The Rings of Saturn: Somerleyton Hall

The second part of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (translated by Michael Hulse) started like this:

It was on a grey, overcast day in August 1992 that I travelled down to the coast in one of the old diesel trains, grimed with oil and soot up to the windows, which ran from Norwich to Lowestoft at that time. The few passengers that there were sat in the half-light on the threadbare seats, all of them facing the engine as far away from each other as they could be, and so silent, that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives.

I don’t know but I find this very funny. The descriptions here ("grey, overcast day" and trains "grimed with oil and soot up to the windows") and the stripped details ("few passengers" ... "half-light" ... "threadbare seats" ... "so silent") are intense. The passengers seated "as far away from each other" as possible (why would they do that?) gives way to an exaggeration of the passengers' death-like state that "not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives." It’s not enough to suppose that not a word is uttered or exchanged in the whole of the train journey, but that the silence must be extended to the entirety of their lives!

Surprising turns of phrase were brought to bear upon the bare English landscape during the dog days of August. Passing through abandoned wind pumps and windmills and a skeletal landscape, Sebald eventually arrived at Somerleyton Hall. He was shocked to see no one, not a single soul was waiting for him in the station platform. Where'd they go?

Sebald proceeded to tell us about the history of the manor of Somerleyton estate which dates back to the middles ages. It changed owners several times, mainly through inheritance. The old mansion was described in extravagant details; its architecture was such that one could not tell "where the natural ended and the man-made began." The society pages of newspapers in 1850s were full of praise and admiration for the visual pleasures afforded by the place.

Sebald was contrasting the glorious appearance of the Somerleyton Hall of the old with the present wherein it was no longer maintained and practically abandoned. His description of a bygone era was very vivid, as if he was part of or had just entered the past and was giving witness of it.

Sebald's fine writing was a constant, yet certain passages gave surprise. Consider this "bygone paraphernalia" in Somerleyton Hall which struck our narrator's fancy:

A camphorwood chest which may once have accompanied a former occupant of the house on a tour of duty to Nigeria or Singapore now contains old croquet mallets and wooden balls, golf clubs, billiard cues and tennis racquets, most of them so small they might have been intended for children, or have shrunk in the course of the years.

Honey, I shrunk the sporting goods?! The reader wonders at this suggestion of a magical shrinkage. Not because it is insisted – it is not. But because the silly idea was entertained at all. What mechanism could have enabled this shrinking of objects? How the passage of time belittles everything?

Yes, the parade of quirky descriptions, handed down matter-of-fact, never ends:

However, on emerging into the open air again, I was saddened to see, in one of the otherwise deserted aviaries, a solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the edge of cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix.

And as if to prove the point, a still picture of this (demented) quail (in a hopeless fix, maybe) appeared on the facing page of the text...

In the grounds of Somerleyton, Sebald met William Hazel, a gardener who works in the mansion grounds. Upon learning of Sebald's German origin, Hazel spoke to him on how he developed an interest in the bombing of German cities during World War II. He constantly wondered about the destruction wrought on those cities by the aircraft bombers he saw passing through Somerleyton. One couldn’t help but to think of William Hazel as a stand-in for Sebald himself because the ideas he told Sebald were the same impassioned arguments the author gave in his lecture "Air War and Literature," collected in On the Natural History of Destruction. Hazel himself seemed to share Sebald’s thesis on the collective amnesia that descended upon the German literary establishment who was not able to publish something that dealt with the massive air strikes in their cities:

I [Hazel] have tried to find out everything I could that was in any way connected with the war in the air.... I even learnt German, after a fashion, so that I could read what the Germans themselves had said about the bombings and their lives in the ruined cities. To my astonishment, however, I soon found the search for such accounts invariably proved fruitless. No one at the time seemed to have written about their experiences or afterward recorded their memories. Even if you asked people directly, it was as if everything had been erased from their minds.

