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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Some random observations about this book to mark the occasion of my third go around.
The Part about the Prose
In Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe, translator Chris Andrews addresses a few points about the apparent ease with which Bolaño's fiction is rendered into English. While some have argued that Bolaño's popularity is the result of his style being simple enough, and more importantly global enough, to appeal to North American audiences, Andrews resists that reading by noting that the kind of style which most resists translation relies on the "wordplay or subtle sound patterning" unique to the original language. Bolaño's distinctive features have, on the other hand, more to do with rhythm, pacing, and juxtaposition. He short list includes "the headlong sentence, which persists in accumulating clauses by coordination; the “swirling” word repetition described by the Colombian poet Dario Jaramillo as an irritating tic; the bursts of bold postsurrealist imagery mentioned above, often introduced by “as if”; and the strategic deployment of the narrator’s uncertainty and/or memory lapses as rapid transitions." It's these qualities that suck the reader in, and it's the feeling of being stuck in a kind of swirl of words, of uncertain meaning and mental stability, which can suddenly bottom out into a bizarre or unexpected image that keeps me coming back. These features are attuned to the pace and rhythm of reading more than its content, and this read through, I could feel the temptation to read more than my allotment for the week. Its this feeling of expectation, uncertainty, and curiosity that Bolaño captures with his rhythmic and pacing features that keeps people hooked and which can survive translation without strong losses of information.
In other words, this readthrough had me thinking a lot about paragraphs. Getrude Stein famously said that paragraphs were emotional and sentences were not. She later expanded on this by saying that "Paragraphs are emotional not because they express an emotion but because they register or limit an emotion." A combination of non-emotional sentences, then, can produce an emotion through registration (ie, a mind slowly becoming aware that it is happy) or limitation (ie, slowly becoming aware that someone loves this person and not that one). Gertrude Stein did, however, give examples of sentences that could express the same kind of emotion content as paragraphs, one of which is "It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident." Now, it could be argued that this sentence is not written very well. The agreement between the two parts of the sentences is hard to parse. The the subject of the sentence, the "It," is not specific enough. The sentence has a kind of enjambed feeling, you can feel the clank of unoiled machinery through the use of the "but" to join the two clauses. But the more I am forced to parse the sentence, the more I am force to go back over and think about what the "It" might be (a patch of grass? an untamed growth of wildlife?) and how he had hurt himself by accident (did he hurt himself mowing the patch of grass? did he hurt himself pruning the unruly growth of wildlife? were his utopian expectations of a garden of eden like paradise rudely punctured by real life?) the more I am convinced it perfectly describes a limiting of emotion. It depicts hopeful, almost delusional optimism, running smack into painful reality.
Bolaño does this kind of thing throughout 2666 all the time! Through weird, unexpected metaphors, paragraphs which can swell to huge lengths or diminish to just a few sentences, and sentences that have that kind of juxtaposition as described by Stein, he's able to perfectly capture the registration and limitation of emotions. Those emotions he's interested in depicting, however, happen to be the varieties of boredom, horror, madness, and mania. Whether it's the bravura run-on sentence early in the Part about the Critics, where it feels like the entire world of the critics and their obsession with Archimboldi contracts to the ultra dense point of the Swabian's twice told story featuring Archimboldi, or the choppy, cross cutting of narrative threads he uses to end sections like the Part about Fate, Bolaño, consciously or not, seems acutely aware of how emotional paragraphs can be made of unemotional sentences. And while in the past I might have explained his strange, unexpected metaphors as simply "the work of a poet in prose," it seems to me that these unexpected metaphors go a long way towards expressing the mood of entire paragraphs, even entire sections.
The Part about Thomas Bernhard
Recent online discourse about literature how been fixated on the presence of Thomas Bernhard in recently written fiction. Without going too much into detail, Bernhard's novels are often known for their monologue character in which an obsessive and vitriolic narrative obsesses over minor social details, people he hates, and his own short comings, usually artistic. These kinds of books often exchange descriptions of settings or expository background for a kind of close, almost stream of consciousness depiction of thought. Bernhard keeps things from flying off the rails, however, by having his narrators return to the same kinds of ideas, people, or events with a fugue like intensity, uncovering new things about them each time they return.
