South Africa is sending the contract documents via courier, so we should know better what we are dealing with in terms of that offer very soon. I hope we will know where we are heading in the next couple of weeks. It will be good just to know.
I just finished reading Roberto Bolano's 2666. I'm not done processing yet, but this is an important book. How important is what I'm having a hard time judging. I am fairly confident it is the best novel I've read that's been written after 1980. That may not sound like it is saying a lot if you know about my distaste for most recent literature, but there have been some bright points in the last 3 decades, so it isn't a hollow compliment. By best I mean it is best as judged by a combination of writing and importance, not that it has been my favorite read. It is not a happy or light read at all, though it does read really fast for being roughly the same size as War and Peace.
Most of the critical reviews I've seen have been almost fawning. I think this is partly due to the author being dead. I think the tone might be a little more measured if the author was living. The book isn't without flaws, though I suppose that gets mitigated by the fact that this work was in draft when Bolano died.
My trouble in judging the book is coming from a combination of the style of the book itself and the author's death. So the book is actually 5 books revolving around a central location, Santa Teresa (which is a thinly veiled Ciudad Juarez). The place unifies the work, but the place itself is not really the point. While the book seems pretty place-driven, much like Under the Volcano and One Hundred Years of Solitude, which really seem to be the parents of 2666 in many ways, I don't really think the place is much other than a stand in for what the author is really focusing on. Bolano doesn't attack his central theme directly, nor does he ever explicitly articulate it. Reading the books is like examining from a distance the concentric circles that ripple in water after an object is thrown in. Part of my dilemma in judging this book is that all we have are the circles so we have to guess what it was that was thrown in. That is easy enough -- death. But I'm not positive whether it was death as a boulder and the ripples are tsunami sized or whether it was death as a pebble. I think most of the reviews I've read have taken it on faith that Bolano threw a boulder here, but I think that is because of some assumed insight or intimacy with the topic because he was dying as he wrote. I'm not really sure the book itself bears that out. I'm struggling to see what is new here, what is different, what is unique and important about whatever it was Bolano threw in. I'm not sure I'm there yet. The book bears rereading and regardless of whether it was a boulder or a pebble, this book is masterfully done and important in the canon of great works I think. I haven't decided whether it goes in my top 100 ever though. Still on the fence on that one. At any rate, I recommend it. And I'd love to chat about it with anyone else who reads it.
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