/lit/ - Literature

>>10989716
Sorry, I went to sleep. Just woke up. This could be a bit of a ramble, and interpreting visual art isn't my strongest ability.

The first thing that strikes me is the choice of colours. I had seen this cover once before and it instantly turned me off. That white with magenta suggests a lighter read than the older cover, and it's curious why the bodies on the cover appear to be mostly male (my eyes could be deceiving me). Given the subject matter and the whole part about the unsolved murders of women in Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez) that everyone ends up talking about, it seems odd that such an event wouldn't factor more into the artistic decision, or that the artist wouldn't choose to create a more serious cover.

When I look at the cover I have - minus the award emblem they stuck on it - I'm awestruck. I'm not so well-versed in my Catholicism, but it looks like a faded, well-worn mural on a wall, the kind that maybe people would leave candles and flowers at, kneel and pray. It's darker, more suggestive of something evil. I can remember first seeing it and thinking 2666 was a serious novel before I ever laid a hand on it.

Now the falling - it looks like they're falling - bodies on the new cover, to be fair, look lifeless. It still doesn't quite capture the gravity of the novel's subject matter, though. It makes me think of that opening to Mad Men with the blackened animation of Don Draper falling out of the skyscraper. He wants a family, the American dream (maybe), but the temptations of alcohol and women send him tumbling, and we're not even sure who he is (his identity is a fiction). That's a quick reading based on memory. Okay, so we have these critics looking for an elusive German writer who cannot be found, a Chilean professor fearing his daughter will be lost to the violence of Santa Teresa, the inability to solve the murders, etc. People searching, afraid to lose something... there's lots of wandering, travel. Maybe the cover captures that a bit. Maybe. I still find it lacking.

But for transparency I've only read bits of 2666, but I've read the following in full:
>A Little Lumpen Novelita
>By Night in Chile
>Distant Star
>The Insufferable Gaucho
>Bolaño's interview from BOMB Magazine

I'm planning on working my way through The Return, The Savage Detectives, The Skating Rink, The Third Reich, and Woes of the True Policeman (which I had once purchased on clearance for $2 but donated to the library). 2666 is either next, or last, after I finish reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.