Finished! Don't have much to say at this stage, other than that it was kind of good to read a really long novel (or in fairness five mid-length novels) again. Middle section's too repetitive though, innit? I mean I realise this is like a formal strategy on Bolano’s part, the sheer numbing, desensitizing pileup of corpses and how it eventually strips away even the reader's most prurient instincts, but for me he's made his point/achieved his effect around murder 700 and we could have done without the next 400 or so.

So...not blown away as I was when I read The Erl King and I do think that the open ended and “suggestively allusive” text that hints at some higher order of connection and interrelation between the disparate events is a bit of a clichéd, po-mo cop out.

Reader: What did all that mean?

Writer: Well, what do you THINK it meant?

Reader:*Blather*

Writer: Well if that’s what it means to you, perhaps that it IS what it means, ho ho….* author disappears in a flash of smoke-and-mirrors,*

Now I don’t want to suggest that this sophisticated and kind of “texturally correct” Barthesian/Derridian writing strategy of conferring ultimate authority on the reader allows for any old poorly thought out, random “weird” bullshit to be stitched loosely together and passed off as some intense commentary on the Late Capitalist condition/ Lacanian whatnot/ Eliminitive hooha, BUT if you’ve ever written a long narrative you’ll be aware of the way seventeen different directions/meanings are constantly fizzing away in your head at any point as you plow forward wondering how you’re going to tie this all up into a meaningful whole, and consequently when you watch, say “Donnie Darko”, your tendency is to think AHA! so you couldn’t find anything to hang all these multiple levels/cool “scenes” and ideas on, no overarching formal or thematic principle, and now you're going to try a bit of sleight of hand by going “ahh, yeah, but isn’t like an a-b-c narrative and like a “meaning” and like a “conclusion” just so old-fashioned, don’t we want like an open text that the reader can enter at any stage, that liberates them from linearity and into the play of multiple meanings and interpretations?” To which I say, maybe, but let’s not try to polish the turd of your shoddy, incomplete work with the increasingly threadbare rag of post-structuralism because it looks pretty old and overdone in itself that kind of approach, looks like a handy get-out-clause.*

Any other recommendations bookwise, by the way?**

*In all fairness you would have to say that Christopher Nolan is a great plotter, a great architect even if he's not thematically my cup of tea. This is probably due to the influence of Christopher Priest who I haven't read enough of, but who I suspect takes some of that looseness and independence of meaning you experience while writing and constantly uses it to switch the readers assumption back and forth.

** UPDATE, Yeah, I've just gone and bought Don Quixote....tried to read it a few times several years ago and and kept getting distracted by other stuff. It was never excatly the right time (same with The Possessed.) while I was in the bookshop, which has a really unusual range of stuff actually, I spotted a couple of novels by Steve Erickson, who I read pretty intensively in the 90s, and his newer stuff looks really intersting too, so depending on how long El Quijote takes me I reckon I'll get up to speed on his latest stuff.

errr.. anybody read any later Mailer, "Harlot's Ghost" and what have you? What about "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson?