Paris Spleen - pg. 17

Annoyed with everyone and annoyed with myself, I long to redeem myself and to bolster my pride a bit in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, fortify me, sustain me, remove me from untruth and the world's corrupting fumes. And you, Lord my God! Grant me the grace to produce a few beautiful verses to prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, and that I am not inferior to those I despise!

Paris Spleen - Opening

1

THE STRANGER

"Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?"

"I have neither father, nor mother,  nor sister, nor brother."

"Your friends?"

"There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me unknown."

"Your fatherland?"

"I am unaware in what latitude it lies."

"Beauty?"

"I would willingly love her, goddess and immortal."

"Gold?"

"I hate it as you hate God."

"So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?"

"I love clouds... drifting clouds... there... over there... marvelous clouds!"

I want to thank Arudnhati Banerjee, Wllace Fowlie, Stephen Gendzier,

Richard Howard, and Harry Zohn for their generous readins and 

suggestions. To Janna, Jeremy, Aaron, and Sima Kaplan I express my love. 

This second edition has benefitted from the criticism and support of

Ryszard Engelking, Rosemary Lloyd, Laurence M. Porter,

Graham Robb, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, and my students.

Publisehd by the University of Georgia Press

Athens,  Georgia 30602

1989, 1997 by Edward K. Kaplan

All rights reserved.

Designed by Louis  OFarrell

Set in 11/13 Bodoni Book

The paper in this book meets  the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

2666 - pg. 879

That night Lotte dreamed for the first time in a long time about her brother. She saw Archimboldi walking in the desert, dressed in shorts and a little straw hat, and everything around him was sand, one dune after another all the way to the horizon. She shouted something to him, she said stop, there's nowhere to go, but Archimboldi kept moving farther away, as if he wanted to lose himself forever in that unfathomable and hostile land.

"It's unfathomable and hostile," she told him, and only then did she realize that she was a girl again,, a girl who lived in a Prussian village  between the forest and the sea.

"No," said Archimboldi, and he seemed to whisper in her ear, "it's just boring, boring, boring ..."

2666 - Opening

1 THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS
The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D'Arsonval.



For Alexandra Bolaño and Lautaro Bolaño


An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom
- Charles Baudelaire

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2004 by the heirs of Roberto Bolaño
Translation copyright 2008 by Natasha Wimmer
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas and McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Originially published in 2004 by Editorial Anagrama, Spain
Punblished in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Grioux
First American edition, 2008
Published simultaneously as a hardcover and a three-volume slipcased paperback edition


An excerpt from "The Part About the Crimes" first appeared in Vice.

"Canto nottorno di un patore errante dell'Asia," by Giacomo Leopardi, is quoted in Jonathan Galassi'a translation.

Endpapers: Sea sponges, from Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, courtesy of the National Library of the Netherlands.

This work has been published with a subsidy from the Directorate-General of Books, Archives, and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts in the form of an NEA Translation Grant.