> Chilean author
> Story takes place in Europe, 1990s and in Mexico during the maquilladoro murders of women
> Four academics (Pelletier (France), Morini (Italy), Espinoza (Spain), and Norton(England) are obsessed with a German writer, Archimboldi.....the four are all professors of German Literature.....then P & E fall in love with N.....gets complicated
> Archimboldi is reclusive, hasn't been seen by anyone in many years
> Hans Reiter becomes Archimboldi on a whim, while renting a typewriter
> Baroness von Zumpe turns out to be former employer
> Quotes I like:
- p.41...."In fact they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid."...Pelletier & Espinoza on the phone
- p.41..."...no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they'd been together they'd have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might no last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), .....".
- p.57...."Like the bachelor who suddenly grows old, or like the bachelor who, when he returns from a trip at light speed, finds the other bachelors grown old or turned into pillars of salt. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of machines celibataires crossing an amniotic sea each day, on Alitalia, eating spaghetti al pomodoro and drinking Chianti or grappa, their eyes half closed, positive that the paradise of retires isn't in Italy, bachelors flying to the hectic airports of Africa or America, burial ground of elephants. The great cemeteries at light speed......Spots on the wall and spots on the skin...". ...........Pelletier thinking about aging
- p. 90..."Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God, making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us."
- p. 117..."Exile .......I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate."
- p.120..."In Europe, intellectuals work for publishing houses or for the papers or their wives support them or their parents are well-off and give them a monthly allowance or they're laborers or criminals and they make an honest living from their jobs. In Mexico, and this might be true across Latin America, except in Argentina, intellectuals work for the state."
- p.189...".....when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn't exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn't exist or hadn't yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn't traveled."
- p.209..."There is no friendship.....there is no love, there is no epic, there is no lyric poetry that isn't the gurgle or chuckle of egoists, the murmur of cheats, the babble of traitors, the burble of social climbers, the warble of faggots."
- p. 227..."What a sad paradox....Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
- p. 228..."Life is demand and supply or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing int the garbage pit of the void........supply + demand + magic...
- p. 254.."Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life preserver."
- p. 255..."Useless things are forced upon us, and it isn't because they improve our quality of life, but because they're the fashion or markers of class, and fashionable people and high-class people require admiration and worship."
- p. 256..."Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach."
- p. 283...""Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?"
- p. 302..."Or what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending."
- p.579..."Haas looks much thinner, his neck long like a turkey';s, though not just any turkey but a singing turkey or a turkey about to break into song, not just sing, but break into song, a piercing song, a grating song, a song of shattered glass, but of glass bearing a strong resemblance to crystal, that is, to purity, to self-abnegation, to a total lack of deceitfulness."
- p.605..."All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them."......???
- p. 640..."Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because he moved across the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor."
- p. 651..."....a long stay in a military hospital drove people to become satanists....".
- p. 680.."...wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.".
- p. 685..."...if one cast a dispassionate glance over the great deeds of history....that a hero should be transformed into a monster or the worst sort of villain or that he should unintentionally succumb to invisibility, in the same way that a villain or an ordinary person or a good-hearted mediocrity should become, with the passage of the centuries, a beacon of wisdom, a magnetic beacon capable of casting a spell over millions of human beings, without having done anything to justify such adoration, in fact without even having aspired to it or desired it.......". (i.e. Jesus Christ)
- p.785..."Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers."
- p.786..."The person who really writes the minor work is a secret writer who accepts only the dictates of a masterpiece."
- p. 786..."Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions."
- p. 787..."....all works from the pen of a minor writer, can be nothing but plagiarism of some masterpiece."
- p. 788..."What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read!"
- p. 790..."Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it."
- p. 794..."...it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that 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."
- p. 800..."...he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi's only wish was never to inhabit either."
- p. 831..."When these stars cast their light, we didn't exist, life on Earth didn't exist, even Earth didn't exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It's the past, we're surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can't do anything to stop it."
- If two people hold differing opinions of a work of art in any form, who is right?
- Pelletier & Espinoza beat up the taxi driver......interesting parallel drawn by author between the feeling after having sex, and after acting violently
- Bolano is incredibly worldly and draws in references from mythology to American movies like "Psycho".....Definitely makes the case that he is writing about humanity, not just one ethnic group
- "...the whole world is a coincidence..."
- repeated references to labyrinths....much as this novel seems to be labyrinthine....
- the meaning of "chincuales"......fleas that bite.....the people who squirm from the bites...people who squirm in general.....adventurers of the mind who cannot keep still mentally.....
- Character names "Fate"...
- the advent of multiplex cinemas has made the "sense of vertigo before the movie begins" disappear
- ventriloquists' dummies reach a certain level of performance and then come to life.....metaphor?
- Identities are surprises over time
- When looking at the stars we are gazing at the past
- coprophagy: feeding on dung, as certain beetles
- interregnum: an interval of time between the close of a sovereign's reign and the accession of his or her normal or legitimate successor.
- orography: the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains
- sacraphobia: fear of that which is sacred
- gephyrophobia: fear of crossing bridges
- peccatophobia: fear of committing sins
- cliniphobia: fear of beds
- tricophobia: fear of hair
- verbophobia: fear of words
- vestophobia: fear of clothes
- iatrophobia: fear of doctors
- gynophobia: fear of women
- ombrophobia: fear of rain
- thalassophobia: fear of the sea
- anthophobia: fear of flowers
- dendrophobia: fear of trees
- optophobia: fear of opening the eyes
- pedophobia: fear of children
- ballistophobia: fear of bullets
- tropophobia: fear of making changes or moving
- agyrophobia: fear of streets or crossing the street
- chromophobia: fear of certain colors
- nyctophobia: fear of night
- ergophobia: fear of work
- decidophobia: fear of making decisions
- anthrophobia: fear of people
- astrophobia: fear of certain meteorological events
- pantophobia: fear of everything
- phobophobia: fear of fear itself
- helicoidal: coiled or curving like a spiral
- simurgh: monstrous bird, rational and ancient, in Persian mythology
Who is Benno von Archimboldi? Why are the Santa Teresa murders unsolved? Why are German literature professors from England, Spain, Italy, and France obsessively hunting for Archimboldi? Is Klaus Haas really guilty? What the heck is the meaning of the title? Three of these five questions will be answered clearly, one vaguely, and one not at all. Are you intrigued? You must be in order to read the whole novel!
Themes included: Identity, the meaning of writing, and the inexplicable web of connections which tie us together in this life we live
I will leave you with this quote....."...wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance."
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