(This was the very thing decried by Sebald in his nonfiction and literary criticism and, indirectly, in fiction. In On the Natural History of Destruction, Sebald blasted the selective memory of Germans who suppressed in their minds the atrocities committed by the Allied bombers in the mid-1940s. This protest appeared to be confined only in Germany as the lack of writing on the subject was not absolute. The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard was able to give a moving account of the air bombing. Bernhard's eyewitness account was contained in one of the volumes of his outstanding memoirs collected in Gathering Evidence.)

From Somerleyton, Sebald came upon Lowestoft, a depressed area hard hit by economic crises. Once again we read some bleak description of the landscape and its run-down establishments, a bleakness animated only by Sebald’s black humor. I cannot, for example, forget the hilarious scene with the sorry fish Sebald ate for dinner.

As with Somerleyton, Sebald provided contrasting descriptions of Lowestoft as a lively tourist destination during its heyday and the ruined Lowestoft of the present that is slowly crumbling into oblivion. Sebald’s travel notes of August '92 undermined previous accounts of Lowestoft as a wealthy resort in the latter half of nineteenth century.

Sebald then shared anecdotes about Lowestoft told by his friend Frederick Farrar, a conversation that took place a few months before the latter died. As with the gardener William Hazel before, Sebald now yielded the narrative to Frederick Farrar whose reminiscences on Lowestoft closed this second ring of Sebald’s saturnine book. Sebald was very like a tourist of ruined landscapes giving voice to his own observations and to those other "tour guides" of the past he encountered along the way. The tour guides tell their own stories as witnesses of history, seemingly innocent narratives in which horrors of death and destruction couldn't resist to bubble to the surface.

Notwithstanding the horror, there is in this chapter a well-calibrated humor, a smile that is always on the brink of escaping and being laughed away. The parade of details went on and on, of observed quietness of the landscapes, of crumbling built structures, of a hallucinatory loneliness. The reader is frozen and helpless in an agony of mirth.


Image: Locating the propellers, NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, 2004

The Rings of Saturn: The anatomy lesson

In the opening chapter an unnamed narrator talked about a certain journey he undertook alone in Suffolk county in 1992. A year later he was admitted in a hospital for an unspecified reason, something like a mental breakdown or exhaustion, though later he mentioned undergoing a "surgery" in the hospital. The narrator only described his ailment as "a state of almost total immobility."

The narrator (let’s call him Sebald, from now on) began composing this book (The Rings of Saturn, translated by Michael Hulse) about his travels to Suffolk in his mind while in the hospital and set to write it a year after being discharged. Two things he felt in his travels: a sense of freedom and a paralysing horror. The latter from the "traces of destruction" he saw in the countryside.

Then he proceeded to recount how after coming out of the hospital two Oxford lecturers died one after another. One is Michael Parkinson (who was researching on Charles Ramuz) and Janine Dakyns (a specialist on Gustave Flaubert). They were both single and appeared to be close colleagues of Sebald.

Sebald then recalled his search for Thomas Browne’s skull which, according to an encyclopedia, was stored in the very same hospital where he was previously admitted. He was able to contact someone who knows the history of Browne (1605-1682) and his skull. We learned that Browne was a son of a silk merchant, studied in Oxford, attended several universities, and became a medical doctor. Sebald speculated on Browne’s possible presence in an "anatomy lesson" conducted in Amsterdam in 1632. In fact, Sebald speculated on the presence of three men in that lesson: Browne, Descartes, and Rembrandt.

The anatomy lesson was a public viewing of the dissection of a corpse of a criminal. The said event was depicted in a painting by Rembrandt to which Sebald gave a kind of extended art interpretation, contrasting Descartes’s view on the value of body and flesh with that of the painter Rembrandt’s.

