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Mysterious_Attempt22 t1_j60deps wrote

Are you reading this in English? I think it's legitimately better in Spanish.

Bolaño builds terror through menace, that is what the book is thematically about.

Evil, terror, menace, and violence that swirl and congeal, and as soon as you look at those things and try to examine them, they dissipate. But, the inability to measure or understand the menace, the evil, the conspiracy, the blind but morbid workings of society, in no sense means that it is somehow not real or dangerous.

Rather it is like being in a dark room, trying to find the monster, knowing one is there, and watching him occasionally do his thing in very dim glimpses. Also, this is somewhat a test of your sanity, as is the case with "Tercer Reich".

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ThatCommanderShepard OP t1_j60fyv1 wrote

To be honest it could be the translation. I’ve read a lot about how that can effect readings (Kundera writes a lot about this) and often in 2023 us english speakers are pretty blessed with quality translations. But Bolaño does sort of come off as unbearably dry and I wonder if that’s not got something to do with his style being washed out in translation.

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Mysterious_Attempt22 t1_j60j0ij wrote

>I don’t think I’m a slouch in reading books that can drag, lesser Joseph Heller novels, Murakamis 1Q84 are books that I have deeply enjoyed, but every time I pick up 2666 my brain begs me to put it back down. Clocking in at 1000 pages the book is purportedly about a mysterious serial killer in Mexico and a meditation on the nature of evil but if in my 300 pages of reading I’ve come across that I’d be hard pressed to tell you how.

Well the dryness may actually be the translation. I found him detached but not dry, not as if I were reading a history book, more almost hmmm, like a legend or something, glimpsed from old newspaper lines, a clouded view into something that leaves out as much as it takes in.

I think this perspective is most obvious when you get to the part with the Hungarian Fascist guy. To me, this was the lynchpin of the book. That despite the debonair and suave exterior that someone like your professors have, there is a rage and brutality that lurks within them, that makes them not unlike the very suave Hungarian fascist, who also has his own concealed rage. They have that thirst in them, even when they hide it. It is this kind of person who is somehow coddled and nurtured by the world, until he or she can come forth and make that rage bloom in some kind of act.

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