You know how people say that you don’t really understand complex somethings until you can parse those somethings down into things any dummy can grasp? That’s how I feel about a novelist who can put big ideas into a good story. Philosophy is one thing, but philosophy placed in a physical world, with no dialectics and no arguments but just so – and then given life through characters – is quite another.
Tag Archives: philosophy
Roberto Bolaño: 2666
It’s a verbal labyrinth; it’s a zoetrope of rape and murder and prison violence; it’s a deep sea fish that crawls, impossibly, through the Sonora desert; it’s a world in which the Virgin winks and the whores are cross-eyed.
2666 · Roberto Bolaño · 2004
Natasha Wimmer translation · Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 · 893 pages, hardcover
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There is no summary for this book. 2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s final opus, published posthumously one year after his death in 2003. Its five parts are incongruous but have a tip-of-the-tongue commonality that sucks them toward one point: Santa Teresa, Sonora, Mexico. Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño’s literary executor, writes in an addendum to the FSG edition that the novel’s title references a passage from one of Bolaño’s previous novels, Amulet, which he had published five years before 2666:
Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or in 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
And 2666 really is a cemetery of sorts and one that inters all the creepiness of something crawling beneath the eyelid of its many corpses.
Fugue state
Steppenwolf is two parts opera, one part philosophy and one part dreamstate, all of it laced with cocaine and limned in neon – oh, and balanced on the four hands of Vishnu. It’s a bit of a trip.
Steppenwolf · Hermann Hesse · 1927
Basil Creighton translation · Picador, 2015 · 218 pages, paperback
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Harry Haller barely makes out the invitation carefully etched into the church door: Magic Theater. Entrance not for everybody. For Madmen only! He’d love to go inside! His mind is filled with torments, with a dissonance that clashes more violently as he tries to wend through it and sort out exactly who he is and what he thinks. Poor Harry, he turns up only despair and the pathetic simplification of the Steppenwolf: Man and Beast. It’s a Faustian dichotomy of his soul that gives him no peace. Though he’s yet to learn it, Harry wants nothing more than to rend his soul from his body and mind, and briefly – oh, very briefly because he’s so in fear of it – he thinks of suicide.
And all of this (but particularly death) is with an aim at immortality. True to Hermann Hesse’s own dabbling in Eastern mythology, his Steppenwolf Harry Haller, in thirsting for immortality, is actually scavenging for reincarnation. And true to classic German literature, Steppenwolf the novel is heavy on philosophy. But this is no treatise (despite the inclusion of one given to Harry by a man clearly from this elusive Magic Theater).
Political theater, poetic farce
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow begins as a novel that had a good shot at feeding the intellect but instead contorted itself into a soap opera complete with convenient fixes for its weaknesses.
Snow · Orhan Pamuk · 2002
Maureen Freely translation · Vintage, 2005 · 463 pages, paperback
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A political coup that manipulates the theater to confuse and gain power? A string of suicides inspired by Turkey’s uncertain position on the East-West divide? An exiled poet who just might find enlightenment in the forsaken streets of his home town? Pamuk’s writing in Snow (originally published in Turkey as Kar) is too placid for the story he wanted to tell. We read the few moments of heightened drama in this novel in a detached way, as if we’re too tired to keep our eyes open and our brains can’t hold onto the words we’re reading: we just don’t care. Continue reading
Killing time
Sharpened rays of sunlight and four trigger pulls, how to live when life and death are interchangeable?
The Stranger · Albert Camus · 1946
Matthew Ward translation · Vintage, 1989 · 123 pages, paperback
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Albert Camus was a proponent of the idea that life becomes absurd once a man learns he is living only, one day, to die. Whether any one of us came into being in the first place is a chance occurrence that alters any other life on only a very insular level. And when we do die…well, we won’t be here to remember the things we did.
And we know this and yet we live this short little march with our full attentions. This is what Camus said was absurd. The Stranger is a slim book that puts Camus’ ideas in the clearest terms.
The Masthead 