It only seems appropriate that my offerings for this newborn first month all deal with botched attempts at adulthood. Let’s start with Daniel Clowes’s “The Death-Ray.” This comic book short story deals with Andy, a young man narrating the startling discovery of his own super powers. Located in and fashioned after the comic renaissance of the 60’s and 70’s (think early X-Men and Spiderman), the story takes on the classic hero’s awakening with an unblinking examination. The bright and campy artwork or the Brady Bunch fashion sense belies the stark destruction of Andy’s childhood. As puny high school kids, Andy and his lone buddy devise their own brand of justice, fueled by Andy’s super strength (summoned through nicotine, which reads like a middle finger to the spinach slugging Popeyes of yore) and his titular death-ray. Of course the ray makes death, but not with some bloodied vengeance. Instead, the death-ray erases its target from existence, a quick poof and you’re gone. The suddenness with which Andy’s heroics can make “bad guys” disappear fills his world with suffocating loneliness. Clowes’s tale takes down the hero, the clean sense of good and evil, and our own infirm life choices.

Next up is a flick, the Sundance darling Pariah. Writer and director Dee Rees’s film follows the crises of a closeted African-American lesbian, Alike (ah-lee-kay), struggling to graduate and get the hell out of her parents’ house. Alike’s gender identity is messy in a striking way. Around her friends, Alike lives how she sees fit, a lifestyle and swagger that can be poorly summed up as something like inner-city black butch. Wearing flat brim caps that hide her hair, baggy jeans, and an oversized shirt, Alike is decidedly masculine. Scenes of Alike discovering her own element, like flirting with women, taking in an all ladies strip club, dressing the part, are jammed alongside her increasingly tense home life. Amongst her family, Alike is daddy’s girl, mommy’s former princess, and the angsty older sister of the house. The heterosexual and religious expectations of this 21^st century black family crumble hard. Alike is their reality check and therefore their obvious pariah. But unlike the whitewashed oblivion of “The Death-Ray,” Alike’s castigation means real movement, not necessarily a sign of tolerance or progress, but, nonetheless, her road to adulthood.

I want to end on a so-called novel I am struggling to finish off: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 Émile, or On Education. Lauded from the get go, it’s now two hundred and fifty years later. What am I doing toying with a better-off-dusty philosophical masterwork? You see, Émile isn’t a novel at all. As the alternate title spells out, it is a treatise on teaching; more specifically, it is a book on raising a kid, emphasis on “a,” just one. Rousseau couldn’t be bothered with kids; in fact, he notoriously sent all of his mistress’s newborns off to orphanages. But perhaps as penance, he made Émile, a six hundred page tome that aims to keep kids free and happy, as close to nature and truth as possible. What does that entail? Certainly not reading six hundred pages of nonsense. Rousseau believes that a kid, well, mostly just a boy, his model student being an imaginary one named Émile, should learn within his means. Rousseau deems children unfit for reading, writing, mathematics, and the scholarly like. What they are fit for is exploring their surroundings, crawling over the countryside, sensory stuff, like breaking sticks and touching streams. If children are to become just and kind citizens, they need to get themselves first. Rousseau is so thorough, so assured, it’s easy to just shut up and take it. But with enough time away from Émile, you understand what a radical, yet outdated, argument is being made.

Today, the effort required to keep all the chaos of civilization at bay is incomprehensible. Children live in a world where the mature and immature are oozing out of every crack, every speaker, every monitor. This is not to blast Jean-Jacques; he knew what he was talking about. Now kids struggle to adjust to the demands of our constantly streaming world. Yep, the off button stopped working awhile ago. Everyone needs to navigate these cultural swamps. To make new maps that show the other humans where our own accounts, our own memories, art, and attempts can be found. At some point, all three works I spent the last month with did just that.

