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2666, Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresaa fictional Jurezon the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
68 pages, Paperback
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About the author
Roberto Bolaño
151 books6,646 followersFor most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain. Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.
He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.
Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.
In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño passed away. Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."
Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.
In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.
In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.
He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.
Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.
In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño passed away. Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."
Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.
In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.
In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.
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November 7, 2016
The Part About Amalfitano could have also been named Behind the Scenes of Reality, because its major concern is the invisible substance that makes up our world. At the very end of the book, during Amalfitano’s dream conversation with Boris Yeltsin, Amalfitano turns away from the dream’s setting – a pink marble courtyard marked with a blood-red latrine – as it swirls away into the Void. To look straight into the Void would be like entering a black hole; in other words, there could be nothing more terrifying. So he wakes up. As random as this dream may seem, and as anticlimactic it may be to a story that just seemed to be getting started, the dream is a summary of the entire Part, and in many ways, of all of 2666. We look away from the true nature of reality every day, because to look fully upon it would be to realize that this world we live in is an illusion created by an evil god; this world is Hell, and therein lies the answer to all of our suffering. In the same dream, Yeltsin says that supply and demand rule the world, but what keeps everything from being swallowed up by the void is magic. Magic is the third destiny after good and evil, the invisible life force, the prana that is the origin of all art, with all art or attempts at art being inherent failures, because art is the attempt to describe something that isn’t there. What is there is the Void, the killings of women in Juarez, the superficial constructs of society, the cruel world that sees art as madness and the practitioners of magic as psychopaths. Art then, at its most fundamental form, is a defense mechanism, a talisman to ward off the apocalypse. At its apotheosis, art is the heretical reminder that the physical world, with all of its horrors, is the illusion, and that magic is not only real, but it is the God inside all of us, or, to be in line with Bolaño’s atheism, “that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” (227)
My thesis might be read as an interpretation of 2666 as a gnostic parable, but that isn’t quite true. Bolaño didn’t believe in an afterlife, so espousing a spiritual outline like Gnosticism is out of the question. I have no idea if Bolaño himself saw the gnostic parallels in his novel; regardless I find it to be a highly functional trope to use in analyzing 2666. In Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, time doesn’t exist; in actuality, the world has never moved on from the Fall. This explains the narrator seeing ancient ruins superimposed over modern day pictures – they are flickers of other dimensions momentarily breaking through the fourth dimension and appearing like god-messages to us in our realm. PKD was a (drug-induced) gnostic and Bolaño has said in many interviews that he read and admired him. Bolaño uses a similar framework in 2666, represented in the invisible things – sometimes feelings, of menace mainly, or artistic preoccupations – superimposed over the dramatic setting of Europe and Latin America. Take Lola for example, Amalfitano’s wife and un-certified psychopath. She abandons her family to pursue a romantic relationship with an obviously gay poet that resides in an insane asylum, all based on a highly specious memory. The one time she sees the poet she is all but ignored. It is a painful part of the book when she is sleeping outside the asylum, looking onto the grounds from beyond the fence and trying to will a truth onto the situation that is most definitely not there. Her madness is that she took her own personal artistic notion of magic and tried to apply it to physical reality. Something triggered a spark of gnosis inside of her and she began changing her daily life to conform to an idea she couldn’t possibly understand; she carried on where others would have stopped and becomes an example of artistic insanity (other examples exist here as well, such as the invariably strange and awesome book by Kilapán). Bolaño doesn’t give her to us as a warning of what not to do, rather, he shows how in this reality of ours even the one essence we have to ward off evil can corrupt a mind completely. Every movement, even art, is an evasion, a look away from the Void, and all evasions are punished. Art is a form of theoretical mathematics, only in physics we have formulas with conclusive answers, whereas in art we have poems, lines open to infinite interpretations; thus, and this is a theme in all of Bolaños work, applying artistic notions to everyday life is extremely dangerous (this theme is behind the Dieste book hanging on a clothesline). Again, Bolaño is anything but didactic or ideological, and his fascination with those that live dangerously is one of the primary motives for him as an artist. A gnostic world is relentlessly bleak, but it is the artist’s, or magician’s, job to keep the flicker of hope alive. 2666 was Bolaño’s final rocket into the abyss before his spirit blazed its own trail in the unknown.
My thesis might be read as an interpretation of 2666 as a gnostic parable, but that isn’t quite true. Bolaño didn’t believe in an afterlife, so espousing a spiritual outline like Gnosticism is out of the question. I have no idea if Bolaño himself saw the gnostic parallels in his novel; regardless I find it to be a highly functional trope to use in analyzing 2666. In Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, time doesn’t exist; in actuality, the world has never moved on from the Fall. This explains the narrator seeing ancient ruins superimposed over modern day pictures – they are flickers of other dimensions momentarily breaking through the fourth dimension and appearing like god-messages to us in our realm. PKD was a (drug-induced) gnostic and Bolaño has said in many interviews that he read and admired him. Bolaño uses a similar framework in 2666, represented in the invisible things – sometimes feelings, of menace mainly, or artistic preoccupations – superimposed over the dramatic setting of Europe and Latin America. Take Lola for example, Amalfitano’s wife and un-certified psychopath. She abandons her family to pursue a romantic relationship with an obviously gay poet that resides in an insane asylum, all based on a highly specious memory. The one time she sees the poet she is all but ignored. It is a painful part of the book when she is sleeping outside the asylum, looking onto the grounds from beyond the fence and trying to will a truth onto the situation that is most definitely not there. Her madness is that she took her own personal artistic notion of magic and tried to apply it to physical reality. Something triggered a spark of gnosis inside of her and she began changing her daily life to conform to an idea she couldn’t possibly understand; she carried on where others would have stopped and becomes an example of artistic insanity (other examples exist here as well, such as the invariably strange and awesome book by Kilapán). Bolaño doesn’t give her to us as a warning of what not to do, rather, he shows how in this reality of ours even the one essence we have to ward off evil can corrupt a mind completely. Every movement, even art, is an evasion, a look away from the Void, and all evasions are punished. Art is a form of theoretical mathematics, only in physics we have formulas with conclusive answers, whereas in art we have poems, lines open to infinite interpretations; thus, and this is a theme in all of Bolaños work, applying artistic notions to everyday life is extremely dangerous (this theme is behind the Dieste book hanging on a clothesline). Again, Bolaño is anything but didactic or ideological, and his fascination with those that live dangerously is one of the primary motives for him as an artist. A gnostic world is relentlessly bleak, but it is the artist’s, or magician’s, job to keep the flicker of hope alive. 2666 was Bolaño’s final rocket into the abyss before his spirit blazed its own trail in the unknown.
