96 Percent Stupid
As it happens, prose-flatness is not atypical of Bolaño (whose story “Labyrinth” appears in this week’s issue of the magazine). He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer. You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence.
I refer this misguided soul to James Wood:
The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a sentence, from “By Night in Chile,” still his greatest work. The book is narrated by Father Urrutia, a dying priest and conservative literary critic, a member of Opus Dei, who comes to emblematize, by the novella’s end, the silent complicity of the Chilean literary establishment with the murderous Pinochet regime. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to report on the preservation of the churches there.
This is where Bolaño’s imagination suddenly expands into a magical diorama. Father Urrutia discovers that the chief threat to the churches comes from pigeon excrement, and that all over Europe churches have been using falcons to kill the pests. In Turin, Father Angelo has a fearsome falcon called Othello; in Strasbourg, Father Joseph has one named Xenophon; in Avignon, the murderous falcon is named Ta Gueule, and the narrator watches it in action:
“Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter.”
Much of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence . . .
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That “long dramatic sentence” doesn’t do much to interest me in Bolaño. There’s one good image–”lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery” (though “aorta” is clearly the better choice and Bolaño realizes it immediately after; what about the earth’s horizon suggests the planet’s thigh? What even is the thigh of the world? Aorta, OTOH, suggests the heart/breast of the world, which works)–buried in a slag heap of dithering, indecisive images: mixed metaphors of birds and arteries and abstract painters never quite meeting at a synthesizing intersection. His tendency to question himself (“like [blank]…or [blank]“) annoys me and saps the “drama” of the imagery, such as it is.
This is spray ‘n pray stylism. There’s not much art in spewing out a string of unconnected metaphors. The art is in distilling and connecting them–not too patly and not too literally.
But is this “flat” prose? As bad as Dostoevsky? No. At least Bolaño was trying. At least I can sense an energy and enthusiasm at work. Unfortunately–judging solely from this excerpt, which I assume you provided as representative of Bolaño’s best prose–I’m unimpressed.
Yeah, seriously, the guy at the New Yorker suffers from myopic reading.
This statement also disturbed me:
“The Third Reich” should join that shelf marked “For Completists Only,” on which also sit “Antwerp,” “Monsieur Pain,” “The Romantic Dogs,” “Between Parentheses,” and “The Skating Rink.”
Clearly an opinion that undermines the intelligence of readers.
Foolish.
What a terrible misreading of an author.
That has to be the worst, most misinformed, most misguided, most pompous thing I’ve read in The New Yorker–EVER. And that’s a saying a lot.
One of the few times I think I have yelled “Is this guy fucking serious?” out loud to myself as I was reading.
Yes, seriously, Bolaño is a bore. I wonder why New Directions began publishing his books–usually they publish good, artistic, prose-sensitive work. I usually agree with Scott’s tastes and author recommendations, but over and over again I cannot see why he keeps defending such a mediocre writer like Bolaño. Perhaps it’s just because of the New Directions imprint.
This sentence fails to grip; in fact I have trouble reading it, making sense of it; I had to go back several times, something I never have to do when I’m reading José Saramago, who writes longer lines, which flow more elegantly, and don’t really on ‘and’ so often; I think that’s a very cheap and easy way of making a sentence long.
And that’s not the only terribly ignorant thing said. There’s also the bit at the end, where he leaves 2666 out of the books that must be read by Bolano. Are you kidding me? That’s the first one I would put in! Warning them as if someone who really knows who Bolano is needs to be bloody warned to stay away from his masterpiece.
I won’t weigh in on this myself, since I have an obvious conflict of interest, but I couldn’t help pulling this quote from Adam Kirsch’s Slate review of 2666, which I think is pertinent–and brilliant.
“According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly. Only minor writers write beautifully, since they simply reflect back to us our preconceived notion of what beauty is; we have no problem understanding what they are up to, since we have seen it many times before. When a writer is truly original, his failure to be conventionally beautiful makes us see him, initially, as shapeless, awkward, or perverse. Only once we have learned how to read him do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great.”
Kirsch’s comment even turns Cormac McCarthy into an AWESOME WRITER!
I’ve sent that Kirsch quote to many people in my defense of Bolano, as I find it pretty goddamn apt.
Giles Harvey’s final suggestion to “Avoid ’2666′ for as long as possible, and for heaven’s sake, don’t start with it” couldn’t be more misguided (or silly).
It’s like telling a reader interested in Melville to start with ‘Benito Cereno’ because ‘Moby-Dick’ is too big, too ambitious, too perilous . . .
Thanks to Natasha for reviving the Kirsch quote, which strikes me as a reiteration of Harold Bloom’s strange/strong test for canonical literature (and of course, thanks also for all the great translations).
Uh, Leah, you sound like a moron. Why don’t you read By Night in Chile yourself instead of pronouncing like an idiot?
Leah, you also need to stop jacking off Nabokov and thinking everything has to be a discrete image. Writing is powered by context.
And, clearly, you’ve frequented Bolaño more than once.
Perhaps to the point of redundancy.