Sebald’s description of the painting betrayed his sympathy for Aris Kindt, the criminal whose body was being dissected. Sebald thought of the anatomy lesson as an extension of the corporal punishment on earth of a man hanged just a moment before. He seemed to be giving something of a critique of the scientific enlightenment that the lesson was providing its onlookers. In any case, it was hard not to detect an aversion on the part of Sebald while viewing the painting as if he himself was present during the entire operation, watching the Guild of Surgeons surrounding the body on the table, each surgeon fixated on the "open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being."

It was likely that Sebald identified with the body prostrate on the table as he returned to his recollections of his time in the hospital after his own surgery. A contemplation of an aircraft and its trail of smoke bought him back to Browne and a consideration of his writing style. Sebald’s description of Browne’s prose and themes, a truly beautiful long passage, mirrored his own elegant prose fiction.

At this point until the end of the chapter Sebald shared the range of Browne's preoccupations from the structure of the quincunx present in Nature (with a capital N) to human fascination on the grotesque, bizarre, and fantastical beasts/monsters, whether real or imaginary. This was by no means a simple listing of themes, however. Sebald gave a prose-poetic riff on Browne’s philosophical ideas on nature, piling up details and images one after the other. As if tracing the structure of the quincunx himself. It was beautiful.

References to art (literature and painting) abound in the book. In Part I alone, we encounter the following:

Gregor Samsa – character in "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka

Charles Ramuz

Madame Bovary by Flaubert

angel in Dürer’s Melancholia

Thomas Browne; Urn Burial; The Garden of Cyprus containing the drawing of a quincunx; Pseudodoxia Epidemica dealing with real and imaginary beings; Hydriotaphia

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911 edition )

Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson - reproduced in the book

amateur anatomist Rene Descartes – allegedly present also in the anatomy lesson

Hippocrates and his notes on sleeplessness

Brehm’s Thierleben – "a popular nineteenth century zoological compendium"

Jorge Luis Borges’s Libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings)

6th book of Grimmelshausen’s narrative in which Simplicius Simplicissimus encounter an imaginary creature


Image: Saturn's auroras, NASA/Hubble/Z. Levay and J. Clarke, 2005

Arial vs. Century Gothic

Arial

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font on its e-mail system from Arial to Century Gothic. It says that while the change sounds minor, it will save money on ink when students print e-mails in the new font.


Century Gothic

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font on its e-mail system from Arial to Century Gothic. It says that while the change sounds minor, it will save money on ink when students print e-mails in the new font.


from: Wis. college says new e-mail font will save money

via: The Constant Conversation

Marías Fever

One of the novels that divide my attention these days, mostly for group readings, is Fever and Spear, the first of three volumes of Your Face Tomorrow by the Spanish writer Javier Marías. I was only too happy to start this big read (1200 pages in all, though right now I own only the first 2 volumes). When The Conversational Reading announced a group read, I found the perfect excuse to finally embark on another Marían experience.

This will be my fourth book of Marías, after All Souls and its "false sequel" Dark Back of Time and the charming biographies in Written Lives. I was happy to learn that the first two books were "prequels" to Your Face Tomorrow. That will give me enough context to the reading of this tome. A friend said that another book, A Heart So White, contains a subtle thread of connection to these books. These novels then can be said to form a tetralogy (let's provisionally call this Deza Tetralogy, after the protagonist).

1333 + 1333 ≠ 2666

I’m rereading 2666 and Nazi Literature in the Americas by the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. Both are part of group reads: 2666 is ongoing over at bolanobolano.com while discussion of Nazi Literature by Bolaño Shelfari group starts on April 1. I'm still catching up with the 2666 group read. Still making progress (I think) though I'm left behind in the middle of "The Part About Fate." Here's a rather long rambling post of my thoughts so far.