October 18, 2009
Can you give a book six stars?
June 20, 2019
Tek başına güçlü bir kitap olabilecekken daha büyük bir kitabı daha güçlü hale getiren bir bölüm bu. İlk bölümde odağına kayıp yazarı arayan akademisyenleri koyan kitapta Meksika'dalarken karşımıza tanık olarak çıkan Amalfitano, bu bölümde ana karakter rolüyle boy gösteriyor. Genele baktığımızda birçok yan öyküden oluşan kitapta benzerlerine göre kitabı farklı kılan her yan öykünün aslında nasıl da kendi başına buyruk, olabildiğince farklı ve bir o kadar bütünlük içinde olması.
Dengesiz ve bir o kadar da eğlenceli karaktere benzeyen eşi Lola, kızı henüz küçük yaşlardayken evi terk eder. Kitapta bir süre boyunca Lola ve hayatındaki garipliklere şahit oluyoruz. Bir yandan şehirde cinayetler başlamışken kızı Rosa ile enteresan deneyimlerin ortasında bulan Amalfitano, aslında bize çok şey anlatmak isteyip bunu dolaylı yoldan anlatmayı bir tercih olarak seçen biri. Rüyalar ve boşluklar bölümde derin anlamlar kazanıyor. Ve bir süre sonunda iş rayından çıkıyor.
Bölümün anlatılış şekli ve yaşananlar, okuyucuların sevip sevmeme konusunda en tereddütte kaldığı ve arafın çok da yer almadığı bir bölüm olarak değerlendirildiğini düşünüyorum. Fakat neresinden bakarsak bakalım Amalfitano'yla İlgili Bölüm tümüyle duygusal bir kitap. Benimle aynı fikre sahip okuyucuların var olduğuna şüphem yok.
Dengesiz ve bir o kadar da eğlenceli karaktere benzeyen eşi Lola, kızı henüz küçük yaşlardayken evi terk eder. Kitapta bir süre boyunca Lola ve hayatındaki garipliklere şahit oluyoruz. Bir yandan şehirde cinayetler başlamışken kızı Rosa ile enteresan deneyimlerin ortasında bulan Amalfitano, aslında bize çok şey anlatmak isteyip bunu dolaylı yoldan anlatmayı bir tercih olarak seçen biri. Rüyalar ve boşluklar bölümde derin anlamlar kazanıyor. Ve bir süre sonunda iş rayından çıkıyor.
Bölümün anlatılış şekli ve yaşananlar, okuyucuların sevip sevmeme konusunda en tereddütte kaldığı ve arafın çok da yer almadığı bir bölüm olarak değerlendirildiğini düşünüyorum. Fakat neresinden bakarsak bakalım Amalfitano'yla İlgili Bölüm tümüyle duygusal bir kitap. Benimle aynı fikre sahip okuyucuların var olduğuna şüphem yok.
July 1, 2014
i finished the second novel in this five novel series and I am blown away by the dark originality....sheer genius.....take a small break before I start book3
Read
April 10, 2014I hardly know where to begin reviewing this massive opus. But I know I am not alone because most of the people who have read the thing just rate it with stars to indicate how well they liked it and leave it at that. I don’t even think the star rating system works well when considering this novel.
2666 might almost be thought of as fictional nonfiction in that it reads like remembered thought, something like a memoir, though it is broken into “books” and many people are central rather than a single narrator. It crosses several continents, and takes in pieces of people’s lives that we later discover intersect. Or, more precisely perhaps, their paths cross paths, like meteors leaving trace. This is ‘Life’ writ large: the work is so bulky one can barely see from one end of it to another, one loses one’s way. One makes connections but too late or too slowly sometimes and even then what does it matter? What control did we really have? Could we have made a difference, a difference to us or to everyone else? Ach!
The work is comprised of five Books which Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño’s literary executor, tells us were meant to be published separately. Echevarría decided, however, that the parts were better off coming together because of their linked quality, which is not apparent until Book Five. Bolaño was first a poet but he thought he’d make more money in novels (publishers and writers will no doubt laugh at this, though this author was probably right in his own case) and there were many times during this opus that I thought he’d have done better to stick to poetry. I was not being facetious. He throws in the kitchen sink, gathering like a vacuum factoids and sidelines from people’s lives that don’t really seem to fit or be at all relevant.
However, in the end, if you can get to the end (and again, I am not being facetious—this takes stamina and stomach) there is something here which is difficult to articulate. It is sorrow, it is appetite, it is fullness, it is all, including the bad bits. At the end we can say we’ve seen it all, experienced it all. If you cling to life in old age or sickness with the idea that somehow tomorrow will be better, put that aside for Life is not especially kind. It has good bits but there is plenty of bad, too, and you can’t have one without the other.
