[I've been reading Roberto Bolaños' 2666, the future of pan-global fiction within a geography devoid of border towns and customs requirements--an epic, sprawling novel which features long, meticulous sentences, one flash-dynamo of a sentence after the other (and you wonder, how is language possible in translation; isn't everything a false repetition, a reflection of something misplaced? Is language possible when uttered at our backs?), all of which shape paragraphs populated with characters, no, lives, named after some distant European principality, or such is the impression--Archimboldi and Morini are some examples--lives, rich, full lives of beings residing in places as wide-ranging as Leipzig and Turin, beings, like most others, in pursuit of women and themselves because this the hunger of the sudden world, a world refused once disease overtook the author, a Chilean expatriate who, in wanting to secure a future of his family, planned to see his final novel, his final examination of all that is proper and human, published in the five, distinct chapters that now make up 2666, until his literary executors saw fit to do otherwise, and we are given this presence to consume in a single block, a single, undulating mass that needles and underscores, and for this the author is forgiven, he is forgiven because he was not to know, he could not ever have known, that I was unable to stop reading and turning, even after fourteen pages in, no, twenty, sixty, one-hundred pages in, despite my being hungry, despite my being tired after a session of work in Lower Manhattan, though lately these days I have been feeling something closer to dread, because the words that most closely approximate tiredness and hunger are not words at all, but are, instead, screens through which I confess, forgive me, Father, I sin and remain--]
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