Rereading a book by Bolaño is, to use his words, like going back to the scene of the crime. Like entering the yellow tape-obstructed door and looking for possible clues that the early detectives may have overlooked. His books can be tagged as crime and detective novels. They are usually about a search for a mysterious artist or a killer or a poet, or a combination of any of them. He uses various styles to make this search a complex examination of human natures. I think his success in this genre is due in part to reader participation encouraged in the books. I don’t mean to say that Bolaño solicits participation. The act of reading itself is participation. But his books involve the reader into the narrative in such a way that the reader is part of the detection. The momentum of narratives and the cross-references practically implicate the reader to a more active role. The reader is left to ponder, trying to put two and two together. Hidden mysteries sustain him. The clues in the novel are misplaced and the elements of a crime (motive, means, and opportunity) and its unfolding (interview, investigation, and resolution) are not ticked off one by one. Sometimes, the case is embedded in the numbers. Numbers betray the novelistic design. As noted before, an alternative interpretation to the numeric title "2666" (apart from it being a futuristic/apocalyptic year) is as the summation of two sets of pages of a history book, each of which totals 1,333 pages. The metaphor came from Nazi Literature in the Americas wherein one of the encyclopedia entries on "Harry Sibelius" (1949-2014), under the section "Magicians, Mercenaries, and Miserable Creatures," makes reference to Sibelius’s 1,333-page novel titled The True Son of Job, "darkly mirroring" the book Hitler’s Europe by the (real) historian Arnold J. Toynbee.

... the British professor’s [Toynbee’s] aim is to testify against crime and ignominy, lest we forget. The Virginian novelist [Sibelius] seems to believe that "somewhere in time and space" the crime in question has definitively triumphed, so he proceeds to catalogue it.

It appears that the books by Sibelius and Toynbee share only structural similarities. The True Son of Job also seems to be a book wholly unlike 2666. As with most imagined titles described in the playful entries of this encyclopedia of Nazi literature in the Americas, Sibelius's book can be considered a joke, being a pastiche of stories borrowing characters from several books (by Hemingway, Faulkner, Walt Disney’s Bambi, Gone With the Wind, etc.). One can even say that the book in question, made up of hundreds of stories not following any principle or overall vision, is the complete opposite of Bolaño's novel, its parody. Curiously, in its original Spanish the novel 2666 ran to around 1,126 pages. Had he lived to edit and finish the book to his liking, Bolaño probably would have written more pages to stretch it to 1,333. Nah, I'm just stretching this idea. But anyway, the idea of a pseudo-history book with 1,333 pages (following the structure of another book) could be correlated to Liz Norton's dream in "The Part About the Critics" which borrowed Borges's image of two mirrors. I believe this dream offers a central perspective to the book, not least because there is a counterpart of double mirrors to "reality" (that is, the two mirrors exist in Norton’s hotel room). Here is the entire dream sequence:

