No real good news from 2666. I'm now 574 pages done (with an entire book left to go after this one) and...it's more of the same. It's well written, but...hopefully, now, I'm spinning even closer to the center. One major character is going make an announcement to the press, but that's a process that's taking forever and in the meantime, the female bodies, some mutilated, some not, accumulate.
Still a lot of women dying. The sheer number, unrelentingly, who all, somehow, work at maquiadoras is staggering and it can't be stopped. Police are incapable of finding the killers and even if they could, corruption, laziness or simply just not having enough resources available to do the job abounds, with many of the investigators chauvinist pigs. The women, almost exclusively, are referred to by the police as whores, or even if they're confused and went out with a guy and it ended with their death, they're still tarred by that, somehow.
It's not so bad, one of the characters says, at least in Santa Teresa, more women, than in other parts of Mexico, have jobs.The maquiadoras provide the jobs, and are temples, themselves, as if the young women are constantly scarified on it to keep the town and workplace going. The women pay the price for the Mexican lifestyle, in which the rage, jealousy and loathing of men is paid to their spouses or girlfriends accounts. She was cheating on me, so I killed her. She wanted a little space, so I strangled her. Drugs are often involved.
We see the men on their own without the women in prison, and there's…at least two counts of prison rape which get graphic and makes me physically uncomfortable.
This book feels like it's got a political undercurrent, even though there's…nothing explicitly political here. But, if we're to take Gramsci's ideas at face value, that recognition is the first step to action and has value, then there is a reasonable argument that Bolano, by showing the myriad ways women get killed and how little happens, is making his point about how women are treated today and how casually news of their deaths is received.
Their deaths are oppressive and constant. I can only imagine what it's like, in every meaning of the phrase.
We Are the Pipettes is a song by the Pipettes. It's the first track off their disc of the same name. Light song, hopefully, to counteract the depressing post.
Still a lot of women dying. The sheer number, unrelentingly, who all, somehow, work at maquiadoras is staggering and it can't be stopped. Police are incapable of finding the killers and even if they could, corruption, laziness or simply just not having enough resources available to do the job abounds, with many of the investigators chauvinist pigs. The women, almost exclusively, are referred to by the police as whores, or even if they're confused and went out with a guy and it ended with their death, they're still tarred by that, somehow.
It's not so bad, one of the characters says, at least in Santa Teresa, more women, than in other parts of Mexico, have jobs.The maquiadoras provide the jobs, and are temples, themselves, as if the young women are constantly scarified on it to keep the town and workplace going. The women pay the price for the Mexican lifestyle, in which the rage, jealousy and loathing of men is paid to their spouses or girlfriends accounts. She was cheating on me, so I killed her. She wanted a little space, so I strangled her. Drugs are often involved.
We see the men on their own without the women in prison, and there's…at least two counts of prison rape which get graphic and makes me physically uncomfortable.
This book feels like it's got a political undercurrent, even though there's…nothing explicitly political here. But, if we're to take Gramsci's ideas at face value, that recognition is the first step to action and has value, then there is a reasonable argument that Bolano, by showing the myriad ways women get killed and how little happens, is making his point about how women are treated today and how casually news of their deaths is received.
Their deaths are oppressive and constant. I can only imagine what it's like, in every meaning of the phrase.
We Are the Pipettes is a song by the Pipettes. It's the first track off their disc of the same name. Light song, hopefully, to counteract the depressing post.
No comments:
Post a Comment