Book One begins with academics following the work of an obscure German writer. They admire his style and tout it successfully enough that the man is mentioned in the same breath as The Nobel Prize. They are curious about his life and where he lives and how he writes. The second book, “The Part about Amalfitano” is about a Chilean transplant to Mexico and appears to be Bolaño’s musings about life, death, love, art, sexuality, and reality. He ranges from “this shithole has no future” to “ Poetry is the only thing that isn’t contaminated…only poetry…isn’t shit.” This section may well contain explanations to the rest of the novel—why Bolaño wrote it, how he felt when he began, and what he intended.
Book Three, The Book about Fate, is a linking book, connecting forgotten and overlooked people whose lives, like threads, nevertheless intersect and overlap others in the ball of string that is life, and move us unfathomably in a direction that appears to be no direction at all. We, each of us, could write a section like this about our lives when we stepped off into the unknowingness of the wider world and played an infinitesimal part in events that occur in the future without our knowledge or consent. This book links directly to Book Four, though we don’t understand the link until Book Five.
Book Four, The Part about the Crimes, is one of the most horrific litanies of rape, murder and torture that I have ever heard, for I listened on audio and the narrator’s deadpan voice did not inflect no matter the nature of the material he recited. A spate (how trivial a word to describe a tidal wave of such proportions) of murders of women was taking place across a section of Mexico. By the end I had concluded that one man couldn’t possibly have done this if he worked full-time at killing, so it was a crime that spawned crime, and crime done with similar hatred and method. I looked in the paper copy of the book to see if the deaths were listed, like they sounded on audio (1,2,3…). But no, Bolaño writes in paragraphs: one’s eyes skim the size and shape of the words on the page and the horror is not revealed until it is spoken or read aloud in an endless, truly agonizing Reading of the Names.
In Book Five, we learn of one killer at least. And we see that elusive author from Book One, Archimboldi, again. It finishes with Bolaño writing to his publishers, friends and readers” “And that’s it, friends. I’ve done it all, I’ve lived it all. If I had the strength, I’d cry. I bid you goodbye.” Bolaño died a matter of months after he finished the book. One senses he knew what he was leaving behind, both in terms of life and in terms of legacy. It is a very difficult work, and one doesn’t need it to live. One cannot help but be awed, though, by the workings of one man’s mind, and enriched by his big, binocular vision of this world and its inhabitants.
-----------------------------
April 10, 2014
David Foster Wallace, giant literary figure that he was, was quoted in The New Yorker magazine as saying “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” It seems to me this is what defines Bolaño's writing.
2666 might almost be thought of as fictional nonfiction in that it reads like remembered thought, something like a memoir, though it is broken into “books” and many people are central rather than a single narrator. It crosses several continents, and takes in pieces of people’s lives that we later discover intersect. Or, more precisely perhaps, their paths cross paths, like meteors leaving trace. This is ‘Life’ writ large: the work is so bulky one can barely see from one end of it to another, one loses one’s way. One makes connections but too late or too slowly sometimes and even then what does it matter? What control did we really have? Could we have made a difference, a difference to us or to everyone else? Ach!
The work is comprised of five Books which Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño’s literary executor, tells us were meant to be published separately. Echevarría decided, however, that the parts were better off coming together because of their linked quality, which is not apparent until Book Five. Bolaño was first a poet but he thought he’d make more money in novels (publishers and writers will no doubt laugh at this, though this author was probably right in his own case) and there were many times during this opus that I thought he’d have done better to stick to poetry. I was not being facetious. He throws in the kitchen sink, gathering like a vacuum factoids and sidelines from people’s lives that don’t really seem to fit or be at all relevant.
However, in the end, if you can get to the end (and again, I am not being facetious—this takes stamina and stomach) there is something here which is difficult to articulate. It is sorrow, it is appetite, it is fullness, it is all, including the bad bits. At the end we can say we’ve seen it all, experienced it all. If you cling to life in old age or sickness with the idea that somehow tomorrow will be better, put that aside for Life is not especially kind. It has good bits but there is plenty of bad, too, and you can’t have one without the other.
Book One begins with academics following the work of an obscure German writer. They admire his style and tout it successfully enough that the man is mentioned in the same breath as The Nobel Prize. They are curious about his life and where he lives and how he writes. The second book, “The Part about Amalfitano” is about a Chilean transplant to Mexico and appears to be Bolaño’s musings about life, death, love, art, sexuality, and reality. He ranges from “this shithole has no future” to “ Poetry is the only thing that isn’t contaminated…only poetry…isn’t shit.” This section may well contain explanations to the rest of the novel—why Bolaño wrote it, how he felt when he began, and what he intended.
Book Three, The Book about Fate, is a linking book, connecting forgotten and overlooked people whose lives, like threads, nevertheless intersect and overlap others in the ball of string that is life, and move us unfathomably in a direction that appears to be no direction at all. We, each of us, could write a section like this about our lives when we stepped off into the unknowingness of the wider world and played an infinitesimal part in events that occur in the future without our knowledge or consent. This book links directly to Book Four, though we don’t understand the link until Book Five.
Book Four, The Part about the Crimes, is one of the most horrific litanies of rape, murder and torture that I have ever heard, for I listened on audio and the narrator’s deadpan voice did not inflect no matter the nature of the material he recited. A spate (how trivial a word to describe a tidal wave of such proportions) of murders of women was taking place across a section of Mexico. By the end I had concluded that one man couldn’t possibly have done this if he worked full-time at killing, so it was a crime that spawned crime, and crime done with similar hatred and method. I looked in the paper copy of the book to see if the deaths were listed, like they sounded on audio (1,2,3…). But no, Bolaño writes in paragraphs: one’s eyes skim the size and shape of the words on the page and the horror is not revealed until it is spoken or read aloud in an endless, truly agonizing Reading of the Names.
