the lurkers do not support me in email! oh no!

from a correspondent:

The three-book version of 2666 is actually cooler than the hardcover? I don’t believe you—please explain.

so i have tried. what follows is from an email &, as such, is in a rather different style. forgive me. i am lazy.

well:

for one thing i just do not like hardcover editions all that much. they are bulky & hard to carry around, which for a graduate student who has to carry around an ass-ton of books all the time is a big enough deal. also as objects they are sort of off-putting in that monolithic way. & they are more difficult to read in bed, as they require propping-up.

for things that are published in a series (e.g. if you are, as i am, a science fiction fan), QPs released by a single publisher can have a v. nice look to them on a shelf. i cite, e.g., orbit’s ongoing re-release of iain m. banks’s novels, which are quite lovely. a good QP has a durable & flexible spine, too, & is definitionally printed on acid-free paper, so the two major drawbacks of paperbacks (spine-creasing & paper-aging) are not in play. (NB: mass market editions SUCK.)

with respect to the bolaño release, specifically: for one thing i think it is superlatively awesome that FSG released both editions. some people are just hardcover fans, & that is their prerogative. but i think the boxed set is really nice for a couple of reasons. in addition to the reasons cited in the first paragraph, 2666 also has its own peculiar history for which to account, as i am sure you are well aware. now, i do not like to be dogmatic about these sorts of things, so the people who tell you that the novel was “supposed” to be published serially & therefore “must” be or “really had ought to have been” are being silly, & the whole affair is rather less straightforward than that. see the note from the heirs in the front-matter to 2666. but, as i am sure you know, the novel DOES have a strange relationship with its own seriality, if one can even call it that; though the novel is surely, well, a novel—a single entity that should probably be read as a whole in order to guarantee maximum reading pleasure & that surely does not make sense if read only partially (insofar as it can be said to “make sense”; i haven’t finished my read-through yet)—it does participate in seriality, or in, less elegantly, sectionality (the chronological progression implied in “seriality” may not in fact suit in this case), in a way that strikes me as programmatic. i do honestly like how the physical discreteness of the 3-volume QP reinforces the disconnect between the various strands of the narrative while maintaining sequential (rather than volume-specific) pagination & section-numbering—the implications of which contrast i am sure you do not need spelled out for you, even if you choose to discard my thinking here as being either a: over-thinking or b: overly attentive to the impact that the physical object has on its so-called “content.”

another, much more minor, point is the correlation between this sort of novel & its unexpected traction in the sci-fi community, which is known for loving a good serial, comic-book or otherwise.

& i don’t have a problem with the decision to divide the novel into three volumes instead of five (as there are five sections), as the first three sections are indeed much shorter than the final two, & the effect of the division is the same (except, perhaps, in terms of what might be called physical pacing) whether there are three or five (though, in the logic of seriality, having only two sections would imply something v. different for the structure of the novel as a whole).

as a last note, the v. lovely artwork for 2666 gets full display in the 3-vol. set, as each vol. is entirely devoted to one of the works, whereas in the hardcover, i believe, only the first predominates, while the second & third are relegated to the inside of the dust jacket.

i could probably live without the “praise for 2666” all over the box, but the box design is quite nice; besides, it is not really visible when on a shelf, but having the box is, i think, a nice final touch.

::

in other news i am thinking of beginning a campaign in support of QPs, as hardcovers are still & for no reason retaining their privileged place at the top of the publishing hierarchy.