If you're lucky, there's some background information about them afterwards. Do you really become attached to characters that quickly?
>>7646711
I guess I don't need to know an awful lot about another human being to understand how much they don't want to be raped and murdered.
>>7646816
That doesn't mean I squirm and feel like shit every time I hear about some imaginary Rosa Sanchez getting raped and murdered, especially when I didn't know that she existed in the book the line before.
DUDE, LIKE, GLOBALISM IS BAD LMAO
ALSO FUCK GRINGOS
>>7647089
you've been spamming this shitty interpretation of 2666 in every single thread and got BTFO every single time
fuck off
>>7647089
>amerifats still mad at a single line in a thousand pages unfinished novel
That book has no redeeming qualities tb h
>>7647089
>all of the raped and murdered women were making it in duty free factories from NAFTA
>mexican femicides dripping in machismo cheerfully drive around murdering them
Globalism is not presented as a bad thing in this book, even when the professors go on their shitty love triangle trip to Mexico THEY arent the ones butchering women cheerfully, and they are buying local goods.
>>7647642
>making it
>minimum wage enslaving jobs
From a Guardian review: "Yet the most startling thing about it is that it is literature. For it is easy to forget, as Bolaño lays down his litany of carnage, that none of what he is describing actually happened. Of course, something nearly identical to it did, in Ciudad Juárez. But Bolaño's town is Santa Teresa, and the women whose deaths he evokes so chillingly never actually existed. Critics have talked for years about the blurring of fiction and reality, but it seems to me that Bolaño, in this sequence, is doing something genuinely novel. He is deploying a technique of non-fiction (the forensic report) to describe something imaginary, but which nonetheless mirrors almost exactly an actual sequence of events."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/roberto-bolano-2666
For me, 2666, and much of Bolano's other work, is there to intimate a sense of a concealed doom. The key word is "convergence," where the various parts of 2666 all converge, whether overtly or indirectly, towards Santa Teresa. The events of the novel, and what came before, and even elements of Bolano's other works, all hurtle together with irreversible force towards an ultimate conclusion, to be resolved in the enigmatic year 2666. However, (and I understand this might be the part that gets iffy), it is not our providence to understand in a logical or coherent way what that conclusion is.
Nor is it the providence of Bolano himself. Bolano stated that the entire work is narrated by Belano, his literary alter ego. And it is the cast of the novel (and by extension the world) who is speaking through Belano, who speaks through Bolano. What we get in our hands is the distilled essence of Belano's vision, something that hints at an apocalyptic vision but does not narrate or explain.
(There is also another case of people speaking through others through narrative with the Soviet authors, whose manuscript interrupts the Archimboldi narrative. Story within a story within a story, woo!)
You can look towards globalization and the influence of Nazis/WWII for some more mundane themes, and the idea that Santa Teresa/Mexico is a microcosm of the world and human history/future (both geographically and temporally) is certainly valid. Personally, I read it as a representation of, or perhaps more accurately as signs indicating, "chaos." There is a fundamental, dare I say visceral, sense that something is [i]wrong[/i] with the world being described in Bolano's work(s). At times apparent and wide-ranging (the horrors of WWI, the grotesque murders) and at other times personal and obtuse (the chaotic personal lives of the critics, Fate's descent into the chaos of Mexico from sheer coincidence).
I am reminded of the Second Coming:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:
[...]
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The difference is that instead of the age of Christ coming to an end in the year 2000, it is the age of [whatever Bolano saw] spiraling towards chaos in the year 2666. You have the similar sense that a revelation/cataclysm shift/change is at hand, and you get a vast, ancestral image from the collective unconsciousness manifesting itself in the events of the novel as well as the thoughts of the authors/writers, real and fictional, that inhabit his world.
>>7649149
Why are you copy-pasting a 4chan post from December 2015?
>>7649160
Cause its relevant to the topic and it was a good post (rare) so I saved it
>>7649167
Stop being an inauthentic faggot.
>>7649169
???
Interesting take on it, pasta or not.
>>7646397
"into your own memory," not "the memory of one."
>>7646243
Exactly. At some point you start thinking "holy shit this is boring" The murder and rape of several women seem banal and you feel like grazing over it.
>>7649863
"De uno" can mean one's self or "my own"
i want to be a critic, travel the world and fuck beautiful girls :(
You cant seem to derive enjoyment of a novel from any source other than plot. You probably couldnt even identify other sources. This is practically a meme observation to make at this point, but I mean come on dude, open your fucking mind.
Im not gonna tell you go back to Spot the Dog, but you seriously need to broaden your approach to lit, as do all people who think like you.
It is entirely and completely appropriate to dislike a book like 2666 and think its bad, but you need fucking evidence for that, and "not enough stuff happens" is not valid evidence and it never will be.
It feels ridiculous that I have to even say this.
>>7650063
This anon speaks the truth. How someone can approach such a book with such a plebian, uncritical mindset is beyond me. No one here cares if you liked a book or found some of it boring. I don't want to hear about your poor feelings, b-but it was too long, b-but I couldn't concentrate. What did the book make you THINK? With your critical mind, what were its strength & weaknesses? Where was it more effective & how does it compare to other works?
>>It feels ridiculous that I have to even say this.
It does & it should.
Anon, I would happily share a lover with you and kick a cabbie to death in
L O N D O N
O
N
D
O
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i enjoyed the part about the murders so much. i liked how level headed and clear it was about the violence that was occurring, and the helplessness of the various police guy characters in the face of it all. like it seemed so futile, there was so fucking much of it and the occasional case they tried to do a bit more than normal and nothing really worked. and then other things got intertwined, like that weird fucking german guywho turns out to be archimboldo's nephewin prison and the romance between that one cop and the lady from the mental hospital and the the new guy trying to become an actual proper detective amongst the apathy and incompetence and the reporter from the arts paper and his interview with that lady who puts a genuine deep human connection into one of the endless anonymous murders and gosh it all works so well