Learn more about the things Ryan reviewed:

Daniel Clowes’s “The Death-Ray”

Dee Rees’s Pariah

Rousseau’s Émile

The Belly Tract #1 is a post from: Pif Magazine

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I have become yet another baby bird on the power line that is Twitter. The whole chirping, squawking, whistling chatter of all this tweeting has seized me. I want a song to call my own, I want droves of beady little bird eyes rolling over my words for a moment. Just give me a slice of your impossible attention. Everyone will see how I have learned restraint, minimalism, compression. That’s me, all so small. I’ll pummel you in three words. The force of my never-before-seen hashtags alone will smash your cellphone all over the curb and leave you jonesing to get back online at any cost. You, stinking of teh net, desperate to read an update, watch a digit change, find one more tag. There’s insistence everywhere now, waves lapping and laughing over the fraud that was memory. A rhythm you can’t trace, no discernible patterns.  Even if you claim to recollect, nowhere to really jot down what you’re claiming. Sure you can try to type something down, but we angry young birds are gonna shit all over it. Our feeding, our cawing, this crisscross of birds grasping power lines, singing the songs of now-not-then; we’re gonna make you a fellow user.

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Now Poetry isn’t feeling so hot. Internet’s swig made everything hysterically powerful. The bartender’s pause, gruff stare, wipe down the counter routine: a riot. The middle-aged women pushing their men aside so they can send some darts deep into the pocked up wall: even funnier. Young people turning pool cues, menus, empties, anything they can get their hands on into play weapons and genitals.  All of it possessing a sexy sheen that Poetry swears it’s seen before, even written about at some point. But Poetry’s sticky sheen turns to a hot, smothering sweat in a snap. Face covered in that vibrating gossamer of sick, Poetry takes three dramatic, wobbly strides to the bathroom door, slides on its knees, and projectiles a chunky yet seamless corona around the toilet’s rim. Internet looms behind Poetry, holds the door to the stall open, spits on the ground and says, “We’re going back to my place.”

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I also have a blog. No, I’m not a fucking consistent poster. What do I look like? I have to expend far too much energy making sure everyone else is being productive online. This isn’t a creator’s game, this is micro management! Of course I rant! What good would a blog do me otherwise? I wait till I feel like I am completely current with everyone I care about online, until I can sense the dry spittle in their mouths and in mine, all of us waiting for that unseen next. Then I just rant rant rant, it only takes a few minutes of key punching and then I can start knocking on the doors; pinning notices around the village. Today I decree this! Tomorrow I decree that! My blog has a black background and white letters. I don’t link much and I don’t upload.  This is my pamphlet. If you want to read my blog, understand you are reading a non-blog. This is not my diary, I never needed that. When the Internet becomes a language of media: gifs, bmps, jpgs, flashes, javas, booms, then a blog like mine, all made up of words, is going to be priceless. Imagine what the dig site will look like. Imagine what this artifact, this scroll of words: “MY BLOG” will look like. A jumble of so many earnest and forgotten symbols, one letter after another forming words- no, sentences- that will shrink the eyes of any onlooker, will choke their throats, and turn healthy brain to rot.

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Internet manages to fluidly shoulder Poetry, pull the keys out of its pocket, open up the apartment, and plop its guest down on the couch. The swiftness is lost on Poetry, who is blathering out chunks of sounds and phrases. Possibly stuttering through some quip or maxim, eyes floating in and out of focus, until it lets out a burp that sounds like breaking metal. Poetry isn’t sure where it is or what it’s looking at. A blur of Internet appears to be rustling around in the corner. The walls are shifting on Poetry, perfectly neat squares momentarily pop up and get replaced. Puppies with vibrating fur yip and somersault and then vanish, kids fly on and off of skateboards, their knees and elbows budding with blood, which get pasted over by a chain reaction of women and men’s orgasms, face after face scrunched, puckered in forgettable joy. Poetry can’t bear the wall any longer, trains its eyes to the ground and notices that the floor is filled with mounds of pure stuff. Stacks of credit cards and money, bags of food, clothing, gadgets, trinkets, everything’s everything. All the piles toppling and rebuilding themselves, the floor constantly shifting. Poetry feels paralyzed, unsure of itself. It feebly cries for Internet, reaches out looking for a hand to pull it off the couch, to slap it sober. Internet grasps Poetry, lugs it upright, the two standing face to face, holding hands. Poetry glimpses something in Internet’s other hand, tries to say something about it. Internet grins and says, “Now we’re gonna have some fun, you and I.”