It struck me, while reading posts about the recent Bernhardian turn, that I could still detect the ghostly presence of Bolaño in these depictions of crazed and obsessed narrators. Speaking for myself, what I found so refereshing about Bolaño was that a story could just be a person talking. A story could just be the deathbed confession of a priest in By Night in Chile or a river of contradictory, hilarious voices in the middle of The Savage Detectives. It's a way of presenting a story like someone might tell you at a bar or on the street and it can still possess all the artificiality, all the magic screen shadows on a wall trickery, of actual literature, while presented as a single person talking. Later, when I found out that Bernhard's influence on Latin American literature was significant (see for instance Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya where the pissed off expat academic refers to San Salvador as a nation of business administrators, something I think grows truer of the United States with each passing day), it seemed practically obvious in retrospect. But where Thomas Bernhard found himself unable to suffer fools gladly, taking the monstrosities of civil society into critical view, it's my contention that Bolaño is interested in speaking through the voices of others. Having other characters talk is just as important as having himself talk, and while he might be indulging in mere ventriloquism, it's often highly important who is talking in Bolaño just as much as what they are saying.
Therefore, it's not so much important that his characters are "fully rounded" or "three-d" but that they are being heard at all and that there concerns and problems and voices be depicted as faithfully and as truthfully as possible. This is why so much of The Part about the Crimes is written in the language of the police report and that the name of the actual reporter who broke the story, Sergio González Rodríguez, appear as a character.
The Part about the Structure
2666, much more so than any other book I have read, largely succeeds on how much you value associative reading. The book's coherence depends on its open structure, upon the resonances and parallels between the sections, than between the standard coherence of plot resolution, or shit, even solving a mystery. When the random guy in The Part about Archimboldi confesses to throwing his wife off the Virgin Ravine and pretending like she got sick and died, can we read it as directly addressing the murders of the women in The Part about the Crimes? Is it important that both Archimboldi and Klaus (maybe?) have killed someone? How important is it that vampires have been threaded as a theme throughout the entire book, culminating in the possible appearance of fucking Count Dracula in Part 5? [Mostly likely the unnamed and mysterious SS officer in the whole Gothic castle interlude, although it could also be General Horsecock as well] I mean, I think the answer is Yes although its the kind of associative reading that avoids resolution. That's why many people find this book so frustrating but I, having been warped by too much PoMo literature reading, find immensely satisfying. It would be pretty gross to have Bolaño say, for instance, that it was fucking Count Dracula that caused the Holocaust or that the women who were murdered was the result of one Silence of the Lambs style serial killer. It's gross because 1) this allows the reader to avoid feeling culpable and can write off the evil as the Big Bad defeated by The Big Good and 2) it makes everything incredibly neat and tidy. The answer, while still perhaps being exasperating, is that society caused the women of Juarez to be killed. It's society that causes the deaths of being in the second and third world to matter less than those in the first. It's society that causes global commerce to facilitate the existence of maquiladoras and their inhuman working conditions. Off course, I'm not saying that all definitive endings are bad in some way, but it's like throughout this you can tell Bolaño wanted to avoid solving these issues definitively, and, instead, choosing to suggest resonances and weird connections. Like the Aztecs sacrificed people to keep the sun coming up, as the common interpretation goes. Are the women killed in Juarez the sacrifice to keep the engine of global commerce turning? I hope not, but that's one explanation. Is Dracula a manifestation of the very real presence of people who use others bodies for sustenance and fuel, as well as an expression of Victorian sexual repression? Yes, mostly likely. Is this what's happening with the Crimes in Part 4? Perhaps in some cases? It's like in drawing these resonances, Bolaño can avoid stating directly that the evil, the secret of the world, is the result of societal arrangement.
