Gather all lines together. This opening line was held by many critics to allude to “Against The Day” being Thomas Pynchon’s swan song. There must have been a few red faces in academe when his publisher released the publication date for “Inherent Vice” last year. This pointless speculation is lampooned in 2666’s “The Part About The Critics” where literary scholars had been relentlessly predicting the drying up of the elusive Archimboldi’s output only to be continually undone by further publications.
This coincidence seems to reflect a further correspondence - Bolano’s novels with their multiple narratives and cuts & jumps between periods, places and cultures bear more than a passing resemblance to Pynchon. The narrative arc of both 2666 and “The Savage Detectives” echo “Gravity’s Rainbow” (although the same could probably be said of any book that begins and ends in, figuratively, the same place). Even the search for Archimboldi/Cesarea Tinajero via enormous diversions and digressions parallels the search for the rocket. However “Gravity’s Rainbow” is, in comparison, less concerned with sex and death.
This ultimately is what 2666 is all about - There’s a sense in which “2666” is an uninterrupted meditation on death. Woody Allen said the difference between sex and death was that at least with death if you were caught doing it on your own no one would laugh. Bolano’s epigraph for 2666 is less comic, a line from Baudelaire “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom” - Santa Teresa in the desert of Sonora? Or, for a man who saw chaos and violence just beneath the surface of the everyday, a metaphor for life - the cradle that rocks above the abyss?
This coincidence seems to reflect a further correspondence - Bolano’s novels with their multiple narratives and cuts & jumps between periods, places and cultures bear more than a passing resemblance to Pynchon. The narrative arc of both 2666 and “The Savage Detectives” echo “Gravity’s Rainbow” (although the same could probably be said of any book that begins and ends in, figuratively, the same place). Even the search for Archimboldi/Cesarea Tinajero via enormous diversions and digressions parallels the search for the rocket. However “Gravity’s Rainbow” is, in comparison, less concerned with sex and death.
This ultimately is what 2666 is all about - There’s a sense in which “2666” is an uninterrupted meditation on death. Woody Allen said the difference between sex and death was that at least with death if you were caught doing it on your own no one would laugh. Bolano’s epigraph for 2666 is less comic, a line from Baudelaire “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom” - Santa Teresa in the desert of Sonora? Or, for a man who saw chaos and violence just beneath the surface of the everyday, a metaphor for life - the cradle that rocks above the abyss?
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