As you may perhaps grasp by reading the title, things didn’t go so well with me and Bolano’s 2666. I mean, I got to like 200+ pages, but I just couldn’t take it anymore. We went into a long section with a guy who was apparently a bit crazy. It was frankly rather dull. It’s boring because there is no cause and effect, and thus no plot movement forward or back. Nothing rational goes on, so there’s nothing to pay attention to – no line to latch on to and follow. And you just don’t care. He goes here, he goes there, he does slightly weird things, he hears voices, he feels sleepy, you get the gist. This is perhaps a true reflection of life for the mentally ill, but it’s also a true reflection of how to write a very boring book.
More though than it being dull – because I’ve ploughed through dull bits of books before, and it’s often been totally worth it for what’s coming – I found the entire tone of the book rather depressing. There seemed to be a general idea that life was crazy, and sad, and that no one was ever going to get anywhere – the critics, in the first section, with their love affairs and hunt for Archimboldi, and then the second section with the crazy guy. So I figured my crazy and sad life was too short for all that.
So onto THE LOST DOG by Michelle de Krester. This tells the story of a man who loses his dog. He is in the middle of some kind of half hearted love affair, and we cut back and forth between the love affair and the hunt for the dog. This is one literary-ass book. It is so literature I kind of want to barf a bit. It was full of images. There they are buying like whatever, noodles or something, and the noodle seller has . . . exquisite hands. Oh yes. Oh god. Part way through I just had to stop and read the author bio and the back flap, and what do you know, she is a professor of English Lit. Barforama. But other than that it was okay. And don’t worry I’m still also on Trollope’s DR THORNE. More on this later.