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I review your poetry on this website. Make it appear or disappear. And it’s the most daunting and ruthless part of working for Pif. Reading all these poems is like licking all the crumbs off of a plate, noticing more crumbs, and then licking the plate some more. A horrifying meal for an editor such as myself. See, there was a time when I thought poetry could be determined, classified, maybe even honored. It was called college and, for the most part, it had no resemblance to the Internet and its limitless poesy. Our incoming submissions list is constantly drenched by a poetry torrent, and we editors begrudgingly wade through it, unsure of ourselves, wary of all that could be lurking in such poetic depths. Anaconda-like sentences wrapping around line after line of a poem, eager to strangle flimsy editors.  Howls and moans of outrageous emotion, unending voices circling, closing in, until everything you read resembles a confessional, and you, you’re just another drunken priest of madness, the sole operator for purgatory’s phone booth. Rhyme, couplet, repetition, metonymy, they now mean nothing to me. It’s the Internet! Poetry is the scripture in the temple! Broken links scattered all over the altar, slideshows raging like stained glass windows, uploads of new poems bursting out of thin air, scorching your eyes and retreating to the pews. I review, reject, or accept Internet poems.

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Poetry realizes that Internet is holding a cord, a USB cord. Poetry recognizes the three letters due to the sheer popularity of the cord but that’s about all it knows. By the time it makes this faint identification, Internet has firmly grasped Poetry’s hand. Menace twitches all over Internet’s face like a web of hairline cracks. It strikes with the cord, plunging one of the rectangular ends of the USB deep into Poetry’s arm. Poetry, woozy from all the stimulation and booze, winces a little and then just stares deeply into Internet’s smile. Poetry’s lush red blood wets the USB cord, streams down the arm, drips across the manic floor. Internet, still holding fast to the cord, rips off its shirt with one hard yank. Internet’s chest is a dazzling texture of layers at varying heights, like miniature buildings or pistons. A chest made of tiny pins, crackling jacks, neon letters and numbers, raging fans spewing hot air, and surge after surge of electronic noises and pulses of light. Poetry’s arm is covered in blood. It leans closer to Internet and just drools all over the chest. The drool sizzles until puffs of smoke cloud out Poetry’s face, reeking of fried electricity. Internet makes one final motion, plugging the other end of the USB into the socket that serves as its left nipple. Instantaneously, two green dots streak through the thick cloud around Poetry’s head, its new eyes. The bleeding lets up. Poetry’s green dots intensify, piercing the cloud to pieces and revealing its new face. Rigid and sober, its head rotates around the room, absorbs all of the surroundings. Internet laughs, so Poetry laughs. Internet motions, so Poetry motions. And at once, a new word is spoken out of both mouths. Something unheard of, unrecognized until now. Poetry and Internet speaking- loudly, plainly.

Impressions of Poetry on the Internet is a post from: Pif Magazine

I’m in Powell’s Books, Portland, OR, a mecca of words, literal blocks of books, a reader’s haven.  People are abuzz with their personal treasures, their eyes flitting between tables of contents, synopses, quoted praise, and their friends’ reactions.  The future owners sure that once they’ve been revolutionized by the read, their peers will be clamoring to borrow it next.  I can feel myself becoming a snob, my hulkish alter ego: back and glasses straightening, squint intensifying, and my disdain for horror mysteries becoming unbearable.  I feel my face push through too many books, breezing all the way to fiction’s “L”, my discerning eye recognizing the praised, the canon. I glimpse their Penguin Classics sensibility, the font so regal, so spare.  I’m disgusted with myself.  The hulk fades, shoulders slump. I don’t want to be here, nor does my English Literature degree.  We’re embarrassed enough to spend our days confined to the secrecy of some used, Amazon bought texts that fly to us from some remote Texas hoarder.

