Word: five
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...passionate. (Only she could pull off a seduction scene that includes clucking like a chicken.) Sofya has proved her devotion by bearing Leo 13 children and copying out his drafts of War and Peace by hand, six times. She's prone to manipulation, eavesdropping and temper. "I lost five children, why couldn't one of them have been you?" she snipes at their daughter Sasha (Anne-Marie Duff), who is in Chertkov's camp. Sofya is not generous. Yet Hoffman ultimately comes down on her side, favoring the constancy of years over the inconstancy of politics...
...disappears and never returns. The inconsequence of his place in the world of “2666,” like so many of its characters, projects the novel’s style out onto its very structure; the events and characters in the novel’s five books don’t intersect so much as lie tangent to one another. Instead, they remain in orbit around the novel’s center, the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (the fictionalized Ciudad Juárez, across the Rio Grande from San Jose, TX) where scores of women...
...fast-paced noir of the third section finds a Harlem journalist named Oscar Fate reporting on a boxing match in the Santa Teresa. Clearly the most narrowly realized of the five sections, Bolaño’s odd-footed parsing of racial and radical politics from New York City has a Kafkaesque absurdity about it (cf. “Amerika”). The world Fate inhabits is awkwardly fleshless, but the details he chooses can illuminate whole parallel universes; “[T]he Mohammedan Brotherhood caught his attention because they were marching under a big poster of Osama...
...Instead of a faithfully causal chain of events (which Bolaño already showed signs of eschewing in “The Savage Detectives,” and even earlier in “Nazi Literature in the Americas”), “2666” plots the five circles of a sort of literary hell. Beginning with criticism, then academia, journalism, police detection, and finally fiction, the structure of the novel represents a cycle of inexplicable death and rebirth that’s as close to a theory of reality as we’re likely...
...real haggle was over speed of deployment. The military plans carefully, in five- to 10-year increments, and moves with the speed of a supertanker. A good part of the reason the troops were sent to Helmand instead of Kandahar, even though it violated the prevailing counterinsurgency strategy, was that the fortifications already had been built in Helmand; it seemed too late to turn the supertanker around. Obama kept sending plans back to the Pentagon, seeking a faster launch for his "extended surge." The military still isn't entirely sure that it'll be able to move 30,000 troops...