In Norton's dream she saw herself reflected in both mirrors. From the front in one and from the back in the other. Her body was slightly aslant. It was impossible to say for sure whether she was about to move forward or backward. The light in the room was dim and uncertain, like the light of an English dusk. No lamp was lit. Her image in the mirrors was dressed to go out, in a tailored gray suit and, oddly, since Norton hardly ever wore such things, a little gray hat that brought to mind the fashion pages of the fifties. She was probably wearing black pumps, although they weren't visible. The stillness of her body, something reminiscent of inertia and also of defenselessness, made her wonder, nevertheless, what she was waiting for to leave, what signal she was waiting for before she stepped out of the field between the watching mirrors and opened the door and disappeared. Had she heard a noise in the hall? Had someone passing by tried to open her door? A confused hotel guest? A worker, someone sent up by reception, a chambermaid? And yet the silence was total, and there was a certain calm about it, the calm of long early-evening silences. All at once Norton realized that the woman reflected in the mirror wasn't her. She felt afraid and curious, and she didn't move, watching the figure in the mirror even more carefully, if possible. Objectively, she said to herself, she looks just like me and there's no reason why I should think otherwise. She's me. But then she looked at the woman's neck: a vein, swollen as if to bursting, ran down from her ear and vanished at the shoulder blade. A vein that didn't seem real, that seemed drawn on. Then Norton thought: I have to get out of here. And she scanned the room, trying to pinpoint the exact spot where the woman was, but it was impossible to see her. In order for her to be reflected in both mirrors, she said to herself, she must be just between the little entryway and the room. But she couldn't see her. When she watched her in the mirrors she noticed a change. The woman's head was turning almost imperceptibly. I'm being reflected in the mirrors too, Norton said to herself. And if she keeps moving, in the end we'll see each other. Each of us will see the other's face. Norton clenched her fists and waited. The woman in the mirror clenched her fists too, as if she were making a superhuman effort. The light coming into the room was ashen. Norton had the impression that outside, in the streets, a fire was raging. She began to sweat. She lowered her head and closed her eyes. When she looked in the mirrors again, the woman's swollen vein had grown and her profile was beginning to appear. I have to escape, she thought. She also thought: where are Jean-Claude and Manuel? She thought about Morini. All she saw was an empty wheelchair and behind it an enormous, impenetrable forest, so dark green it was almost black, which it took her a while to recognize as Hyde Park. When she opened her eyes, the gaze of the woman in the mirror and her own gaze intersected at some indeterminate point in the room. The woman's eyes were just like her eyes. The cheekbones, the lips, the forehead, the nose. Norton started to cry in sorrow or fear, or thought she was crying. She's just like me, she said to herself, but she's dead. The woman smiled tentatively and then, almost without transition, a grimace of fear twisted her face. Startled, Norton looked behind her, but there was no one there, just the wall. The woman smiled at her again. This time the smile grew not out of a grimace but out of a look of despair. And then the woman smiled at her again and her face became anxious, then blank, then nervous, then resigned, and then all the expressions of madness passed over it and after each she always smiled. Meanwhile, Norton, regaining her composure, had taken out a small notebook and was rapidly taking notes about everything as it happened, as if her fate or her share of happiness on earth depended on it, and this went on until she woke up.