The Part about the Part about the Crimes
Still kind of blown away by this part. Its through this books organization, use of police reports, and its refusal to develop a lot of the true crime, noirish plots that are invoked, that it most closely approaches the kind of "oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" evoked by its Baudelaire epigraph. Its, as someone once described of a longform drone rock song, the ultimate staring contest. Do you look away, like much of first world society being depicted as doing, or do you keep looking. But, crucially, this section doesn't reward the reader dogged to piece together the clues of the crime scene reports with any definitive solution. Instead multiple solutions are proffered, ranging from the misogyny and machismo of Mexican culture to the cartels, snuff films, corrupt police institutions, and even Jeffrey fucking Epstein! Talk about a kind of big bad, Dracula figure. [Although it should be noted, Epstein was definitively not a Big Bad, metaphysical evil.] Quick thing about the Epstein appearance. In retelling the story of the first ever snuff film, a film which merely pretended to be a snuff film to account for its shitty construction and drive up interested rather than actually being a snuff film, Bolaño chooses to name the couple that made the film as the Epsteins. This was not the name of the people who actually made the first snuff film. Then, much later, when the congresswomen is telling the reporter, Sergio, the story of her friend Kelly's disappearance after working as a Eyes Wide Shut party organizer for the rich and the wealthy, Bolaño describes the figure Kelly works for as the banker Salazar Crespo, who's arrangements with the main government party in Mexico go "very very deep." Well, if you combine the name Epstein (used falsely as the name for the couple which made the first snuff film) and the description of Salazar Crespo as a wealthy banker with close ties to the main government party (not as far as I can tell a real name) than you get two facts that add up to the actual Jeffrey Epstein, who functioned as banker with close ties to government figures in America as well as a sex trafficker. Importantly, though, this appearance of Epstein is not presented as the ultimate solution to the killings, nor is it even really investigated at all. Bolaño merely gestures at these connections and leaves the whole thing open. This section really is a remarkable bit of parapolitical writing that manages to touch on the web of causes for the Juarez femicides without definitively settling one on. What is does settling one, however, are the emotions. The shock, horror, and boredom and the need to resistance the causal indifference and the shrug. Multiple characters throughout this section continue investigating, continue caring, and continuing staying invested, even though the task is impossible.
The Part about the Ending
As it is to be expected, the ending also doesn't really resolve anything, but in the appearance of Fürst Pückler, more known for his ice cream than his novels, the book seems to suggest that 1) it is the small things that someone may be remembered for more so than the big things and 2) the fate of every author is to be misremembered or misrepresented by history. That literature, despite how much we may value it and think about it and treat it as important, is dwarfed by the simple business of living and taking care of each other. If anything, we should be remembered for that rather than our attempts at greatness.
Post script: The End of Semblance
Realizing that it took until this read through to realize I had been misinterpreting my favorite part of the whole freakin book, Ansky's journal. See, I thought that Ansky's journal, and its preocupation with semblance and metaphor, celebrated the ability of things to be other things, of semblances to transform into their opposites, for Reiter to become Archimboldi through reading Ansky's journal. But that is not, it appears, to be the case. For Reiter, the only thing that isn't semblance is Ansky, who chose to ghostwrite Soviet science fiction novels for someone else, who choose to travel to the city at the age of 14, who chose a position of constant and romantic anarchy. The painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is also presented as the way out of semblance. Rather than being a painting that pretends to be something else, Arcimboldo uses everyday objects and arranges them in portraits, so that a lawyer may be made out of books or that a season in profile may be made out of animals. I for one think this is just as valid a representation strategy, just as valid a semblance, as any other one. So, I'm still wondering what Bolaño is saying about semblance here. There's something very PoMo hall of mirrors about it. If you're lost in a sea of signifiers, Bolaño seems to be saying, you can at least take the position of constant romantic anarchy, the doomed romantic anarchy of youth. To be honest, I'm not sure I agree! I think it's powerful that semblances can become real and that everything can be anything else through metaphor, through representation, through semblance. You can become what you behold which appears to happen to Archimboldi but I think he takes the opposite stance. Some things aren't semblances, like Ansky and his journal.
The Part about the Prose
In Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe, translator Chris Andrews addresses a few points about the apparent ease with which Bolaño's fiction is rendered into English. While some have argued that Bolaño's popularity is the result of his style being simple enough, and more importantly global enough, to appeal to North American audiences, Andrews resists that reading by noting that the kind of style which most resists translation relies on the "wordplay or subtle sound patterning" unique to the original language. Bolaño's distinctive features have, on the other hand, more to do with rhythm, pacing, and juxtaposition. He short list includes "the headlong sentence, which persists in accumulating clauses by coordination; the “swirling” word repetition described by the Colombian poet Dario Jaramillo as an irritating tic; the bursts of bold postsurrealist imagery mentioned above, often introduced by “as if”; and the strategic deployment of the narrator’s uncertainty and/or memory lapses as rapid transitions." It's these qualities that suck the reader in, and it's the feeling of being stuck in a kind of swirl of words, of uncertain meaning and mental stability, which can suddenly bottom out into a bizarre or unexpected image that keeps me coming back. These features are attuned to the pace and rhythm of reading more than its content, and this read through, I could feel the temptation to read more than my allotment for the week. Its this feeling of expectation, uncertainty, and curiosity that Bolaño captures with his rhythmic and pacing features that keeps people hooked and which can survive translation without strong losses of information.
