The Equator reading group is back by popular demand.
After a successful summer outing with Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, the globally minded magazine is sponsoring another book club. This time, the subject is a literary doorstop—Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.
Why read 2666 in a flock? Bolaño’s final novel, published posthumously, is famous for exasperating as often as it rewards. Appropriately, this reading group has a questing name: “Into the Abyss.”
As Sam Anderson noted in a review for New York, in 2666 the late Chilean maestro “follows his restless talent down every available rabbit hole of improvisation, no matter how dark and unpromising.” Over the novel’s near thousand pages, “single sentences stretch on…obsessively sifting the most minor gradations.”
The sum total is “indisputably brilliant,” but also “crowded, brutal, dense.”
A novel like this rewards accountability mechanisms, and deserves plenty of conversation. (That’s the bet Equator has made, anyway.) Readers who’ve been ISO buddies to sift through all the brilliance can now sign up for five discussion sessions that break the book up into 150 page chunks.
Periodic club meetings will be moderated by scholars, fans, and special guests. And I do mean special. Rachel Kushner, Karl Ove Knausgård, Benjamin Kunkel, Pankaj Mishra, and Bolaño translator Natasha Wimmer anchor a starry slate of speakers.
But perhaps most exciting is the discussion framework. Over its five sessions, “Into the Abyss” will consider the novel through its many thematic lenses.
Violence, literary obsession, borderlands and “the wreckage of the twentieth century” are all on the menu. So if you love structuring chaos, consider joining the fray.
As with Davis Summer, Bolaño January isopen to all Equator subscribers, runs on pay-what-you-can contributions. It also takes place fully online.
No more excuses! Stay warm this January with a good group and a big book.