A few nights ago I dreamed I was a member of the New York Yankees. In the dream—upset because I barely got any playing time—I recognized that stars like Derek Jeter and Melky Cabrera outshone me by a lot, yet somehow I wasn’t especially impressed or intimidated by these big-time Major Leaguers. During a team trip to Texas (yes: in my subconscious, I traveled to Texas with the New York Yankees), I snuck onto the estate of pitching ace Andy Pettitte. The property was ugly, like something out of the Roberto Bolano novel 2666—half bunker, half factory, a dun-colored arrangement of giant concrete blocks. When the famous dimple-chinned pitcher walked through his front gate and saw me messing up his manicured grass, he stared me down incredulously as I jogged past him, exiting the property.
By the way, the above reference to Roberto Bolano isn’t a throwaway association. I’ve been reading Bolano’s sprawling magnum opus for weeks now, and I think the book has begun to influence my dreams.
As a whole, 2666 is crammed with plenty of Bolano’s inveterate musings about what a book is, what a writer is, and how meaningful the pursuit of literature is or could be. As far as I can tell, dreaming about sports isn’t exactly Bolano-esque (although there’s a good deal of material in his novel about boxers and boxing), but dreaming about a strange border-area where the rules and exact boundaries are unclear definitely resonates with Bolano’s work. Much of the novel 2666, for instance, takes place in a Mexican border town where young women are being murdered with soul-deadening regularity.
Another thing that makes my sports dream resonate with Bolano’s book, at least in my mind, is the word pitching.
In baseball, the word “pitching” requires no explanation. But in a literary context, pitching refers to what writers do when they’ve completed a book and they want to find an agent or a publisher—a dance that dates back at least as far as the pioneer days of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s an odd verb to link to the writing life, I think: You sit for years at a desk, moving words around on a screen, and then one day you get up and start to pitch. As though writing a book is one long-ass bullpen session, and then the game begins.
It’s funny to think of Roberto Bolano pitching his book—“Well, see, I’m just about finished writing this 893-page novel, and roughly a quarter of it reads like a repetitive grand jury testimony detailing the murders of women in a Mexican city just south of the Arizona border, and I’m not really willing to edit any of that out because that’s sort of the point—so no, I don’t see the book getting a lot shorter—anyway, want to take a look?” At times, Bolano seems to suggest that all writers are absurd, that the act of writing is pathetic. At other times he seems pretty convinced that books tether us to human decency, that writing is a heroic act in a world that’s coming apart at the seams. The hero of 2666 is a German writer in post-World War II Europe, a writer who refuses to pitch—instead he practically flees from his publisher, from any kind of publicity, hiding away from the public eye, distrustful and even disdainful of recognition. But always this man is writing, delivering book after book from different addresses around the continent, never asking for the money his publisher owes him for book sales.
In my Yankees dream, although the regular starting players were way, way better than me, I derived little pleasure from being around their greatness. But, man, I’m loving Bolano’s novel. It’s ridiculous! It’s amazing. It’s boring sometimes. Certainly I’d say it explains the rush of posthumous praise and enthusiasm for Bolano’s fiction. He made some truly strange, frustrating, affecting art. He shows how inadequate sports metaphors can be when applied to the writing life, but he also likes to describe his characters’ odd, rambling dreams, full of doubt and fervor.