In Book Five, we learn of one killer at least. And we see that elusive author from Book One, Archimboldi, again. It finishes with Bolaño writing to his publishers, friends and readers” “And that’s it, friends. I’ve done it all, I’ve lived it all. If I had the strength, I’d cry. I bid you goodbye.” Bolaño died a matter of months after he finished the book. One senses he knew what he was leaving behind, both in terms of life and in terms of legacy. It is a very difficult work, and one doesn’t need it to live. One cannot help but be awed, though, by the workings of one man’s mind, and enriched by his big, binocular vision of this world and its inhabitants.
-----------------------------
April 10, 2014
David Foster Wallace, giant literary figure that he was, was quoted in The New Yorker magazine as saying “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” It seems to me this is what defines Bolaño's writing.
September 7, 2016
A parte de Amalfitano: Um ligeiro decair em relação ao primeiro livro, Bolaño continua um prosador engenhoso, mas aqui falta algo do seu melhor.
June 3, 2021
Honestly, I've read this section at least three times now and I don't think I get it. The prevalent theme is "madness," which to me feels ... very 90's? I just remember "madness" being a major part of Dark Pop Culture when I was a teenager, but reading through this section now it seems like a sort of catch-all for unrelated, even fantastical, portraits of mental illnesses.
This is the shortest section of the book (about 70 pages), but one of the things that makes it hard to follow is that there are three subsections that don't overlap as much as you think they might. The first twenty pages take place in and around Barcelona, and are about Amalfitano's estranged wife (probably bipolar?) who left him years prior in pursuit of a poet, locked away in an asylum, who she has decided she's in love with. This is probably the most cohesive part of the story, and it's a pretty acute portrait of a micro-community of drifters who gravitate toward one another through various obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
That section of the story ends somewhat abruptly, and then skips forward some years to when Amalfitano (still grieving for the loss of his wife) first arrives with his daughter to Santa Teresa, the fictional Mexican city that features in all five parts of 2666. We've met Amalfitano in Part 1 after he's somewhat better established in the city, but here he begins his own (probable) descent into madness when he unpacks a copy of Testamento geométrico from his moving boxes that he doesn't remember owning. In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp's found art piece Unhappy Readymade, Amalfitano hangs the book on the clothesline in his backyard, "so that the wind...could choose its own problems, and tear out the pages." Amalfitano also begins drawing out geometry problems labeled with names of literary and historical figures, a practice that seems to send him to the point of mild distraction. Meanwhile, he is (probably) being romantically pursued by another professor at the university where he's been hired, and she takes him to a faculty party where, while ignoring her advances, he instead notices the son of the dean, Marco Antonio Guerra.
This second section is most heavily connected to the version of Amalfitano that we've met in Part 1, seen through the eyes of three visiting professors ("The Critics"). Amalfitano is somewhat more of a cypher in Part 1, but one thing we know about him is that he still has Testamento geométrico hanging on his clothesline, an oddity that the other professors find somewhat disturbing. The only other thing we really learn about him is that the professors, in observing his interactions with Marco, decide that Amalfitano is gay. This is key, because the "threat" of homosexuality is an ambiguous undercurrent throughout Part 2. This second theme first shows up when Amalfitano reminisces about his dead father, who used homophobic slurs pretty frequently to describe most anyone he didn't like.
The third and final section of Part 2 begins when Amalfitano begins hearing "a voice" each night after his daughter goes to bed, and the voice's central (and extremely aggressive) preoccupation is Amalfitano's sexuality. Over and over, the voice (which identifies itself as Amalfitano's father) demands that Amalfitano prove he isn't gay, returning night after night to have the same conversation. To distract himself, Amalfitano begins reading O'Higgins is Arcaunian, a fictional book (which seems laden with conspiracy theories) about how the first Chilean head of state was secretly of indigenous descent.
Concurrently, Amalfitano begins spending time with Marco Antonio Guerra -- going out for drinks, discussing philosophy and poetry, or simply driving around. Guerra is violent by nature; he tells Amalfitano that one of his favorite things to do is to go to a bar and pretend he's gay in order to get into a fight. Sometimes he even lets the other man beat him, just for the experience.
(Try as I might, I'm not able to pick up on any cues of a romantic and/or physically intimate relationship between Amalfitano and Guerra. They only have a few scenes together, and for most of them Amalfitano doesn't seem to want to be around Guerra at all. A relationship between them is what would make the most sense, given everything else this part of the story is laying down, but if it's here, it's too subtle for me to see. The writing does indicate that the two men are drawn to each other in a nebulous way, but that's about it. On the other hand, if their interactions are simply meant to suggest that they are simply two closeted men spending time together platonically, and perhaps both dancing around the secret they share, I could probably buy that.)
Between the book on O'Higgins and Amalfitano's own troubles, there's a final theme of "secret selves" that loosely connects the prior themes of madness and sexuality -- the idea that mental illness, or deviations from traditional ideas about masculinity, are things about Amalfitano that he needs to hide. But to be honest, even this seems like a stretch: Amalfitano makes no attempt at all to hide his "madness" from his daughter, friends, or coworkers, nor is he overly concerned about defending his straightness to the voice he hears. As it's written on the page, Amalfitano fears visitations from the voice simply because he doesn't want to go mad -- the nature of its interrogation isn't something that he seems to fret over.
Toward the end of this section, there are a few scenes that seem designed to provide context for where Part 2 fits into 2666 as a whole. Guerra confides in Amalfitano that he no longer reads anything but poetry, because "poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated," as if to suggest that prose (or linear storytelling, perhaps) isn't to be trusted. This causes Amalfitano to remember a conversation he once had with a pharmacist who chose only to read minor works by major authors of the Western canon (Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener rather than Moby-Dick, for example), to which Amalfitano laments that people are "afraid to take on the great, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown." Together, these anecdotes comment both on Part 2 itself (the most lyrical and minor section of 2666), as well as the largesse of 2666 as a complete work, which is both "great and torrential" as well as extremely, slavishly linear in all its other parts.
