This morning I finished Roberto Bolaño’s epic 2666. Rather than offer up yet another review to the cluttered æther, I instead offer two quotations from the novel which explain why I loved Bolaño’s imperfect swan song.

The first quotation speaks to the writer in me:

[I]t was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.

The second speaks to the reader in me:

One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Leaving aside the fact that “A Simple Heart” and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

If, ultimately, the clarity of the afterimage of a previously unknown world is how we decide what constitutes a great novel, 2666 leaves one as crystal clear as it is haunting.

I’m convinced the hardest thing a writer does (besides writing) is disconnecting himself from his words.

As William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings.” 

Lest we forget the words of Victor Hugo:

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.

I love writing . . . nothing beats your story taking an unexpected turn before your eyes, a character appearing out of the blue.

I don’t understand writing fiction from an outline. Where’s the surprise, the compulsion to discover? It all sounds so, well, academic.

After a solid week’s work on the new manuscript, I feel like Liverpool today following their 0 – 1 victory over Chelsea (where the boys in red ended the boys in blue’s 86-game unbeaten home league record): hitting my stride.

Unlike Liverpool, however, I’m not sure where I’m headed.

As Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville wrote:

In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end.

Like Liverpool, a successful end also happens to be the most rewarding.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

At a Litquake tribute to Tobias Wolff, writer Stephen Elliott described a link between fiction writing and political bent: “Literary fiction is character driven, and to write good characters you have to have empathy, and if you have empathy, you’re a liberal.”

What utter horseshit.

I’m appalled that we allow ignorant thugs to run our lives (and, for once, I’m not talking about politicians):

Plans for the British publication of a controversial novel about a young wife of the Prophet Mohammed have been postponed following a firebomb attack at the publisher’s London office.

I understand publisher Martin Rynja’s trepidation and I can’t blame him. But at what point do we stop allowing thugs to win? What a pathetic politically-correct world . . .

I’d never heard of sentence diagramming, thank God, until I moved to the States. And, somehow, I managed to squeak through sixth grade, junior high, and high school in the US without diagramming sentences (though I do seem to recall a brief, frightening moment as a freshman at Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, but that entire East Texas ten-month experience was so skull-fracturing horrific that most of my memories can’t be trusted because I’ve either scrubbed them or altered them so I can sleep at night).

Kitty Burns Florey’s Slate article, “Diagramming Sarah,” reminded me of this unjust sentence inflicted on US youth every school year. I can honestly say that if I’d been forced to diagram sentences I’d be neither a writer nor a reader. Nothing would’ve killed this kid’s passion for the magic of language and stories faster.

No wonder Tori kant read . . .