Word: amalfitano
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...various permutations of the three male critics and their single female colleague, endure bizarre and horrifying dreams, and plunge stoically into the breach between art and madness. Their search for a trace of the living author leads them to Santa Teresa, where a brush with the Spanish professor Oscar Amalfitano gives way to that character’s own section. Of all the protagonists throughout “2666,” Amalfitano is perhaps the most typical for Bolaño—a lone scholar and continental transplant who suffers bouts of profound fatigue and schizophrenic delusion. Paranoid...
...lost in it. How can art, Bolaño is asking, a medium of form and meaning, reflect a world that is blessed with neither? That is in fact a cesspool of chance and filth? In Part 2 of 2666 the philosophy professor, whose name is Amalfitano, recreates one of Marcel Duchamp's ready-made artworks: he hangs up a geometry textbook outside his house by a string so that the elements can gradually corrupt and destroy its tidy diagrams. He contemplates the book for hours as random, meaningless, non-Euclidean reality invades it, forcing it to register the presence...
...tragic, paradoxical way, his death completes the book: it touches 2666 with the disorder and rootlessness that is its subject. And what more could Bolaño have told us anyway? With what final wisdom could he have supplied us? Gazing at his ruined geometry book, Amalfitano fantasizes about meeting a 19th century philosopher on his deathbed and asking him for advice. "What would his response have been?" Amalfitano wonders. "Be happy. Live in the moment. Be good. Or rather: Who are you? What are you doing here? Go away...
Coming to bat for Los Angeles is Catcher Mike Scioscia, a contact hitter. "The bases are still drunk," Catcher Gary Carter calls out a reminder. "Let's get the double play," barks Third Baseman Ray Knight. Joey Amalfitano, the Dodger coach at third base, wigwags some semaphore to Scioscia, who flicks his helmet to signal message received. Gooden looks at Knight and mouths, "Squeeze bunt?" Knight looks at Amalfitano and says, "Too obvious." At first base, Keith Hernandez gives thought to visiting Gooden, but reconsiders. "What am I going to tell him? Bear down?" Bearing down, Gooden makes Scioscia foul...