i’ve wanted to read 2666 since the day i first heard about it, and i found it at FNAC – but i don’t think reading a 900something page tome of a novel in french would be quite the same experience (although it’s translated in either language i’d read it in). kottke has been posting excerpts and i NEED to read it now!
“Not believing your ears, though, thought Espinoza, is a form of exaggeration. You see something beautiful and you can’t believe your eyes. Someone tells you something about… the natural beauty of Iceland… people bathing in thermal springs, among geysers… in fact you’ve seen it in pictures, but still you say you can’t believe it… Although obviously you believe it… Exaggeration is a form of polite admiration… You set it up so the person you’re talking to can say: it’s true… And then you say: incredible. First you can’t believe it and then you think it’s incredible.”
“Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren’t consistent, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape He believed (or rather like to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. This was something he’d probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read.”