In other words, this readthrough had me thinking a lot about paragraphs. Getrude Stein famously said that paragraphs were emotional and sentences were not. She later expanded on this by saying that "Paragraphs are emotional not because they express an emotion but because they register or limit an emotion." A combination of non-emotional sentences, then, can produce an emotion through registration (ie, a mind slowly becoming aware that it is happy) or limitation (ie, slowly becoming aware that someone loves this person and not that one). Gertrude Stein did, however, give examples of sentences that could express the same kind of emotion content as paragraphs, one of which is "It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident." Now, it could be argued that this sentence is not written very well. The agreement between the two parts of the sentences is hard to parse. The the subject of the sentence, the "It," is not specific enough. The sentence has a kind of enjambed feeling, you can feel the clank of unoiled machinery through the use of the "but" to join the two clauses. But the more I am forced to parse the sentence, the more I am force to go back over and think about what the "It" might be (a patch of grass? an untamed growth of wildlife?) and how he had hurt himself by accident (did he hurt himself mowing the patch of grass? did he hurt himself pruning the unruly growth of wildlife? were his utopian expectations of a garden of eden like paradise rudely punctured by real life?) the more I am convinced it perfectly describes a limiting of emotion. It depicts hopeful, almost delusional optimism, running smack into painful reality.
Bolaño does this kind of thing throughout 2666 all the time! Through weird, unexpected metaphors, paragraphs which can swell to huge lengths or diminish to just a few sentences, and sentences that have that kind of juxtaposition as described by Stein, he's able to perfectly capture the registration and limitation of emotions. Those emotions he's interested in depicting, however, happen to be the varieties of boredom, horror, madness, and mania. Whether it's the bravura run-on sentence early in the Part about the Critics, where it feels like the entire world of the critics and their obsession with Archimboldi contracts to the ultra dense point of the Swabian's twice told story featuring Archimboldi, or the choppy, cross cutting of narrative threads he uses to end sections like the Part about Fate, Bolaño, consciously or not, seems acutely aware of how emotional paragraphs can be made of unemotional sentences. And while in the past I might have explained his strange, unexpected metaphors as simply "the work of a poet in prose," it seems to me that these unexpected metaphors go a long way towards expressing the mood of entire paragraphs, even entire sections.
The Part about Thomas Bernhard
Recent online discourse about literature how been fixated on the presence of Thomas Bernhard in recently written fiction. Without going too much into detail, Bernhard's novels are often known for their monologue character in which an obsessive and vitriolic narrative obsesses over minor social details, people he hates, and his own short comings, usually artistic. These kinds of books often exchange descriptions of settings or expository background for a kind of close, almost stream of consciousness depiction of thought. Bernhard keeps things from flying off the rails, however, by having his narrators return to the same kinds of ideas, people, or events with a fugue like intensity, uncovering new things about them each time they return.
It struck me, while reading posts about the recent Bernhardian turn, that I could still detect the ghostly presence of Bolaño in these depictions of crazed and obsessed narrators. Speaking for myself, what I found so refereshing about Bolaño was that a story could just be a person talking. A story could just be the deathbed confession of a priest in By Night in Chile or a river of contradictory, hilarious voices in the middle of The Savage Detectives. It's a way of presenting a story like someone might tell you at a bar or on the street and it can still possess all the artificiality, all the magic screen shadows on a wall trickery, of actual literature, while presented as a single person talking. Later, when I found out that Bernhard's influence on Latin American literature was significant (see for instance Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya where the pissed off expat academic refers to San Salvador as a nation of business administrators, something I think grows truer of the United States with each passing day), it seemed practically obvious in retrospect. But where Thomas Bernhard found himself unable to suffer fools gladly, taking the monstrosities of civil society into critical view, it's my contention that Bolaño is interested in speaking through the voices of others. Having other characters talk is just as important as having himself talk, and while he might be indulging in mere ventriloquism, it's often highly important who is talking in Bolaño just as much as what they are saying.
