A Bolano Tactic

I recently finished Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. As I’ve mentioned here before, it's a simply stunning book.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Adam Kirsch statement I wrote about the other day (short version for those of you that don’t want to click through: “Only once we have learned how to read [an orginal author] do we realize that this ugliness is really a new, totally unexpected kind of beauty and that what seemed wrong in his writing is exactly what makes him great.”) Now 2666 is a book that is about a lot of awful things, and yet it’s compulsively readable. But it’s not the morbid readable of Cormac McCarthy, which is like rubbernecking at the carnage of an automobile accident on the side of the highway. Instead, Bolaño gets you to really care about his characters through a number of tactics, not least of which is the obsessive capturing of the minutia of their everyday lives (or deaths, in "The Part about the Crimes"). But he does this through writing that is almost willingly bland, a stream-of-consciousness style consisting of clinical descriptions of banal events. But he also keeps you on your toes by including sudden strokes of absurd poetry. To chose just one example, in one of the tangents in "The Part about Archimboldi", Bolaño has just finished telling a story of how Popescu has found happiness with a beautiful actress and spends two large relatively boring paragraphs detailing Popescu’s economic investments in Tegucigalpan public transit. After all this, Bolaño suddenly writes:

“With Asuncion Reyes, Popescu found happiness, but then he lost it and they were divorced. He forgot the Tegucigalpa metro. Death surprised him in a Paris hospital, asleep on a bed of roses." (page 856)

The abrupt mood change from happiness to death, the absurdly poetic detail of having a bed of roses in a hospital (in Paris, of course): all this elevates the story to another level. There are many other examples that probably illustrate this point better – in fact I’ve quoted a few of these before, but they don’t really do the effect justice without the “regular” prose that precedes the beautiful part – but its this mixing of “boring” with magical writing that lends a lot of his writing his power.