hiding in plain sight: August 2009

Friday, August 28, 2009

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez . . .

There’s something about really long books. They’re so comforting. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just that you inhabit them for so long.

And, of course, they’re never neat, the way shorter books often are. It’s as if the writer, once a certain point is passed, no longer feels an obligation to gather up loose ends, to make sense where there is none. As if complexity comes to justify itself.

Also, you always know you’ll be able to come back, to read them again and again, without exhausting their surprises, maybe without even remembering for certain what happens next.

All the best books are long. Gravity’s Rainbow. Gaddis’s JR. War and Peace.

And now comes Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

Let me say immediately what I’m not saying. It’s not Gravity’s Rainbow. Or JR. Or War and Peace. At least I don’t think so. But it could be, I suppose. It’s certainly very good.

What’s it about? Who knows. Another characteristic of good books. I mean, you can say that War and Peace is about the Napoleonic Wars, or about life in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, or about certain people who lived in that time. But of course it’s not.

And so 2666 is not about Juarez, or about the murders of women in Juarez, or about the four or five parallel universes that swing in its pages around Juarez, or even about Benno von Archimboldi, whoever he is.

Bolaño’s not going to tell us. He’s dead. (Of drinks and drugs and just a difficult sort of life in general.) But we’re told he was pleased with this book, and I think he was right to be.