The shock of new beauty

• Adam Kirsch reviews Roberto Bolaño's 2666 at Slate.

And positions it as a major work, kicking off with a corollary to Proust. I've been looking forward to sinking my teeth into this sucker and this kind of review makes the wait even more difficult.

Time and again, Bolaño hints, without ever quite saying, that what is happening in Santa Teresa is a symptom of a universal derangement in which hidden dimensions of reality are coming horribly to light. That is why so much of the activity of 2666 takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor. It is in Bolaño's allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his character's frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches—above all, in the dark insights of Benno von Archimboldi, who finally takes center stage in the book's fifth section—that the real story of 2666 gets told. That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize—and why Natasha Wimmer's lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant. 2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve.

Conversational Reading has been beating the Bolaño drum for a while now, and I've been interested in him since sampling By Night in Chile. Come on -- a 900+-page final work by a largely unsung, but major writing talent? Bring it on.

DeLillo's return

• Adam Kirsch reviews Don DeLillo's latest in The New York Sun.

A well-written review of Falling Man. Consensus seems to be mixed -- Scott at Conversational Reading linked to another mezzo-mezzo review -- but I'm still looking forward to it.

Mr. DeLillo has even envisioned the writer and the terrorist as direct rivals, each seeking the power to change history by changing the way it is understood. As he told an interviewer in 1985, "There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to." This insight, which once might have seemed paradoxical or frivolous, now looks like a simple statement of fact. Terror, we have learned during the last five years, regards individual bodies as a medium through which to affect the collective imagination. That is why the terrorist can so savagely disregard his victims' suffering, and why resistance to terrorism is always also an affirmation of humanism.

..."Falling Man," then, offers neither the sprawling historical canvas of "Underworld," nor the thesis-driven postmodernism of "Libra" and "Mao II." Instead, like Mr. DeLillo's last two novels — "Cosmopolis" and "The Body Artist," neither very well received — the new book is small-scale and subdued, at times even a bit airless. Reading "Falling Man," it is easy to see what Mr. DeLillo meant when he said that "the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism." The book is structured like a film, a series of brief episodes that fade in and black out. Indeed, the main characters — Keith Neudecker, a lawyer who worked in the towers, and his ex-wife, Lianne — each have moments of estrangement when they view themselves as if they were actors in a movie. "In the movie version," Keith thinks as he climbs the stairs to his deserted apartment in Lower Manhattan, "someone would be in the building, an emotionally damaged woman or a homeless old man, and there would be dialogue and close-ups."

Dialogue and close-ups are, in fact, Mr. DeLillo's preferred narrative tools. He keeps a tight focus on Keith and Lianne, in regular alternation, as they move through the days and weeks after September 11. And his prose eschews special effects, acting instead as a bleak, lustreless lens. Here is Keith picking a fight in a department store: "The man was listening to his companion but did not move. Keith was happy to stand and watch and then he wasn't. He walked over there and punched the man." This sounds more like Hemingway than what we usually think of as Mr. DeLillo's style, and the long stretches of curt, repetitive dialogue sometimes read like a parody of David Mamet.