The nightmare's "minor effects" are plenty here: the dim light, the gray suit and hat, the dead woman reflected in the mirror who was distinct from Norton, the reflected woman’s swollen vein (which grows), the woman’s head turning, the clenched fists, an empty wheelchair, the dark forest of Hyde Park, the woman’s gaze, her smile and twisted grimace and expressions of madness. The images are all deployed from the perspective of reflection, in the two mirrors. Many interpretations are put forward as to the dream’s meaning and in fact all of these interpretations are plausible. Because it can be argued that the (literary) language of dreams can be interpreted in any number of ways, in the same way that two mirrors facing each other reflects each other infinitely. This dream among many other dreams in the book can hold a clue to the book’s title as a 2,666-page history book and to the books "reflective" design. It is arguably the creepiest and certainly the longest dream described from among the three critics dreaming their own dreams at the same time. The interesting part for me is the mention of Norton’s note-taking at the end of the dream, just before she woke up. This can correspond to the cataloging of crimes and evil deeds as a valid (ethical) response of an artist when confronted by horrors. The dead woman reflected in the mirror (who looks like Norton but was not her) could be standing for the murdered women of Sta. Teresa, Mexico. The swollen vein and the grimace and gestures of madness evoke the horrors of distress, torture, and suffering. The woman turning her neck is quite scary enough; I couldn’t help but think of The Exorcist! Norton’s response to the dream, to take notes furiously, reflects that role of a writer (a novelist or a journalist) to catalogue everything and to write and describe the cold facts around her, to make a written report of it if only to bear witness to the terrible crimes (its naked truth, brutality, and horror), if not to try to understand them. So while Norton is oblivious to the crimes happening around her, she is haunted by this dream of a dead woman reflected in the mirror. The litany of deaths is cataloged in "The Part About the Crimes" and the novelist’s unflinching response to what is happening around her defines the role of the novelist in the face of evil. The ethical dimension of the persistence of poetry after the triumph of evil had been argued before, in Adorno’s dictum, and rejected in several ways by uncompromising and sublime writers such as W. G. Sebald. The moral position of these writers is absorbed in the lambent quality of their works. And so the inevitable question. Does Bolaño have a moral position? A writer puts forward his position through the objective clinical treatment of undeniable hard facts, through exposing the crimes and retrieving it from the censorship of horrible and heinous things. Unspeakable rapes and murders are spoken. Bodies are counted. Injuries are described dispassionately. Irony heightened to accompany the violence. The fragmented truth held to the light. The brutal scalpel of fiction serving as an instrument to the autopsy of victims. A victim’s body after body paraded if only to remind us, constantly and unforgiving, over and over and over, that sick things happen and they are the doings of our fellow human beings. And thus, the image in the mirror and its reflection. The historical novel and its reference, the history book that is full of dark momentous events. The historical book and its negative twin book, both of which when taken together constitute a book of a certain number of pages. The restless waking life reflected in a restless nightmare. In the labyrinth of reflecting mirrors there is clearly a double-layer of double-meaning: a double-image, a double-reflection in the metaphors of twinning and twin mirrors, images of images. Nightmares could be cries from hell, nightmares could literally take place in hell, Borges said in his lecture on nightmares. In his last interview, when asked of his description of hell, Bolaño said that it is "like Ciudad Juárez, our curse and mirror, a disturbing reflection of our frustrations, and our infamous interpretation of liberty and of our desires." And so to illustrate the reflection of reality in nightmares, of images in mirror, of hell in the void (a gaping black hole capturing all the light, essentially the image of the negative), 2666 (like Nazi Literature, Distant Star, and the other books) is riddled with references to mirrors and reflections, twins and image negatives. Thus, the glass shards in Amalfitano's neighbor's fence reflecting each other's light. And then the metaphor of a "negative image" early in the book when the critics speculated on the identity of the Swabian (a cultural promoter) who claims to have seen Benno von Archimboldi (the missing novelist):

According to Morini, the Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed photograph that keeps looming larger, becoming more powerful, more oppressive, without ever losing its link to the negative (which undergoes the reverse process, gradually altered by time and fate), the two images somehow still the same ...

Another clue is perhaps left by the novelist in "The Part About Amalfitano," where a reference to another year can be stretched by our reading. The following passage comes from a book that Amalfitano was reading, "scarcely one hundred pages long, [written] by a certain Lonko Kilapán, published in Santiago de Chile in 1978." The title of the book is O'Higgins Is Araucanian: 17 Proofs, Taken from the Secret History of Araucania.

Kilapán wrote: "Killenkusi was a Machi priestess. Her daughter Kinturay had to choose between succeeding her or becoming a spy; she chose the latter and her love for the Irishman; this opportunity afforded her the hope of having a child who, like Lautaro and mixed-race Alejo, would be raised among the Spaniards, and like them might one day lead the hosts of those who wished to push the conquistadors back beyond the Maule River, because Admapu law prohibited the Araucanians from fighting outside of Yekmonchi. Her hope was realized and in the spring of the year 1777, in the place called Palpal, an Araucanian woman endured the pain of childbirth in a standing position because tradition decreed that a strong child could not be born of a weak mother. The son arrived and became the Liberator of Chile."