The very last section of Part 2 is a dream Amalfitano has about Boris Yelstin, the "last Communist philosopher" (a moniker which Amalfitano himself notes is more proof of his madness that anything else). Sitting next to "a crater or a latrine," Yeltsin speaks to Amalfitano of the concept of the "human table":
"Life is demand and supply...[but] a third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history. [...] So take note. This is the equation: supply+demand+magic." Another allusion to the grandeur and indulgence of a book like 2666.
Yeltsin disappears soon after this speech, and Amalfitano forces himself to wake rather than to be alone, staring into the latrine "streaked with red."
Whether this last image is meant to be scatalogical or pornographic or both, it is to me the clearest indication of Amalfitano's discomfort with the unknown. Trying to give Bolaño full credit here, it could be that the lack of innuendo between Amalfitano and Guerra is due to the fact that the story is told entirely from Amalfitano's perspective. If Amalfitano's sexuality is something he refuses to acknowledge, then it might make sense that we're not given access to ideas that he won't consider himself.
But to be clear, I wouldn't have written all this out if I actually knew what I was talking about. The whole point is that I don't -- I don't really understand Part 2, and at this point I'm sort of looking at it cross-eyed. It may have to wait until the next time I make my way through 2666.
This is the shortest section of the book (about 70 pages), but one of the things that makes it hard to follow is that there are three subsections that don't overlap as much as you think they might. The first twenty pages take place in and around Barcelona, and are about Amalfitano's estranged wife (probably bipolar?) who left him years prior in pursuit of a poet, locked away in an asylum, who she has decided she's in love with. This is probably the most cohesive part of the story, and it's a pretty acute portrait of a micro-community of drifters who gravitate toward one another through various obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
That section of the story ends somewhat abruptly, and then skips forward some years to when Amalfitano (still grieving for the loss of his wife) first arrives with his daughter to Santa Teresa, the fictional Mexican city that features in all five parts of 2666. We've met Amalfitano in Part 1 after he's somewhat better established in the city, but here he begins his own (probable) descent into madness when he unpacks a copy of Testamento geométrico from his moving boxes that he doesn't remember owning. In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp's found art piece Unhappy Readymade, Amalfitano hangs the book on the clothesline in his backyard, "so that the wind...could choose its own problems, and tear out the pages." Amalfitano also begins drawing out geometry problems labeled with names of literary and historical figures, a practice that seems to send him to the point of mild distraction. Meanwhile, he is (probably) being romantically pursued by another professor at the university where he's been hired, and she takes him to a faculty party where, while ignoring her advances, he instead notices the son of the dean, Marco Antonio Guerra.
This second section is most heavily connected to the version of Amalfitano that we've met in Part 1, seen through the eyes of three visiting professors ("The Critics"). Amalfitano is somewhat more of a cypher in Part 1, but one thing we know about him is that he still has Testamento geométrico hanging on his clothesline, an oddity that the other professors find somewhat disturbing. The only other thing we really learn about him is that the professors, in observing his interactions with Marco, decide that Amalfitano is gay. This is key, because the "threat" of homosexuality is an ambiguous undercurrent throughout Part 2. This second theme first shows up when Amalfitano reminisces about his dead father, who used homophobic slurs pretty frequently to describe most anyone he didn't like.
The third and final section of Part 2 begins when Amalfitano begins hearing "a voice" each night after his daughter goes to bed, and the voice's central (and extremely aggressive) preoccupation is Amalfitano's sexuality. Over and over, the voice (which identifies itself as Amalfitano's father) demands that Amalfitano prove he isn't gay, returning night after night to have the same conversation. To distract himself, Amalfitano begins reading O'Higgins is Arcaunian, a fictional book (which seems laden with conspiracy theories) about how the first Chilean head of state was secretly of indigenous descent.
Concurrently, Amalfitano begins spending time with Marco Antonio Guerra -- going out for drinks, discussing philosophy and poetry, or simply driving around. Guerra is violent by nature; he tells Amalfitano that one of his favorite things to do is to go to a bar and pretend he's gay in order to get into a fight. Sometimes he even lets the other man beat him, just for the experience.
(Try as I might, I'm not able to pick up on any cues of a romantic and/or physically intimate relationship between Amalfitano and Guerra. They only have a few scenes together, and for most of them Amalfitano doesn't seem to want to be around Guerra at all. A relationship between them is what would make the most sense, given everything else this part of the story is laying down, but if it's here, it's too subtle for me to see. The writing does indicate that the two men are drawn to each other in a nebulous way, but that's about it. On the other hand, if their interactions are simply meant to suggest that they are simply two closeted men spending time together platonically, and perhaps both dancing around the secret they share, I could probably buy that.)
Between the book on O'Higgins and Amalfitano's own troubles, there's a final theme of "secret selves" that loosely connects the prior themes of madness and sexuality -- the idea that mental illness, or deviations from traditional ideas about masculinity, are things about Amalfitano that he needs to hide. But to be honest, even this seems like a stretch: Amalfitano makes no attempt at all to hide his "madness" from his daughter, friends, or coworkers, nor is he overly concerned about defending his straightness to the voice he hears. As it's written on the page, Amalfitano fears visitations from the voice simply because he doesn't want to go mad -- the nature of its interrogation isn't something that he seems to fret over.
Toward the end of this section, there are a few scenes that seem designed to provide context for where Part 2 fits into 2666 as a whole. Guerra confides in Amalfitano that he no longer reads anything but poetry, because "poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated," as if to suggest that prose (or linear storytelling, perhaps) isn't to be trusted. This causes Amalfitano to remember a conversation he once had with a pharmacist who chose only to read minor works by major authors of the Western canon (Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener rather than Moby-Dick, for example), to which Amalfitano laments that people are "afraid to take on the great, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown." Together, these anecdotes comment both on Part 2 itself (the most lyrical and minor section of 2666), as well as the largesse of 2666 as a complete work, which is both "great and torrential" as well as extremely, slavishly linear in all its other parts.
