![]() Who would have suspected what Melville has made us see: that a writer could alternate a vivid whaling yarn with long, digressive chapters on cetology, the scientific study of whales that these lessons would teach us everything that was known at the time about whales and that this information would only deepen the mystery of the white whale that Captain Ahab is chasing. ![]() Until I read Bolaño’s novel, I hadn’t realized that a writer could interrupt a narrative to include a lengthy sermon, though in fact I should have known: It’s been suggested that Barry Seaman’s lecture was partly inspired by Father Mapple’s sermon in Melville’s Moby-Dick, a novel Bolaño admired and which itself is structured in a way we might not have imagined. (“From up close it’s hell, but from far away you’d have to be a vampire not to see how useful it is, how beautiful.”) He compares the value of a cigarette and a jar of strawberry jam in the various prisons in which he was incarcerated, and he tells the story of how pork chops saved his life. ![]() Barry Seaman’s brilliant, rambling monologue covers subjects ranging from money to danger to food to stars (movie stars, star athletes, and the Milky Way) to the usefulness of the sun. In Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666, he devotes a dozen pages of the novel’s third section to a speech delivered by a character named Barry Seaman, a figure apparently based on the Black Panther leader and 60s activist Bobby Seale. I didn’t know that a writer could do that. Some of our most exciting and memorable reading experiences occur when we discover a story or novel, essay, play or poem that seems to us so original, so unexpected, so apparently unaware of-or unconcerned by-past models, conventions and clichés, and yet so steadily faithful to a guiding principle all its own that, regardless of how much else we may have read, we think: This is something new. ![]()
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