2666

by Roberto Bolaño

“If you look them closely in the face, after a moment you realize they’re mad. But they aren’t shut up in a madhouse.

The most important kinds of feldspar, for your information, are orthoclase, albite, and labradorite. But the kind I like best is obsidian. Well, back to the pyramids. At the top is the sacrificial stone. Can you guess what it’s made of?”

you. This stone bed where the victims were laid was transparent! It was a sacrificial stone chosen and polished in such a way that it was transparent. And the Aztecs inside the pyramid watched the sacrifice as if from within, because as you’ll have guessed, the light from above that illuminated the bowels of the pyramids came from an opening just beneath the sacrificial stone, so that at first the light was black or gray, a dim light in which only the inscrutable silhouettes of the Aztecs inside the pyramids could be seen, but then, as the blood of the new victim spread across the skylight of transparent obsidian, the light turned red and black, a very bright red and a very bright black, and then not only were the silhouettes of the Aztecs visible but also their features, features transfigured by the red and black light, as if the light had the power to personalize each man or woman,

that can last a long time, that exists outside time, or in some other time, ruled by other laws.

And above them in the sky there was always an eclipse,”

Reiter risked his life at least three times, the first during an attack on a brick fortification on the outskirts of Kirovske,

The second time he almost died

In the grove Reiter spotted a figure in the undergrowth and stopped. It was the statue of a Greek goddess, or so he believed. Her hair was gathered up and she was tall, her expression impassive.

The third time he almost died was weeks later, during the attack on Sevastopol.

Then he went looking all over the house for something to use as a bandage and that was how he found the papers of Boris Abramovich Ansky and the hiding place behind the hearth.

The rescued, thought Reiter, and the rescuer. The survivor and the victim. The one who flees when night falls and the one who stays and surrenders.

Boris Abramovich Ansky was born in 1909, in Kostekino, in the same house that Reiter the soldier now occupied.

At that moment, which hardly lasted a second, Ansky decided that he didn’t want to be a soldier, but at the very same moment the officer handed him a paper and told him to sign. Now he was a soldier.

Ultimately, thought Ansky, the revolution would abolish death.

because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

“The Train Through the Urals”

But everything grows old, and the formula of the bright future plus the hero who helps to bring about that bright future plus the boy (or the girl) who in the future (which in Ivanov’s stories was the present) enjoys the fruits of the whole cornucopia of Communist inventiveness also grew old.

They think they’re suns, setting everything ablaze, but they aren’t suns, they’re just plunging meteors and in the end no one pays them any heed. They spread humiliation, not conflagration. And ultimately it’s always they who are humiliated, truly humiliated, bludgeoned and spat upon, execrated and maimed, thoroughly humiliated, taught a lesson, humiliated utterly.

Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which struck him as notable and memorable and distinguished and drove him to seek out more books by Döblin, finding in the Moscow Library The Three Leaps of Wang-lun (1915), Wadzek’s Battle with the Steam Engine (1918), Wallenstein (1920), and Mountains, Seas, and Giants (1924).

If Stendhal, as it is said, danced when he read Balzac’s critique of The Charterhouse of Parma, Ivanov spilled countless tears of joy upon receiving Gorky’s letter.

And he also writes: our eyes met. Fucking a snake.

It’s in Ansky’s notebook, long before he sees a painting by the man, that Reiter first reads about the Italian painter Arcimboldo, Giuseppe or Joseph or Josepho or Josephus Arcimboldo or Arcimboldi or Arcimboldus (1527–1593).

The Return from the Conference,

The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine

Behind every answer lies a question, Ansky remembers the peasants of Kostekino say. Behind every indisputable answer lies an even more complex question.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Romanian soldiers, stragglers playing dice

“So what’s that?” asked a German, motioning toward the crucified man.

Finally I got to Cologne and it struck me that everything that could possibly happen to me had already happened and it was pointless to let myself be hunted by Sammer’s filthy ghost.

my strides, a giant’s strides, echoed in my sister’s head.

although perhaps that was an overstatement, since the quality of Mason & Cooper’s leather coats was and would continue to be beyond reproach, if not in the detail then in the mood,

Reiter finished his first novel. He called it Lüdicke

As far as I’m concerned, you understand, purity and will are utter tripe. Thanks to purity and will we’ve all, every one of us, hear me you, become cowards and thugs, which in the end are one and the same. Now we sob and moan and say we didn’t know! we had no idea! it was the Nazis! we never would have done such a thing! We know how to whimper. We know how to drum up sympathy. We don’t care whether we’re mocked so long as they pity us and forgive us. There’ll be plenty of time for us to embark on a long holiday of forgetting. Do you understand me?”

In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know. So what? I might spend a night drinking with a killer, and as the two of us watch the sun come up, perhaps we’ll burst into song or hum some Beethoven. So what? The killer might weep on my shoulder. Naturally. Being a killer isn’t easy, as you and I well know. It isn’t easy at all. It requires purity and will, will and purity. Crystalline purity and steel-hard will. And I myself might even weep on the killer’s shoulder and whisper sweet words to him, words like ‘brother,’ ‘friend,’ ‘comrade in misfortune.’ At this moment the killer is good, because he’s intrinsically good, and I’m an idiot, because I’m intrinsically an idiot, and we’re both sentimental, because our culture tends inexorably toward sentimentality. But when the performance is over and I’m alone, the killer will open the window of my room and come tiptoeing in like a nurse and slit my throat, bleed me dry.

I was a writer, but my indolent, voracious brain gnawed at my own entrails. Vulture of my Prometheus self or Prometheus of my vulture self,

But what she’s seen is only the outside. The shell of literature. A semblance,”

“Our good craftsman writes. He’s absorbed in what takes shape well or badly on the page. His wife, though he doesn’t know it, is watching him. It really is he who’s writing. But if his wife had X-ray vision she would see that instead of being present at an exercise of literary creation, she’s witnessing a session of hypnosis. There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing.

How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty. There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing.

There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

Every work that isn’t a masterpiece is, in a sense, a part of a vast camouflage.

Every book that isn’t a masterpiece is cannon fodder, a slogging foot soldier, a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece.

Most writers are deluded or playing. Perhaps delusion and play are the same thing, two sides of the same coin.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

One might also say: we’re theater, we’re music. By the same token, few are the writers who give up. We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. S...

See you at the Nobel. We’ll go down in history. We have the gratitude of the German people. A heroic battle remembered for generations to come. An immortal love. A name inscribed in marble. The time of the Muses. Even a phrase as seemingly innocent as echoes of Greek prose is all play and delusion.

“Play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers. Also: the promise of their future happiness. A forest that grows at a vertiginous rate, a forest no one can fence in, not even the academies, in fact, the academies make sure it flourishes unhindered, as do boosters and universities (breeding grounds for the shameless) and government institutions and patrons and cultural associations and declaimers of poetry—all aid the forest to grow and hide what must be hidden, all aid the forest to reproduce what must be reproduced, since the process is inevitable, though no one ever sees what exactly is being reproduced, what is being tamely mirrored back.

“In a word: experience is best. I won’t say you can’t get experience by hanging around libraries, but libraries are second to experience. Experience is the mother of science, it is often said. When I was young and I still thought I would make a career in the world of letters, I met a great writer. A great writer who had probably written a single masterpiece, although in my judgment everything he had written was a masterpiece.

history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

my memories are written in letters of fire and they’re my only capital,

One might say the Dnieper was the protagonist and the other rivers were the chorus.