Therefore, it's not so much important that his characters are "fully rounded" or "three-d" but that they are being heard at all and that there concerns and problems and voices be depicted as faithfully and as truthfully as possible. This is why so much of The Part about the Crimes is written in the language of the police report and that the name of the actual reporter who broke the story, Sergio González Rodríguez, appear as a character.
The Part about the Structure
2666, much more so than any other book I have read, largely succeeds on how much you value associative reading. The book's coherence depends on its open structure, upon the resonances and parallels between the sections, than between the standard coherence of plot resolution, or shit, even solving a mystery. When the random guy in The Part about Archimboldi confesses to throwing his wife off the Virgin Ravine and pretending like she got sick and died, can we read it as directly addressing the murders of the women in The Part about the Crimes? Is it important that both Archimboldi and Klaus (maybe?) have killed someone? How important is it that vampires have been threaded as a theme throughout the entire book, culminating in the possible appearance of fucking Count Dracula in Part 5? [Mostly likely the unnamed and mysterious SS officer in the whole Gothic castle interlude, although it could also be General Horsecock as well] I mean, I think the answer is Yes although its the kind of associative reading that avoids resolution. That's why many people find this book so frustrating but I, having been warped by too much PoMo literature reading, find immensely satisfying. It would be pretty gross to have Bolaño say, for instance, that it was fucking Count Dracula that caused the Holocaust or that the women who were murdered was the result of one Silence of the Lambs style serial killer. It's gross because 1) this allows the reader to avoid feeling culpable and can write off the evil as the Big Bad defeated by The Big Good and 2) it makes everything incredibly neat and tidy. The answer, while still perhaps being exasperating, is that society caused the women of Juarez to be killed. It's society that causes the deaths of being in the second and third world to matter less than those in the first. It's society that causes global commerce to facilitate the existence of maquiladoras and their inhuman working conditions. Off course, I'm not saying that all definitive endings are bad in some way, but it's like throughout this you can tell Bolaño wanted to avoid solving these issues definitively, and, instead, choosing to suggest resonances and weird connections. Like the Aztecs sacrificed people to keep the sun coming up, as the common interpretation goes. Are the women killed in Juarez the sacrifice to keep the engine of global commerce turning? I hope not, but that's one explanation. Is Dracula a manifestation of the very real presence of people who use others bodies for sustenance and fuel, as well as an expression of Victorian sexual repression? Yes, mostly likely. Is this what's happening with the Crimes in Part 4? Perhaps in some cases? It's like in drawing these resonances, Bolaño can avoid stating directly that the evil, the secret of the world, is the result of societal arrangement.
The Part about the Part about the Crimes
Still kind of blown away by this part. Its through this books organization, use of police reports, and its refusal to develop a lot of the true crime, noirish plots that are invoked, that it most closely approaches the kind of "oasis of horror in a desert of boredom" evoked by its Baudelaire epigraph. Its, as someone once described of a longform drone rock song, the ultimate staring contest. Do you look away, like much of first world society being depicted as doing, or do you keep looking. But, crucially, this section doesn't reward the reader dogged to piece together the clues of the crime scene reports with any definitive solution. Instead multiple solutions are proffered, ranging from the misogyny and machismo of Mexican culture to the cartels, snuff films, corrupt police institutions, and even Jeffrey fucking Epstein! Talk about a kind of big bad, Dracula figure. [Although it should be noted, Epstein was definitively not a Big Bad, metaphysical evil.] Quick thing about the Epstein appearance. In retelling the story of the first ever snuff film, a film which merely pretended to be a snuff film to account for its shitty construction and drive up interested rather than actually being a snuff film, Bolaño chooses to name the couple that made the film as the Epsteins. This was not the name of the people who actually made the first snuff film. Then, much later, when the congresswomen is telling the reporter, Sergio, the story of her friend Kelly's disappearance after working as a Eyes Wide Shut party organizer for the rich and the wealthy, Bolaño describes the figure Kelly works for as the banker Salazar Crespo, who's arrangements with the main government party in Mexico go "very very deep." Well, if you combine the name Epstein (used falsely as the name for the couple which made the first snuff film) and the description of Salazar Crespo as a wealthy banker with close ties to the main government party (not as far as I can tell a real name) than you get two facts that add up to the actual Jeffrey Epstein, who functioned as banker with close ties to government figures in America as well as a sex trafficker. Importantly, though, this appearance of Epstein is not presented as the ultimate solution to the killings, nor is it even really investigated at all. Bolaño merely gestures at these connections and leaves the whole thing open. This section really is a remarkable bit of parapolitical writing that manages to touch on the web of causes for the Juarez femicides without definitively settling one on. What is does settling one, however, are the emotions. The shock, horror, and boredom and the need to resistance the causal indifference and the shrug. Multiple characters throughout this section continue investigating, continue caring, and continuing staying invested, even though the task is impossible.
