The Departed

[Bruce Appelbaum]

Lethem did the review in the Sunday Book Review.  They use their own  
reviewer staff for weekdays, so it is unlikely that TRP will be  
reviewing 2666 for the Times.


Bruce

> "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to  
> worry about answers."

        --- Thomas Pynchon





On Nov 8, 2008, at 12:24 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

>
> 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
>>>
>
>
>
>

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