The very last section of Part 2 is a dream Amalfitano has about Boris Yelstin, the "last Communist philosopher" (a moniker which Amalfitano himself notes is more proof of his madness that anything else). Sitting next to "a crater or a latrine," Yeltsin speaks to Amalfitano of the concept of the "human table":
"Life is demand and supply...[but] a third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history. [...] So take note. This is the equation: supply+demand+magic." Another allusion to the grandeur and indulgence of a book like 2666.
Yeltsin disappears soon after this speech, and Amalfitano forces himself to wake rather than to be alone, staring into the latrine "streaked with red."
Whether this last image is meant to be scatalogical or pornographic or both, it is to me the clearest indication of Amalfitano's discomfort with the unknown. Trying to give Bolaño full credit here, it could be that the lack of innuendo between Amalfitano and Guerra is due to the fact that the story is told entirely from Amalfitano's perspective. If Amalfitano's sexuality is something he refuses to acknowledge, then it might make sense that we're not given access to ideas that he won't consider himself.
But to be clear, I wouldn't have written all this out if I actually knew what I was talking about. The whole point is that I don't -- I don't really understand Part 2, and at this point I'm sort of looking at it cross-eyed. It may have to wait until the next time I make my way through 2666.
August 29, 2013
Well it took me long enough, but I finally finished this book. It was rich in images and language but sometimes short on plot, but I could not imagine not finishing this one. Though it circles around the search for a German author and serial killings in a North Mexican border city, this book is all about its characters and their stories. If you're looking for tidy closures, like in life, you won't find them. Instead, characters' lives come and go throughout the 5 sections of this book and as in life, you're lucky if you know the end of at least one of them.
I will warn, that the hardest section is "The Part about the Murders," which details 250 some odd murders through the eyes of detectives and the press. It can be kind of wearying to get through, but yet Bolano still compels the reader to keep moving forward.
I will warn, that the hardest section is "The Part about the Murders," which details 250 some odd murders through the eyes of detectives and the press. It can be kind of wearying to get through, but yet Bolano still compels the reader to keep moving forward.
Currently reading
December 22, 2009having read less than the first 100 pages of an 893 page book i can only say that I will be truly, truly sad when this book ends. it is a marvelous epic but with a very tight focus; it is robust without being verbose. each and every page of this book is another kind of love affair with language with wonderful rhythms and motifs= nice translation.
A really interesting kind of writing, not like Borges "interesting" but it's as if he has technically mastered the act of writing and having done that, pioneered yet another dimension to it. It's a vibrant read without being showy and masculine without excessive muscle- great so far!
A really interesting kind of writing, not like Borges "interesting" but it's as if he has technically mastered the act of writing and having done that, pioneered yet another dimension to it. It's a vibrant read without being showy and masculine without excessive muscle- great so far!
January 16, 2018
This part concentrates on Óscar Amalfitano, a Chilean professor of philosophy who arrives at the University of Santa Teresa from Barcelona with his young adult daughter Rosa. As a single parent (since her mother Lola abandoned them both when Rosa was two) Amalfitano fears Rosa will become another victim of the femicides plaguing the city.
The second book of this series is quite metaphorical with some hints of autobiography tips from the author.
3* Woes of the True Policeman
CR 2666
TR By Night in Chile
TR The Secret of Evil
TR The Savage Detectives
TR Antwerp
The second book of this series is quite metaphorical with some hints of autobiography tips from the author.
3* Woes of the True Policeman
CR 2666
TR By Night in Chile
TR The Secret of Evil
TR The Savage Detectives
TR Antwerp
July 23, 2013
Literary meandering at its most grandiose. Majestic in its non-rising, non-declining plot.
I’m sure there are literary scholars that can find common threads through the 5 parts and 900 pages, but I already have a full time job and the last I checked reading this book wasn’t paying my heath care premiums. I don’t mind a challenge, but you have to help me out a little bit. How many characters are in this book? 15,000? And I curse those authors who give characters similar names. Bolano took it to a new level by giving them similar long names. Thanks Dude. I understand that there may be technical merits in the book that I missed because I was too busy trying to find some life in the story. There is a 300 page section that is essentially a Mexican police blotter.
But, BUT! I read the whole thing and I didn’t dread reading it. I wanted to know how it was all connected and that kept me going. Maybe the plot was not as satisfying as I would have liked but the writing was. And there’s no way I could recommend this book due to it’s length, but I admire the attempt. Bolano deserves credit for that. This book is essentially a good short story writer shooting for the moon and coming us short, about 850 pages short.
I’m sure there are literary scholars that can find common threads through the 5 parts and 900 pages, but I already have a full time job and the last I checked reading this book wasn’t paying my heath care premiums. I don’t mind a challenge, but you have to help me out a little bit. How many characters are in this book? 15,000? And I curse those authors who give characters similar names. Bolano took it to a new level by giving them similar long names. Thanks Dude. I understand that there may be technical merits in the book that I missed because I was too busy trying to find some life in the story. There is a 300 page section that is essentially a Mexican police blotter.
But, BUT! I read the whole thing and I didn’t dread reading it. I wanted to know how it was all connected and that kept me going. Maybe the plot was not as satisfying as I would have liked but the writing was. And there’s no way I could recommend this book due to it’s length, but I admire the attempt. Bolano deserves credit for that. This book is essentially a good short story writer shooting for the moon and coming us short, about 850 pages short.
