A recent exchange in the com­ments over at Ads With­out Prod­ucts offers an inter­est­ing sug­ges­tion for clos­ing the Roberto Bolaño-Roberto Bazlen-​Robert Musil loop that John Latta started and I con­tin­ued. (Advance apolo­gies if crib­bing com­ments like this is poor form):

Scott Eric Kauf­man:

I’ve got to say, I’m think­ing the way a person reacts to Bolaño’s directly tied to their feel­ings about Musil…

CR:

Yes! I’ve never been able to get past, you know, the first sev­eral thou­sand pages of Musil - you must be right!…

SEK:

Less cryp­ti­cally, Bolaño’s novels seem to have that (admit­tedly con­tra­dic­tory) qual­ity of being both a page-​turner and occa­sional. I’m not com­pelled to read them, but when I do, I can’t put them down. Musil was the same way—his pale shadow, Kun­dera, not so much—but this seems to exclude Musil and Bolaño both from the mod­ernist cat­e­gory into which they’re so often shoved….

And yet as soon as I offer the sug­ges­tion, I feel myself want­ing to draw it back. I’m only halfway through the first volume of the Musil (and not plan­ning to take up the second) but so far it seems like the only way in which it’s close to the Bolaño is in that “quality of being both a page-​turner and occasional.” Musil’s book for me is still best described in his own words, and I don’t think they apply to Bolaño’s:

Read­ers are used to demand­ing to be told about life, and not about the reflec­tion of life in the heads of lit­er­a­ture (sic) or of men. This is cer­tainly jus­ti­fied only inso­far as this reflec­tion is an impov­er­ished copy—now become conventional—of life. I try to give them the orig­i­nal, and it is there­fore proper that they should sus­pend their prejudice.

If any­thing, read­ing Bolaño reminded me of read­ing Tropic of Cancer: both were indul­gent even by the gen­er­ous stan­dards of the genre—about twice as long as they should have been—both could be momen­tar­ily but hugely enter­tain­ing. Read­ing each of these books I couldn’t shake the feel­ing that they’re beloved because they offer enough poverty, sex, and poetry to tempt us with an abject (and there­fore, in the pecu­liar value system that belongs to most of the people who buy these books, wildly roman­tic) por­trait of the youths we might have been.

In Bolaño’s case, I think James Wood was closer to the mark than he allowed when he wrote,

A novel all about poetry and poets, one of whose heroes is a lightly dis­guised ver­sion of the author him­self: how easily this could be noth­ing more than a pre­cious lat­tice of ludic nar­cis­sism and unbear­ably ‘literary’ adven­tures! Again, Bolaño skirts danger and then glee­fully accel­er­ates away from it.

I dis­agree about that last part. It’s true that Bolaño, like Miller, offers moments of real read­erly ecstasy, but they’re noth­ing near what it would take to get him out of his “precious lattice.” If any­thing helps him escape–and I’m not con­vinced that he does–it’s noth­ing glee­ful but rather a deep bass tone of dis­il­lu­sion and dis­ap­point­ment that gets louder and more unmis­tak­able as the book goes.

Mostly, I think, I was just dis­ap­pointed that Bolaño didn’t give me the mas­ter­piece I’d been promised, a book on the order of The Recog­ni­tions or Ada or even, a notch down, London Fields. I admit I’m wary of being bitten twice with 2666, but I was heart­ened by this note at the Com­plete Review, the first part of which cap­tures my feel­ings exactly:

While we admired The Savage Detec­tives, we never found our­selves com­pletely in the thrall of Bolaño-mania. We even pre­ferred Nazi Lit­er­a­ture in the Amer­i­cas–but that book is, after all, just a game (an almost per­fectly exe­cuted game, but still …). So our expec­ta­tions for 2666 really weren’t all that high.

Expec­ta­tions are, of course, a dan­ger­ous thing, and we are wary of heap­ing on higher ones, given all the hype (and the great first reviews). Read­ers should be allowed to dis­cover it for them­selves, and maybe it helps if one comes to it think­ing, It can’t be that impres­sive. The thing is, it is.