I’ll just plainly admit it…I am out of touch with the literary culture.  Ever since I graduated university and hauled off to the northwest I feel like I haven’t had a clue.  The university system was a support network of name droppers, distancing techniques that let you bullshit till you were waist high in self-aggrandizing, and maybe worst of all, beaming professors who oozed when you stated the right reference, the right connection, the right quote or polemics. Toying with material they’d been teaching over and over again for years.  Now I’m unhinged, floating through a liberal public that wants reading to be a fashionable accessory without betraying its substance.

Yet, while I am full up with uncertainty, I know that it is ultimately up to me to account for what I witness in this elaborate coupling literature and culture have been up to in the northwest.  So here’s what I, your plaid engulfed oracles, sees. I see a silent sustained happy hour, people firmly holding both book and beer like unwitting victims of a Bud Light commercial.  They try to keep their eyes on the page but are too distracted wondering how other eyes find their own effort to keep said eyes on the page.  Welcome to twenty-first century hipster courtship.  I see charming small businesses: a Russian bookstore complete with lone old Russian clerk, egalitarian comic stores nodding at Gaiman, DnD, Magic the Gathering, Spiderman-Superman crossovers, R. Crumb, and Pekar all at once with that unparalleled nerdy fervor.  I see shelf makers, copy masters, binders, and librarians all muttering, “Well I’m still here, aren’t I?  See, they still need me”.  I see book metropolises. That is, I see Barnes and Noble. Bookstores rife with everything they think words have to offer.  I see their legions of nametag-necklace wearing personnel remarking on the wonder of being around books all day.  Their bestseller, book club, hot list shelves shifting like Wall Street’s ticker.  Their E-reader’s like digital omens whose sleekly rectangular screens proclaim the inevitability of a future where page flipping is just another special effect. Egad, enough of me already!

But I’ll tell you, what I see the most is a person and a book.  A knowing smirk on the reader’s face as the book whispers in their ear.  Maybe an intimate turn of the page. Someone savoring their own mental movement through the pages. I see literature, or simply, reading overall, as an exchange and a collaboration. Reader and work are realizing their cultural relevance simultaneously.  The marketplaces, the reviews and analysis, the water cooler chats, and even the classrooms cannot come close to duplicating those moments when a reader is pouring all their energy into what they are reading.  Although I often find the rituals and formalities, or better put, the money and the social status that lean on our stacks of books to be elaborately annoying distractions, no matter how you dress it up, the task is still to read and learn and then to read and learn some more.  If that’s what you’re doing, then thinking past the frills will just happen.

Literature, The Northwest, and Me is a post from: Pif Magazine

RG: So, what is the current status of the novel?

BE: I started writing this novel at the end of 2006 and I’m currently working on a fourth draft. The feedback on my third draft pointed to some fairly substantial gaps in the flow of the narrative, so this 4^th draft is about filling those gaps and rebalancing the novel as a whole.

RG: How would you characterize your work’s overall setting?

BE: The novel is set in 1980s South Africa, the last decade of apartheid. Resistance to apartheid was particularly fierce at this time and there were many violent uprisings in the townships and demonstrations amongst the student population. Conscription to the army was compulsory for all white men of school-leaving age and the South African Defence Force had a reputation for brutal treatment of conscripts in training (which then transferred into brutal military action). The only way to delay conscription was to keep on studying in higher education, which is what my protagonist does.

RG: What motivated you to tell this story?