October 21, 2021
En este volumen, lo que me llamó la atención, a diferencia del anterior, fue el manejo que le da a su personaje principal y su pareja. La estructura de lo relatado, sigue siendo relajada, plana, pero siento que un poco más profunda. Me gustó la manera en que dibuja la cotidianeidad y la crudeza que giraba en torno a Lola. Me gustó por último, los tintes de locura que fue desgranando, poco a poco, en el profesor. Seguiremos adelante con el siguiente volumen, por lo menos ahora, si quedé con ganas de leer un poco más y avanzar en la novela.
December 10, 2009
I think the best way to describe this book is epic. It was epic. The writing, the stories, even getting through each page was epic and it was an endeavor. There is no straight forward plot line, the book (books) are filled with vinettes that related to an overall story and sometimes don't, but the finished product is absolutely beautiful. Almost every page contains an incredible quote, but in order to get through this book, you have to want to read it.
November 29, 2015
I don't know. I'm seriously scratching my head right now.
Tentative 2 stars (at least for this part), but I'm waiting to see how the rest of the book pans out.
Tentative 2 stars (at least for this part), but I'm waiting to see how the rest of the book pans out.
December 27, 2018
Wow, just wow! Bolaño is a wonderful writer! In this part we encounter Amalfitano's worries and sadness, narrated in a really beautiful way with a certain sadness. There are alsoanswers to certain questions from Part 1.
Part 2 can also be a stand-alone novel but it is part of the bigger picture. I can already see how Part 2 fits with Part 1 and how Part 2 compliments Part 1.
When I started reading 2666, I thought it was going to be a long and torturous read but Bolaño's prose is so wonderful that I can't help but continue reading it. This is one of those books that the process of reading is enjoyable in a way that you're having hard time putting it down. It's not one of those classic page-turners with a captivating plot but rather a thorough character examination. I am really Looking forward to the remaining three books.
Part 2 can also be a stand-alone novel but it is part of the bigger picture. I can already see how Part 2 fits with Part 1 and how Part 2 compliments Part 1.
When I started reading 2666, I thought it was going to be a long and torturous read but Bolaño's prose is so wonderful that I can't help but continue reading it. This is one of those books that the process of reading is enjoyable in a way that you're having hard time putting it down. It's not one of those classic page-turners with a captivating plot but rather a thorough character examination. I am really Looking forward to the remaining three books.
Read
January 5, 2019considering someone asked me for my number when I was perusing this book in portland I figured it had to be good. I dont know why bram sent it to me here though I get enough marriage proposals without people being attracted to my literary choices. I've read the first 2 books so far have been flying throught- unfortunately it was too heavy to bike 70k so I had to take a quick break from it.
September 1, 2013
Bolaño is one of the greatest short story writers of our time. But his books are flabby and weird. This novel is basically 600 pages of descriptions of women who have been raped and murdered, and 200 pages of...nothing happening. I stand by it.
February 25, 2010
My Bible.
September 22, 2025
Underhållande, rolig och obegriplig.
April 25, 2013
It was over two years ago when I ran to a Barnes and Noble to see if they were selling this book that was being urgently applauded in the NYT Review of Books. They say an educated person gets the chance to read five books a year. How many of those will be contemporary? This was new because Americans were just finding out about it, and falling in love with it. But the voice didn't sound like any kind of new thing I knew.
The voice that opens up the strange journey of 2666 is old, dead sounding. It had a storyteller's authority, the kind that Borges or Walter Benjamin might approve of. This faint unearthliness is probably because the author knew he was dying when he wrote it. That fact followed me through the kind of sloppy Dante's Inferno text. A keen humor lights many of the scenes, but it's usually a gallows humor. At the time I thought it was one of the best things I had read, because of its urgency and the dark figures that follow each obsessed character around. Now I'm suspicious that I"ll go back to it and it won't sustain that passionate first reading I gave it.
I will say this. Once I read 2666 I knew I had to read all of Bolano's work. His first short story in Last Evenings on Earth and passages of 2666 and The Savage Detectives will always be in my memory. What 2666 has on the rest of it is a kind of tough minded, indeed doomed, romance. The romance of reading, writing, editing and the tenuousness of it, in a land of war. Part of that romance is in its scope. The third part of the book is the part about Archimboldi, a fiction German writer who fought for the SS, and lived a life of exile and poverty in order to release the demons of his experience into fiction. This was a thrilling and instructive read for me, seeing how Bolano shows his fictional writers process work. His relationship with the stalwart publisher and his girl endow the story with a warming romance, without sacrificing the cruel shades the world inevitably gives. It's a cold dispassion that cloaks Archimboldi, but the character only looks like a cool customer because all of that fire is saved for the book that put such a spell on the critics of PT 1, who scour the globe's Archimboldi conferences looking for new information on the man. This lands the critics in Santa Teresa (Juarez) where they believe Archimboldi to be, what they first see is that the new hell on earth is not in a concentration camp, but right on the America/Mexican border.
This is where the book will survive as an important document from this time. In 2666 a scene where American tourists blankly wander to a fence to stare at nothing, listening to Willie Nelson, shows the vacuum of America that is gobbling up the things Mexican underlords have to sell. It is this moral vacuum that exists on the edges of a desert where druglords are murdering women, and a psychic cries over these deaths in the book's talismanic passages. The critics don't know they're in for that yet, but they can feel it. And Bolano saves a laundry list of current Mexican war crimes for the second part of the book, a part that caused a friend of mine to return the book in disgust.
Bolano, unlike the popular contemporary writer David Foster Wallace, is a born writer. All of his intertextual or post modern tricks are streamlined quickly into a spring all of his death and life haunted characters are making. We know he's the real deal because his voice is urgent, his characters sketched with affection and the sentence style pretty. It's a voice that stays with you, and has made 2666 a puzzle and an object of love or obsession for many. Rightly so I think.
