2666 Week One - The Map

I took the locations gathered by Sara for the 2666 group read and threw them into a Google Map.

The Map

From the Google Map you  can "Save to My Maps" and always have the latest version available to you whenever you load up Google Maps.

This'll probably added to bolanobolano.com shortly, but I was proud of my work so I wanted to post it here first!

2666 Week One

I've turned in my list of character annotations to Matt Bucher, so you should expect to see those sometime soon at bolanobolano.com. [edit: here it is!] In the meantime, my Characters & References document has been greatly updated to include the new content for the group read.  Warning: the document lists characters beyond the first 50 pages in this first week of the group read.

2666 Preview - The Selected Works of Archimboldi

While the 2666 group-read doesn't start until January 25th, I've got some minor items that I've been working on. You can think of it as a sneak preview of what's going to be published on Monday morning.
I was thinking a lot about the titles of Archimboldi's novels - if there was any significance to their titles at all or if they were just fun-sounding names.

D'Arsonval - possibly a reference to Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval, who was a French physicist. The D'Arsonval phenomenon is commonly referred to as the Tesla Current ("An alternating current having a frequency of 10 kilohertz or greater produces no muscular contractions and does not affect the sensory nerves"). Remember that this is the first Archimboldi that Pelletier reads and is also the first that he translates from German to French. We'll discuss this more next week...


Saint Thomas - Thomas the Apostle was known mostly for disbelieving in Jesus's resurrection (John 20:28). The phrase "doubting Thomas" finds its origins in Saint Thomas. It is Morini that translates this work - I wonder if there's any significance?

Lethaea - Lethaea - From Wikipedia:

"a mythological character briefly mentioned in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Due to her vanity, she was turned to stone at Ida by the gods. Her lover Olenus wished to share in the blame, and so shared her fate. The story is used a metaphor for how stunned Orpheus was after a failed attempt to bring back his wife from the underworld. It was as if he too were turned to stone."

Again, this work is linked to Morini through a paper he authored on "on the various guises of conscience and guilt in Lethaea, on the surface an erotic novel..." The paper also uses Bitzius as a primary reference.

Bifurcaria, Bifurcata - Some science-y stuff here - Bifurcaria is a source of unique diterpenoids which may prove pharmaceutically beneficial. In one preliminary study, an extract of Bifurcaria bifurcata halted the proliferation of cancer cells. This work of Archimboldi was also translated by Morini, who has multiple sclerosis. So maybe there's a link between this stuff that might offer some kind of cancer relief and the one character that's confined to a wheelchair? Also, Bifurcaria, Bifurcata makes me think of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! mostly for the sound and the shape of the words.

Bitzius - Probably a reference to Albert Bitzius, who wrote under the pen name Jeremias Gotthelf. All we know of Bitzius is that it's a short novel, less than 100 words. More of a novella, really. This one is tied to Morini again, but I don't see a clear connection within the context of 2666.

More coming on Monday - stay tuned!

My Copy of Hear The Wind Sing Arrived!

 My copy of Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing arrived from Japan today!  I knew it would be smaller than a traditional trade paperback, but I guess I hadn't thought about it too much because I was really surprised when I saw it.

Since I had it delivered directly to my desk at work, I had some questions regarding this strange package from Japan!  Everybody seemed pretty let down when I told them that it was just a book. But who cares!  I'm thrilled!

This is the Alfred Birnbaum translation, published by Kodansha English Library.  You can find Birnbaum's translation of Pinball, 1973 here [PDF].  Incidentally, Pinball is being republished as well.  Probably the best place to get it is eBay.

So here's Hear the Wind Sing next to my copy of A Wild Sheep Chase just to illustrate the size difference.  Sheep Chase looks like a hard-cover next to the little Japanese book.

It turns out that there's a dust cover on the book!  I wasn't expecting that.

Translation notes at the end of the book

Spine shot.  This is definitely going to stick out on my bookshelf.

New Stephen Dixon Short Story at Matchbook

Stephen Dixon, author of I. (among others) has a new (very) short story on Matchbook today called "Wife In Reverse".
As the story indicates, the story is told in reverse-chronological order.  It begins with a death  and sadness and as it progresses it gets less bleak and then there is joy and finally ending with hope.  The story is 441 words.  That's it.  And it's totally perfect.
But there's one thing that I'm kind of focused on that I don't really understand.  The Wife appears very dignified throughout the story.  She's the one who decides that she wants to go off of life support, she's the one that breaks off the relationship, but then starts it up again.  But the opening sentence is this: "His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open.", which is so not dignified to me.  And I'm not sure if it's some sort of "death steals our dignity" type of thing or what, but it feels out of place and kind of, I don't know, off.
There are some other interesting things in there too - the husband cries at all of their major "happy" events (the engagement, the wedding, birth of first child) but then doesn't cry at the birth of their second daughter and never cries again.  Not even in the end (or the beginning, rather).
Seriously, great story.  So good that I took it and re-assembled it in chronological order just for fun.  It makes a good story that way too.

Murakami - Hear The Wind Sing

I just bought an English copy of Harkuri Murakami's first novel Hear the Wind Sing off of Ebay for less than $20.

Hear the Wind Sing was published in 1979 and was followed by Pinball, 1973 in 1980.  Both books are hard to find in English although both are available from the Japanese publisher Kodansha International.  There is a PDF version of Pinball, 1973 out there on the inter-webs if you look for it.

This is also the first book in the Trilogy of the Rat, which includes Pinball and A Wild Sheep Chase (which I finished over the Christmas Holiday).

I'm pretty excited to receive my copy of the book.  As a fan of Murakami, I can't wait to dig into this, his first novel.

New 2666 Group Read

Over at bolanobolano.com there's a new group-read of 2666 starting very soon.  I'm looking forward to this since 2009's group-read fizzled out about half-way through the project.

Please feel free to join the discussion on the bolano-l.

I'll also be re-starting and re-working my long-dormant 2666 Characters and References document.

The group-read kicks off on Jauary 25th, 2009!