Insanity and Mezcal, and that’s just me…
Week 4 was comprised of the entirety of Book 2, ‘The Part About Amalfitano,’ which made for an enjoyable read. It isn’t the sort of book which attracts a lot of interest from spectators (reading as a spectator sport? It’ll never catch on.) But I was asked today ‘What is it about?’ And could reply, only, ‘Damned if I know!’
But this week’s instalment had insanity and dreams, philosophy, more insanity, sex in graveyards (but I covered that with the insanity?), mezcal (the real deal, with added worm) oh, and telepathy, and possibly ghosts. What’s not to like?
‘You’re getting crazier every day, you know, said Rosa. Amalfitano smiled. I’ve never seen you do a thing like that to a book, said Rosa. It isn’t mine, said Amalfitano. It doesn’t matter, Rosa said, it’s yours now. It’s funny, said Amalfitano, that’s how I should feel but I really don’t have the sense it belongs to me, and anyway I’m almost sure I’m not doing it any harm.’
The book in question is a book on geometry, pegged out on the line, à la Duchamp, in order ‘to see if it learns something about real life.’ From the mysterious materialisation of the geometry book onwards Amalfitano appears to be slowly fallling into insanity, and isn’t the first character to have done so. The artistic endeavours of first an artist and then a poet have landed them in ‘insane asylums;’ though the alleged insanity speaks more of refuge than affliction in each case.
‘Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freeedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.’
As Amalfitano critiques a fictional book by a fictional author in order to prove telepathy and not insanity, a quick trip to Wikipedia reveals that the unlikely story of Ambrosio and Bernardo O’Higgins is, at least in part, true. As may be the Marcel Duchamp story. This mixing of historical fact with bizarre fiction is by no means the least disconcerting part of the book.
You don’t have to understand this book to enjoy it, so that’s fortunate isn’t it? (But having said that I am now going to hie myself over to Infinite Zombies, where one may find evidence of enjoyment and understanding.)
A Rat in the Book Pile 
Aw, shucks. Let’s call it a pretension of understanding at IZ at best, at least as far as my posts go. :)
I stopped reading this – doing the whole 50 pages thing is too hard, and the book’s too big to carry around. I’m going to have to take it on vacation and read the entire thing in one go. Also, am finding it really difficult reading more than one book at one time. I suck at readalongs :(
This bit sounds interesting though… glad your readalong’s coming along better than mine!
Oh, that’s such a shame :(
But there does seem to be a general feeling that the book to date lacks a decisive narrative thrust. This would be less of a problem in a continuous reading. And I bet you could read the whole thing in two to three weeks. I would quite like to know how long it does take, cover to cover, actually…
As my puny and continued attempts to wrest meaning from a pot pourri of seemingly unrelated incidents proceeds, I quite envy your proposed approach. Bearing in mind that we are scheduled to finish in May, you could actually finish it first!