The voice that opens up the strange journey of 2666 is old, dead sounding. It had a storyteller's authority, the kind that Borges or Walter Benjamin might approve of. This faint unearthliness is probably because the author knew he was dying when he wrote it. That fact followed me through the kind of sloppy Dante's Inferno text. A keen humor lights many of the scenes, but it's usually a gallows humor. At the time I thought it was one of the best things I had read, because of its urgency and the dark figures that follow each obsessed character around. Now I'm suspicious that I"ll go back to it and it won't sustain that passionate first reading I gave it.
I will say this. Once I read 2666 I knew I had to read all of Bolano's work. His first short story in Last Evenings on Earth and passages of 2666 and The Savage Detectives will always be in my memory. What 2666 has on the rest of it is a kind of tough minded, indeed doomed, romance. The romance of reading, writing, editing and the tenuousness of it, in a land of war. Part of that romance is in its scope. The third part of the book is the part about Archimboldi, a fiction German writer who fought for the SS, and lived a life of exile and poverty in order to release the demons of his experience into fiction. This was a thrilling and instructive read for me, seeing how Bolano shows his fictional writers process work. His relationship with the stalwart publisher and his girl endow the story with a warming romance, without sacrificing the cruel shades the world inevitably gives. It's a cold dispassion that cloaks Archimboldi, but the character only looks like a cool customer because all of that fire is saved for the book that put such a spell on the critics of PT 1, who scour the globe's Archimboldi conferences looking for new information on the man. This lands the critics in Santa Teresa (Juarez) where they believe Archimboldi to be, what they first see is that the new hell on earth is not in a concentration camp, but right on the America/Mexican border.
This is where the book will survive as an important document from this time. In 2666 a scene where American tourists blankly wander to a fence to stare at nothing, listening to Willie Nelson, shows the vacuum of America that is gobbling up the things Mexican underlords have to sell. It is this moral vacuum that exists on the edges of a desert where druglords are murdering women, and a psychic cries over these deaths in the book's talismanic passages. The critics don't know they're in for that yet, but they can feel it. And Bolano saves a laundry list of current Mexican war crimes for the second part of the book, a part that caused a friend of mine to return the book in disgust.
Bolano, unlike the popular contemporary writer David Foster Wallace, is a born writer. All of his intertextual or post modern tricks are streamlined quickly into a spring all of his death and life haunted characters are making. We know he's the real deal because his voice is urgent, his characters sketched with affection and the sentence style pretty. It's a voice that stays with you, and has made 2666 a puzzle and an object of love or obsession for many. Rightly so I think.
March 30, 2011
This is an incredible book. It was well worth the enormity. It falls between a 4 and 5 for me for reasons I'm still thinking about. Questions: should the five sections/chapters have been published together as one book? Were the revisions completed posthumously, sound? The entire book's chapters seems so well wrought, so wound--even in their lack of closure, their mystery. But the last chapter/book...it doesn't feel as tightly woven.
Is this the manifesto? I think so.
"The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely" (887).
Is this the manifesto? I think so.
"The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely" (887).
November 26, 2012
2666 is many things -- a literary game, a demonstration of how language can capture a place and a time, and a variety of other things that will interest those of us who like to think about our books. But it is much, much more than that -- it is a angry, almost impossibly intense look at the effect of the drug war on Mexico and the violence perpetrated against women every day. It is a poetic look at people who want to be saved by literature, but who must instead face the burdens of real life. It is entertaining and awful, funny and terribly sad, violent and beautiful, and there is so much of all of it that it sometimes feels as though the reader is drowning in hundreds of pages of pain. But in the end it is a singular achievement by one of the great Latin American writers of the past several decades (or, at least among those we can read in translation).
June 27, 2013
So, I'm pretty convinced one should wear a crash helmet when taking on a Bolano title, chin strap buckled. Such was the case for 2666 anyway. Fucking magnificent! It's 900 pages so I brought it everywhere and ended up reading the bulk of it between periods of the NHL playoffs, kind of a perfect fit. Part history lesson, part news report, part novel, a mélange of things all rolled into one big beautiful book. It's the closest thing to David Foster Wallace that I've run across and I don't say that lightly. The only negative is that there won't be any more, truly sad. Don't be afraid of it's length, it goes by so easily, I was only greedy for more.
November 30, 2009
Well, understanding that this book was published posthumously, and understanding that this book was, by the author's admission, un-finished, and understanding that the narrator was Arturo Bolano (one of the protagonists in The Savage Detectives), it was just a very good read, albeit 890 or so pages of a good read. I wonder if the author didn't connect the dots because death intervened, or because he wanted to make it that way on purpose? I intend to read more of his works.
June 9, 2021
It's funny that he's like ugh now even BOOKISH PHARMACISTS are afraid of "the real combat" of art. Like what is he talking about with "even." The only people who care about the "real combat" of this stuff are the people who would say something like that in the first place, which is to say, not pharmacists.
I for my part do have a great interest in the struggle that terrifies us all, Roberto. Come at me. Cow and spur me, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
I for my part do have a great interest in the struggle that terrifies us all, Roberto. Come at me. Cow and spur me, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
January 2, 2010
What starts out as an academic version of a noir gradually steamrolls into a macabre test of endurance cataloging the ongoing murders in Jaurez. Oddly readable, and somehow personal. A fine trick to pull off.
March 3, 2010
Having just finished...I'm not sure what to say. I didn't realize that this 'book' (Like calling the OED a 'book') actually shares characters with Savage Detectives. Also, a tip, take notes. The 'Crimes' section 4 kind of ends up wiping out all that came before.
October 15, 2009
Possibly the best this decade: http://npinopunintended.wordpress.com...
August 6, 2013
Nothing very interesting in this part except for the geometry book hanging on the clothesline, a nod to Duchamp's surrealism. Moving on to Part 3!
September 19, 2014
Trudging on to Part 3.
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