Saturday, January 17, 2009

ALL POETS ARE THIEVES!!!

Hello there, Easterners, Westerners, Northerners, and Lucky Southerners:

Hope Renaissance's latest post warmed you and you aver with its mighty, temperate (not tempest) logic. Good going, good Sir!

I am writing this entry from approximately twelve miles from the U.S.-Mexican border. It's warm here, high seventies today with a strong, hard-focused sun, and I purposely deferred my Friday entry. Why? I needed to finish Roberto Bolano's magisterial, 893 page novel, 2666. It's mammoth and it's incomplete (but reads like a durable totality of meaning, images, narratives, and mysteries). The five sections migrate across history and the globe but its most frequent contact point/landing base is the fictional Santa Teresa, based on the nonfictional Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican border town. To finish it here was imperative, a way of putting its context and illustriousness in contact with my own place of temporary residence.

A few pithy remarks:

1. The novel is one of the most siginificant of the past one hundred years.

2. Bolano has transcended geographies and psychogeographies, borders and bridges, the discreteness of sharp lines around destinies or peoples, and is truly globalizing in the least nefarious connotation of that term.

3. Bolano is reminiscent of Balzac, Dickens too (and I add the latter because this novel has "cojones" and what is a Balzac without the Dickens? Also, sexual entendres abound in the novel so I'm merely forwarding the gesture).

4. I am angry, so angry and sad, that Roberto Bolano died on July, 13, 2003 at the age of fifty when he was supposed to live until ninety-seven with seventeen more novels to be written.

5. The novel is incomplete! No ending, no end. What's the point? It was not intentional, the author died after all, but the incompleteness makes sense. Is not life without conclusion?
Should it? Should this post? I don't know; I just trust the ................................ J/C