BE: This feels like an important story to write.  For one thing, it offers a fresh angle on the apartheid story, through the eyes of a young orthodox Jew. But also, it looks at powerlessness in the face of a system you feel you can’t change and how young people turn to extreme solutions when they experience that impotence. Extreme religious practices are particularly attractive to a certain type of young person, and my protagonist, Eli, is someone who craves a sense of belonging and needs to be insulated from some of the more terrifying aspects of life.

RG: Would you elaborate on the development of your main character, Eli?

BE: At the start of the novel Eli Adler is living in dread of his army call-up. His friend Bernie has died during basic training and to make matters worse, Eli’s twin brother Gabriel (always his closest companion) has turned away from him.

Eli is a law student at Wits University in Johannesburg, and orthodox Jews are active on campus, trying to encourage assimilated students back into the fold.  Eli is initially skeptical but gradually, he’s drawn in.  The sense of belonging and the reassuringly clear parameters of Jewish Law go some way to filling the gap left by Bernie’s death and Gabriel’s departure.

Eli is now eager to prove his commitment to Judaism and rebuild a sense of family, so he rushes into marriage with the young, also newly-orthodox Ilana. But her family is secular and Eli becomes frustrated with what he sees as their complacency.

By now Eli has taken up a job as an articled clerk (which means he is still temporarily exempt from the army), but his growing obsession with intricate religious laws puts him on a collision course with others, both at work and at home.

RG: How does this particular excerpt fit in with the rest of the novel?

BE: This excerpt occurs two-thirds of the way through the novel. Eli has volunteered to spend a week in the remote semi-desert area called the Karoo, as part of a project that renovates neglected Jewish cemeteries. It’s a mitzvah, a good deed, to undertake such projects. While there, he witnesses the local cops meting out rough justice against a group of township kids who are accused of stealing chocolate from the local shop. This episode throws into relief Eli’s helplessness when faced with the big moral challenges of apartheid South Africa.

RG: Your excerpt takes place in the Karoo.  Can you give our readers a sense of that environment?

BE: The Karoo is an extraordinary region of South Africa. It’s a vast semi-desert area in the interior of the country with a beautiful, desolate landscape. The settlements are far apart, and tiny. In the first half of the 20^th century these small towns had a Jewish presence through peddlers and shopkeepers who served the local farmers. So you’ll find vestiges of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in the most far-flung of areas. It’s hard to imagine how tough it would’ve been for immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to adapt to this landscape. My own grandparents made that journey and my father grew up in a Karoo town called Aberdeen (a Scottish missionary would’ve had something to do with that name). I’ve always found these remnants of Jewish communities very evocative.

The Karoo

RG: What do you remember life to be like in South Africa during the novel’s time period?

BE: The novel is set in the 1980s, when resistance to apartheid was really gathering momentum. In 1985 the government declared a State of Emergency – thousands of people were detained without trial, political meetings were banned and curfews were imposed in the townships. At the time I lived in a student residence at Wits University (a prominent mixed-race university, and highly politicised) and I can remember arriving at breakfast to discover that fellow-students had been taken away by police during the night. Some of them had to face solitary confinement or torture, and they had no legal recourse.

While all of this was happening in the townships, life in the white suburbs was going on pretty much as normal and because the press coverage was so flimsy many people were largely unaware of the ferocity of the resistance – and the ferocity of the state response to it. As a student at Wits University, Eli is well aware of what’s going on, but his response to these circumstances is to take refuge in the rules of orthodoxy. During the course of the novel he clashes with others who deplore what they consider to be his head-in-the-sand approach.

RG: Your excerpt is very interested in relating language divides between people.  There seems to be a sort of binary between those who understand and those who don’t, or, the words shared between people but kept from others.  Would you elaborate?

BE: As you’d imagine, language was highly political in SA during the apartheid years. The two official languages were English and Afrikaans, but Afrikaans was the language of the ruling party. In this piece the cops don’t speak English, partly because their grasp of English is poor, but it’s also a way of saying, we are in charge and we are not going to make the effort to speak your language. Today there are eleven official languages in SA (nine African languages, plus English and Afrikaans)!

