I am reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, and I love it! It is fantastic! Thank you to Becky for furnishing this wonderful novel to me! The first section of the book is narrated, diary style by Juan Garcia, a visceral realist–a new member. He wanders Mexico City like a ghost, romancing the ladies. Dropped out of school and ran away from home. About 140 pages in… the novel changes and all of the characters we have met tell their sides of the story. Month by month and now its 2 years later. However, so far, Juan Garcia is gone, not mentioned at all. I purposefully never read any of the criticism over the past few years about this book because I wanted to form my own opinion. And I love it. I will share….
“I’d obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).”
This is Joaquin Font’s inexplicable rant about average vs. desperate readers. Keep in mind that this man is in a mental institution…
“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read literature of desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Miserables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitable he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly-as if wrapped in swaddling cloths, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives-he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don’t mean that once someone has become a cool-headed reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs, doesn’t’ pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don’t exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damian, and so they didn’t listen.”
Wooh, sorry. I wanted to quote the whole passage because it’s interesting to me. It reminds me of the Dostoevsky argument of Original versus Ordinary. I don’t necessarily agree with the desperate reader thing, but it’s cool. I really recommend this book to all.
I finally finished a book. It was only 751 pages long though!!! I only recommend it 1) if you want to read all of William T. Vollmann (which may take a while) or 2) if you want to read about WWII way in depth starring characters that may or may not have existed (at least in relation to each other 3) if you love Shostakovich or want to listen to his music with a fictional guide to his life. (I know I really want to listen to Opus 110. I can’t say I really enjoyed this book, but I don’t think it was meant to be enjoyable at all. It was kind of horrible… but here are some passages anyway….
A disheartening article on the age of digital reading. (Blogging–I feel as though I have a hand in the fire), but honestly. Maybe I’ll learn this in library school, but can’t you guilt or manipulate a teenager into reading? If I were responsible for a teenager, they would be reading something other than blogs, text messages, etc. And it’s not just about test scores and reading comprehension… it’s about empathy, culture, vocabulary and personal experience. It’s about fusing our lives with fictional lives and stepping outside of ourselves. This is not the end of the discussion, I’m sure.
What I want to read soon in my lifetime: All of the summaries are from Amazon.com
We got out of the subway at Broadway and Lafayette. I wanted to find this french fry place called Pomme Frites that sells just french frys with different sauces. We walked around to find 2nd ave. not too far away and all of a sudden there was the french fry place. Walked back up 2nd ave and turned left. trying to get “up” the map to the prince/spring/crosby area to go to Housing Works. Walked in a “huge messed up semi-circle” for a long time and finally found it. It was closed because they were shooting a movie there. Found St. Mark’s Bookstore instead and it was way fancy and expensive. Kept walking “up” the map to the right and where to we end up? Back outside of Pomme Frites on 2nd ave. Now explain to me how we got back there, right?