The year 1777 is of course just incidental. Or not? It is convenient that Bolaño allow Amalfitano to choose this book of Kilapán's, gaining a correspondence to the book's title. The childbirth could have happened at some other year, of all years. The historian could have recorded some other innocent year. The probabilities are interesting. Trebling the 7 is not so different as trebling the 6 in the novel’s title and also the halving of the 6's and thus the trebled 3 in the number of pages of a "fake" history book in Nazi Literature. The politics of history is never more fleshed out than in this book by Kilapán which Amalfitano thinks was published as a propaganda material by a dictatorship regime. Note also that a child mentioned in the book was named Lautaro, sharing the name of Bolaño's son, to whom, along with Bolaño's daughter, the novel 2666 is dedicated. Note also that the year 1777 was an extended form of the number in the subtitle, "17 Proofs." Bolaño's deadpan tone with respect to describing the book's contents relegates this book O'Higgins Is Araucanian to something like a joke, so much so that one could excerpt the entire passage of Amalfitano's "literary criticism" to be included as an additional entry to the Nazi Literature encyclopedia. But it turns out to be a real book. An unusual history book dealing with myths, magic, telepathy and racial issues. Can this be tied up to the intellectual responsibility of writers and the political regimes’ manipulation of literature to serve their totalitarian purpose, etc.? Maybe. Some useful background and great discussion of the Araucanian book can be found here.

We also find in an entry in the novel Nazi Literature a reference to another year, in a description of a book of poems called The Destiny of Pizzaro Street (second edition) by Andrés Cepeda Cepeda, aka The Page:

What does The Page propose [in his book of poems]? To what is he committed? A return to the Iron Age, which for him coincides roughly with the life and times of Pizzaro. Inter-racial conflict in Peru (although when he says Peru, and this is perhaps more important than his theory of racial struggle, to which he devotes no more than a couplet, he is also excluding Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador). The ensuing conflict between Peru and Argentina (including Uruguay and Paraguay), which he dubs "the combat of Castor and Pollux." The uncertain victory. The possible defeat of both sides, which he prophesies for the thirty-third year of the third millennium. In the final three lines, he alludes laboriously to the birth of a blond child in the ruins of a sepulchral Lima.

The year referred to is the year 2033, no three-peat in the digits but only in the way the year was described (33rd year of the 3rd millennium). It is possible this is just another incidental year in a book filled with hypothetical years. But it is hard not to compare this with the event in 1777 since in both years, a birth of a child was prophesied, a child who furthermore may (or will) play an important role in history.

There is certainly reference to the year 2033. In the novella Amulet one finds something from among a string of years "remembered" by the hallucinating imagination of Auxilio Lacouture: "For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033." That is hardly helpful, and one thinks that the thirty-third year of the current millennium is just a random, arbitrary year, in the same way that 2666 or 1777 is arbitrary. Not unless if, in search of lost time, we think hard of Proust's works on memory and things past. (Thus in Amulet, the meaning may not be stretched and we just go to the default interpretation of a futuristic, prophetic year 2033, without succumbing to any apocalyptic tendency. The years in Auxilio’s mind are still instructive in that we are treated to some privileged prophecies regarding the fate of literature and books: "Vladimir Mayakovsky shall come back into fashion around the year 2150. James Joyce shall be reincarnated as a Chinese boy in the year 2124. Thomas Mann shall become [an] Ecuadorian pharmacist in the year 2101" and this bold takes on the future state of letters goes on for a few more pages, with writers being reincarnated or rediscovered or falling into oblivion.)

This fixation on mirrors and numbers belies the fragmentation of 2666. The fragmentation arises from scattered images and characters, found objects and readymades. The books (real, imaginary, or something in between), can make detectives out of readers. But readers are consigned to not solve the case, to not find all the answers to the questions. Why are we still reading? Or as Czesław Miłosz asked more explicitly, what is poetry that does not save nations or people? Beats me, I imagine Amalfitano answering and then shrugging his shoulders. And then the professor might have relented and given his answer, in the way he described what he saw in the City of Sta. Teresa, "images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments."

As if his fate or his life on earth depended on it, Bolaño made a dash to finish his posthumous book. What he came up with are fragments, fragments that will not save nations or people. Pages and clues that do not give a puzzle-fit solution. Fake (fictional) books that mirror the horrible century. A whole unequal to the sum of its discrete parts. For it could be greater. For the reckoning could always be delayed. Say, 2667. Or the pages lengthened by an afterword.