RG: You’ve made some conscious decisions about what words to translate from Afrikaans to English in your piece and which words to not.  Can you talk about the decision making behind your translations?

BE: In making decisions about translations, I was aiming for a balance: I wanted to leave some things untranslated, so that the reader experiences a sense of the characters’ frustration of being on the outside, but not so much so that it would make the piece unsatisfying to read.

There are some words in this piece that have entered English usage in SA, either because they describe something culturally specific (eg sjambok is a type of whip) or because they are evocative (eg boendoe, pronounced ‘boondoo’, is a local version of ‘boondocks’).

RG: I’m eager to get a better sense of what brought you to writing.  Will you detail that process?

BE: I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of six, but by my mid-thirties I was in a demanding full-time job, and I realised that if I was serious about writing I would have to make a change, so I quit my job and began working from home as a freelance business consultant. I used to commute for two hours a day and I told myself that I would spend at least that amount of daily time on writing. Things haven’t turned out quite as neatly as that, but I still try to maintain a regular writing routine, alongside my freelance work.

In 2006 I won an Asham Award for a short story entitled Under the Black Hat, which is published as part of a Bloomsbury anthology (Is This What You Want, Ed Kate Pullinger, Bloomsbury, 2006).  That was a really positive moment: firstly, it gave me much-needed encouragement; secondly, it was the first piece of writing I’d done on a Jewish theme and it triggered the idea for this novel. Before then it had never occurred to me that this could be a compelling subject for a novel.

RG: How would you characterize your own experiences growing up within Jewish South Africa?

BE: I was brought up within the orthodox Jewish community of SA, although my family were what we would call ‘traditional’ rather than strictly orthodox. We had a strong sense of cultural identification, we went to synagogue regularly and observed the Jewish festivals but unlike Eli, we weren’t strictly observant. In my teens, and again at university, I had periods where I immersed myself in Judaism and thought about taking a religious path – in fact, several of my close friends did exactly that. There’s much in Judaism that I find profound but ultimately the world of orthodoxy felt too circumscribed for me.

RG: Can you sketch out the historical context of the Jewish community in South Africa?

BE: The Jewish community in South Africa is made up mainly of Lithuanian Jews who went over during the late 19^th and early 20th centuries to escape persecution by the Tsars.  In many cases they arrived with nothing and the only opportunities open to them were those that the indigenous whites were not keen to take up. This is why they landed up in these godforsaken places. But on the whole, Jews in South Africa enjoyed the privileges associated with being white under apartheid. They enjoyed freedom to practice their religion and ultimately the community became very prosperous.

RG: What is the relationship like between the Afrikaners, the white majority, and Jews?

BE: The Afrikaners are the descendants of the Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17^th Century, and they regard themselves as the true pioneers of SA.  In the early 20^th century the Afrikaners became marginalised under British colonial rule but in 1948 the Afrikaner National Party came to power and the country came under their control.

There’s a really strange anomaly in the relationship between Afrikaners and Jews.

There was plenty of anti-Semitism amongst the Afrikaners and substantial support for the Nazis during World War Two. But the Afrikaner community had also developed this notion of being the Chosen People, as part of their national mythology. (They were deeply religious through the Dutch Reformed Church).  So there were many Afrikaners who identified with the ‘Israelites’ and who put Jews on a pedestal. As a Jew, one could never quite tell whether one would get a positive or negative reaction from an Afrikaner, and there are entertaining scenes in this novel where Eli encounters both types.

RG: Historically, was there a resistance to apartheid from South African Jews?

BE: The Jewish community had a paradoxical role in relation to the struggle against apartheid. On the one hand, Jewish religious leaders were reluctant to openly criticise the government because they feared a backlash. This was in contrast to other religious groups, who were much more vocal. On the other hand a disproportionately high number of white anti-apartheid activists were Jewish. These included figures such as Joe Slovo, Albie Sachs, Helen Suzman and so on. Incidentally, these high profile figures definitely served to fuel feelings of antisemitism amongst the Afrikaners.

