The Departed

[Mark Kohut]

The editor of the Times Book Review implied by what he said in a note, that they have asked TRPjr to review Bolano, as he once did Marquez, memorably. 

No seems to be the answer so far...



--- On Sat, 11/8/08, Bruce Appelbaum <brucea at bestweb.net> wrote:

> From: Bruce Appelbaum <brucea at bestweb.net>
> Subject: Re: The Departed
> To: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, November 8, 2008, 10:12 AM
> The local Barnes and Noble had copies of the 3-volume boxed
> paperback set last night. Started on the first part.  The
> fictional author who is the subject of the four critics'
> attention has more than a passing resemblance to  another
> non-fictional writer.
> 
> 
> Bruce
> 
> > "If they can get you asking the wrong questions,
> they don't have to worry about answers."
> 
>        --- Thomas Pynchon
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 7, 2008, at 3:21 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> > The Departed
> > By JONATHAN LETHEM
> > Published: November 9, 2008
> > 
> > 
> > In Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story "The
> Preserving Machine," an
> > impassioned inventor creates a device for
> "preserving" the canon of
> > classical music — the sacred and, he fears,
> impermanent beauties of
> > Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by
> feeding it into a device
> > that transforms the compositions into living
> creatures: birds, beetles
> > and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines.
> Outfitting the
> > classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free,
> the inventor
> > means to guarantee their persistence beyond the
> frailties of human
> > commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate
> to their value.
> > Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and
> violent, turn on one
> > another and, when the inventor attempts to
> reverse-engineer his
> > creations in order to prove that the music has
> survived, reveal
> > themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing
> like the
> > originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true
> essences —
> > irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the
> classical pieces to
> > begin with?
> > 
> > Dick's parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded
> in our reverence
> > toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes
> "masterpieces" embody in the
> > human realm that brings them forth and gives them
> their only value. If
> > we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed
> at the summit
> > of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to
> our grubby
> > lives? Con versely, if on investigation such works,
> and their makers,
> > are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same
> provisions and defects
> > as the rest of what we've plopped onto the planet
> — all these cities,
> > nations, languages, histories — then why get worked
> up in the first
> > place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may
> suspect art of being
> > useless in either case.
> > 
> > Literature is more susceptible to these doubts than
> music or the
> > visual arts, which can at least play at abstract
> beauty. Novels and
> > stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the
> imperfect stuff:
> > language, history, squalid human incident and dream.
> When so many
> > accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the
> universe gives
> > the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds
> itself by the
> > brutalities of animal instinct and time's
> remorseless toll, books may
> > seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how could
> such losers cobble
> > together anything particularly sublime?
> > 
> > The Chilean exile poet Roberto Bolaño, born in 1953,
> lived in Mexico,
> > France and Spain before his death in 2003, at 50, from
> liver disease
> > traceable to heroin use years before. In a burst of
> invention now
> > legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature,
> and rapidly
> > becoming so internationally, Bolaño in the last
> decade of his life,
> > writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing
> health,
> > constructed a remarkable body of stories and novels
> out of precisely
> > such doubts....
> > 
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html
> >