Books: March 2024
Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov
⭐⭐⭐ Time Shelter mostly uses a loose plot about a psychiatrist building hyper-real, decade-specific amusement parks to riff on memory: how some things can’t be forgotten, others get memory-holed, and how we seem obsessed with nostalgia.
Not sure how well it all works. The nostalgia bits are the most interesting to me. But the book was thin on that front. It also felt like the author was trying too hard to be clever and an editor somewhere worried that the reader wouldn’t get it – lots of allusion-based jokes followed by a sentence explaining the allusion.
Something about new books is that they all feel like they were written for a limited series TV show. This feels exactly like that. Cute world-building but it doesn’t go much of anywhere.
2666 — Roberto Bolaño
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ You can’t overstate how long this book is. It’s not just 1,200 pages; there are no chapters save for five sections and there are huge multi-page paragraphs. There were nights where I would turn the page, see three pages of unbroken text, and said forget it.
When you read books this long they invariably stick with you, like Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow or Moby Dick. There is a rhythm, a kind of trance you fall into. You end up reading them in many settings: in bed, while eating lunch, in Florida, waiting in my car. This one feels like it will stick with me.
The first three sections are good but the last two are very, very good. The part about the murders is eerie and dark and slowly builds momentum; I read somewhere that 110 murders are recounted. Klaus is terrifying. And then the last section draws a parallel between the horrors of the Holocaust and the murder of women in Santa Teresa without feeling heavy-handed. The end itself is very sweet: a mother who loves her son, who sees but doesn’t understand how much evil people are capable of.
Bolaño can write like no one else, with an ease and energy that is shocking. Not just the part about the murders, but to shift gears and write about Germany in the 1930s and Italy in the postwar period without breaking a sweat.
Not sure where I rank this relative to Savage Detectives – maybe it’s ahead.