RG: I’m very curious to hear your take on the transformations within South Africa over the last thirty years.  What have become some of the central issues in contemporary South Africa?

BE: South Africa now is in many ways unrecognisable from the country I grew up in. There’s a new generation of young black people who have themselves never experienced apartheid – it’s something they read about in history books. To me and other people of my generation, that’s extraordinary.

There were times when we couldn’t imagine that the transition out of apartheid could be peaceful. I was sitting in a conference in Johannesburg when Prime Minister FW de Klerk unexpectedly announced that the ANC was unbanned and Mandela would be released. There were many political activists in this auditorium, including people who had spent long periods incarcerated on Robben Island, and I will never forget the stunned expressions on their faces at that historic moment.

We were blessed at having leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu, who were able steer the country through a peaceful transition. Which is not to say, of course, that the country isn’t struggling with the legacy of apartheid. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done in education, health care, housing, transport and so on.

Perhaps the most pressing problem in SA is the high crime rate and the extreme violence of this crime. It doesn’t happen along racial lines – crime is targeted towards black and white alike. It’s endemic. I think it’s a legacy of the violence that people had to endure under apartheid (of which this excerpt shows a fairly small-scale example). And we’re dealing with a generation of people who missed out on education, and who can’t see a way to improve their lives other than through crime.

Right now SA represents an extraordinary mix of warmth and energy and forgiveness on the one hand, and endemic violence and corruption on the other. One has to hope that the former will win out. As the most economically developed country in Africa, SA’s success could of course drive political and economic improvements further up the continent.

RG: Any thoughts on the ongoing South African hosted World Cup?

BE: I won’t be in South Africa for the World Cup but everyone there says that it’s a wonderfully positive experience. It seems to have reignited a warmth and sense of unity in the country. That’s heartening, because visitor numbers were looking disappointing in the run-up and there were real question marks over organisation and safety.

RG: Finally, you are currently living in London.  What brought you to England and how would you describe living there?

BE: I’ve been living in London since 1992.  I came at the age of twenty-five for a gap year, but I immediately felt at home in London. Maybe it’s to do with my grandparents’ European heritage, or the colonial history of SA, but so much about England felt familiar and warm, and London is a great place to live. It has tremendous diversity and coming from SA the general atmosphere of tolerance is refreshing.

The diversity and quality of cultural activity here is dazzling. I can walk into an art gallery and see a famous masterpiece or I can turn up at the Royal Academy of Music and listen to world class musicians. All for free!  One has to have grown up on the tip of Africa, or at any rate, outside Europe, to appreciate fully what a privilege that is.

Brenda Eisenberg is a post from: Pif Magazine

This first move of the novel makes it clear that Archimboldi functions as an author within the author, shrouded in speculation and criticism; he is a nonentity, someone to be determined, chased but never grasped.  While reading, it is apparent that Bolaño’s novel champions cast over plot through its innumerable attempts to account for fictitious people and their realities.  The plot can only enhance the depth of this task.  It is not a work driven by completion or a functional brand of storytelling.  2666 is a dizzying experiment in simulating the interconnections of reality, and its attempt is marked by the overwhelming feeling that both the author and reader will fail, that while fiction will always be informed by a slew of experiences and people, it will never be able to truly grasp them.  Bolaño understands that life is constantly outpacing us, and he wants 2666 to be fictions acceptance of this concept.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

With these thoughts in mind, the dismantling of Archimboldi accelerates.  The academics that open the novel are exposed to their own sexual follies, their infighting, and misplaced desires.  Archimboldi becomes a quiet, coveted distraction amongst the much more gripping shame of people trying to lead actual, albeit created lives.  Bolaño’s emphasis on the play between human fallibility and the limits of a writer’s creations allows this novel to truly breathe, paralleling the feel of his earlier work, The Savage Detectives, in which a lengthy monologue abruptly ends and is replaced by a blur of fragmented and diverse accounts from so many shades of people.   2666 abandons the traditionally European intellectuals’ perspective, and grounds the work in several strains of Mexico for the majority of the rest of the novel.  This transition begins with the displaced life of a professor in Mexico, Amalfitano, a deliberate counterpoint to the snobbish Archimboldi experts, who is enlisted by the European intellectuals to aid them in their hunt for the reclusive writer.