The Part about the Ending
As it is to be expected, the ending also doesn't really resolve anything, but in the appearance of Fürst Pückler, more known for his ice cream than his novels, the book seems to suggest that 1) it is the small things that someone may be remembered for more so than the big things and 2) the fate of every author is to be misremembered or misrepresented by history. That literature, despite how much we may value it and think about it and treat it as important, is dwarfed by the simple business of living and taking care of each other. If anything, we should be remembered for that rather than our attempts at greatness.
Post script: The End of Semblance
Realizing that it took until this read through to realize I had been misinterpreting my favorite part of the whole freakin book, Ansky's journal. See, I thought that Ansky's journal, and its preocupation with semblance and metaphor, celebrated the ability of things to be other things, of semblances to transform into their opposites, for Reiter to become Archimboldi through reading Ansky's journal. But that is not, it appears, to be the case. For Reiter, the only thing that isn't semblance is Ansky, who chose to ghostwrite Soviet science fiction novels for someone else, who choose to travel to the city at the age of 14, who chose a position of constant and romantic anarchy. The painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is also presented as the way out of semblance. Rather than being a painting that pretends to be something else, Arcimboldo uses everyday objects and arranges them in portraits, so that a lawyer may be made out of books or that a season in profile may be made out of animals. I for one think this is just as valid a representation strategy, just as valid a semblance, as any other one. So, I'm still wondering what Bolaño is saying about semblance here. There's something very PoMo hall of mirrors about it. If you're lost in a sea of signifiers, Bolaño seems to be saying, you can at least take the position of constant romantic anarchy, the doomed romantic anarchy of youth. To be honest, I'm not sure I agree! I think it's powerful that semblances can become real and that everything can be anything else through metaphor, through representation, through semblance. You can become what you behold which appears to happen to Archimboldi but I think he takes the opposite stance. Some things aren't semblances, like Ansky and his journal.
Widely hailed as the greatest book of the 21st century, so far. It's main themes revolve around societal degeneration during the 20th century and it serves as a sort of meta-analysis of the degeneration of literature. In that, if this is the greatest book written in the past 20 years, literature is fucked.
I should have listened to my gut and stopped after 100 pages rather than devoting two weeks of my life to the most overrated doorstopper I have ever bothered to read. On the bright side, I'll never have to read another one of Bolaño's awkward and revolting descriptions of sex since I'm done with him. The next person I see compare this to Moby Dick is going to get slapped.
I should have listened to my gut and stopped after 100 pages rather than devoting two weeks of my life to the most overrated doorstopper I have ever bothered to read. On the bright side, I'll never have to read another one of Bolaño's awkward and revolting descriptions of sex since I'm done with him. The next person I see compare this to Moby Dick is going to get slapped.
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
What a ride. Each of the five parts have a semblance of feeling - the lovers, the history, the murders, or the spiraling madness.. feeling bubbles to the surface but burst away so quickly it leaves you searching and waiting only to be cast aside for an odd belaboring of life.
There are moments in 2666 that really moved me but they were in the current of a littered post-modern flow that constantly pushed me away. Worth it to drown in it sometimes!
There are moments in 2666 that really moved me but they were in the current of a littered post-modern flow that constantly pushed me away. Worth it to drown in it sometimes!
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated