Roberto Bolaño 2666

I've got a copy of The Savage Detectives waiting for me when I finish the book I'm reading now. It'll be the first thing I've read by him.

The article on Time.com really caught my attention. I don't wanna read any more reviews before reading it myself.

Love this book, and it's quite creepy, when considering this degradation that he writes about, the "unknowable mystery" of the murdered women that's central to his novel, is the same thing that's been happening around my city as well.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/bre...-91794474.html

I kind of fantasize about adapting the story to here in a film.

I started this, got sidetracked by other stuff, and never got back to it. Need to fix this.

This is an amazing book, but I really can't imagine why anyone would want it filmed. There's no protagonist, very little connective tissue between the parts, and the main theme is basically "chaos and death". Thinking about the parts you'd have to excise to make a coherent narrative (To begin with, "The Part About The Crimes" - the most essential part of the book, "The Part About Fate", and "The Part About Amalfitano") leaves you with virtually nothing. I suppose you could tell the story of the three professors and the story of Hans Reiter and tie it in with the arrest of his nephew, but that's doing a massive disservice to the narrative and the metaphor of the novel.

Put another way, 2666 worked its way into my head like few novels before. It's ominous in unspeakable ways - and the reviews, which struggle mightily to describe WHY the book deserves the praise it receives, seem to agree with this. There's the meta-narrative of a brilliant, troubled mind raging against a death that's coming too soon by writing the bleakest possible takedown of the living world. There's the succinct summary of the atmosphere of living at the end of one century and the beginning of the next. There's the incredible feeling of dread at the constant encroachment of capitalism and the free market and the effect it has on the people who are unprepared for its arrival. But, despite how much I love it, it's so, so unfilmable. It should remain in the form it was created.

I'm not of the school that an adaptation can "ruin" an original work. Most of our stories are just riffs on stuff other people have done, if one is to recite the exact plots and character motivations. In any case, I think it would be valuable for a director to film his or her own interpretation of his novel, because there are so many ways of looking at it that, well, I don't think anyone can claim they know the 'pure' intentions of Bolano.

Right, of course it can't. But, still, 2666 is an incredibly personal work that's essentially unfilmable in its current state. Why not direct the Coens or Cronenberg towards a project of their own, rather than putting together an almost necessarily inferior work? This isn't like adapting NCFoM. You're going to end up with an adaptation that's going to be so different from the original that adapting serves almost no purpose to begin with.

Point.

Been wanting to read this for a while, I hear that the fourth section of it is just epically devastating.

That being said, man, I just could not get into Savage Detectives for the life of me. I won't claim it's bad, there didn't seem to be anything to it, in terms of the aesthetics of the writing or structure or the story or anything. Love to hear other takes if anyone's got any.

Still looking forward to this one.