Once again, the novel’s alleged focus, the discovery of the absent Archimboldi, is displaced.  The perspective of this Latin American professor emphasizes a social hierarchy in the academic world in which reputation and national identities trump the merits of the individual.  Amalfitano, as a displaced native of South America, recounts the hardships of military dictatorships and emigration that lead him to Mexico.  Bolaño uses this character to begin a lengthy demonstration of how reductive people can be when engaging with environments drastically different from their own.   Fleshing out the perspective of displaced or obscured Latin American people is particularly important to 2666 as it corresponds to Bolaño’s own movement in life.

Not only are careless judgments passed, but incessant, numbing violence becomes the novel’s essential force in depicting the lack of dialogue that persists between people bounded in by their unthinking apathy.  After delving further into the life of the Mexican professor and his far more Mexican acclimated daughter, the novel turns towards accounting for an atrocious series of murdered women in Santa Teresa, Mexico.  While the fear of the murders is alluded to throughout the novel, it becomes the centerpiece when a black American journalist, Fate, gets swept up in his own personal investigation into the extent of the crimes.  When this outsider, whose own judgments enhance the novel’s conflicting perspectives, tries to comprehend such a visceral tangle of brutality he quickly becomes dwarfed by its scale (a perverse nod to the inner working of 2666 itself) and must abandon his inquiry, fleeing both Mexico and the novel.

So begins a staggering series of vignettes in which Bolaño examines murder after murder in Santa Teresa.  Always studying it in its wake, often from the perspective of a variety of Mexican officers, the novel wades through such grisly depictions of dead women that they are eventually rendered to blurred piles of bodies, flimsy fictitious lives always already extinguished.  This is where Bolaño succeeds the most in his unique criticism of the limitations of fiction’s simulations of reality.  He rapidly establishes a format for accounting for inexplicable murders, and then perverts it.  At points the deaths seem like bare bones obituaries, other times the novel decides to fixate on a minor character for an uncomfortably long time.  This effort to shift between reduction and partial reality, such as examining a dead woman’s family, her job, the aftermath for her community, makes the tensions of the novel’s creative drives very prominent.   Any major premise of the novel seems to have been derailed while reading this portion; it is Bolaño’s decision to involve countless people that gives the novel its spiraling sense of being a botched conversation about actual life and death.

Only after wiping away any direct sense of plot and order via the three hundred page binge of violence and a widespread, Mexican-community driven hunt for guilt and vengeance does the novel return to its sole anchoring character, Archimboldi.  The reader is transported to the eastern front of Germany in World War II, in which a young version of the novel-long sought after writer is serving for a severely waning Germany.  After being carried away by such tremendous distancing techniques the novel can now return to its major character, a character who has yet to exist in the novel, whose only ever been discussed, with a wide enough perspective that the man seems utterly diminished, essentially a real and struggling individual.  Bolaño tracks the path Archimboldi takes from child to soldier to writer to anonymity with startling energy and brevity.  The sensation of the longwinded trial of facing countless imagined people has subsided.  What remains, as the novel shows you how its major character went about disappearing in the first place, is the lingering sense that one point of reality can never be pinned down.  Instead, the ripples outward to more people, societies, suffering, and stories reverberate off each other and create a chain of more ripples, a limitless project of imagination that at its best shows the need to expand fiction in order to come closer to resembling reality, an impossibly frustrating but essential condition of imagination.  By taking up this task, Bolaño’s 2666 is simply groundbreaking.

2666 is a post from: Pif Magazine