2666 Read Online Free Page B

presenter or not, knew quite a bit
about contemporary German literature.
    And when the shadowy writer, who was
Swabian, began to reminisce during his talk (or discussion) about his stint as
a journalist, as an editor of arts pages, as an interviewer of all kinds of
writers and artists wary of interviews, and then began to recall the era in
which he had served as cultural promoter in towns that were far-flung or simply
forgotten but interested in culture, suddenly, out of the blue, Archimboldi's
name cropped up (maybe prompted by the previous talk led by Espinoza and
Pelletier), since the Swabian, as it happened, had met Archimboldi while he was
cultural promoter for a Frisian town, north of Wilhelmshaven, facing the Black
Sea coast and the East Frisian islands, a place where it was cold, very cold,
and even wetter than it was cold, with a salty wetness that got into the bones,
and there were only two ways of making it through the winter, one, drinking
until you got cirrhosis, and two, listening to music (usually amateur string
quartets) in the town hall auditorium or talking to writers who came from
elsewhere and who were given very little, a room at the only boardinghouse in
town and a few marks to cover the return trip by train, those trains so unlike
German trains today, but on which the people were perhaps more talkative, more
polite, more interested in their neighbors, but anyway, writers who, after
being paid and subtracting transportation costs, left these places and went
home (which was sometimes just a room in Frankfurt or Cologne) with a little
money and possibly a few books sold, in the case of those writers or poets
(especially poets) who, after reading a few pages and answering the
townspeople's questions, would set up a table and make a few extra marks, a
fairly profitable activity back then, because if the audience liked what the
writer had read, or if the reading moved them or entertained them or made them
think, then they would buy one of his books, sometimes to keep as a souvenir of
a pleasant evening, as the wind whistled along the narrow streets of the
Frisian town, cutting into the flesh it was so cold, sometimes to read or
reread a poem or story, back at home now, weeks after the event, maybe by the
light of an oil lamp because there wasn't always electricity, of course, since
the war had just ended and there were still gaping wounds, social and economic,
anyway, more or less the same as a literary reading today, with the exception
that the books displayed on the table were self-published and now it's the
publishing houses that set up the table, and one of these writers who came to
the town where the Swabian was cultural promoter was Benno von Archimboldi, a
writer of the stature of Gustav Heller or Rainer Kuhl or Wilhelm Frayn (writers
whom Morini would later look up in his encyclopedia of German authors, without
success), and he didn't bring books, and he read two chapters from a novel in
progress, his second novel, the first, remembered the Swabian, had been
published in Hamburg that year, although he didn't read anything from it, but
that first novel did exist, said the Swabian, and Archimboldi, as if
anticipating doubts, had brought a copy with him, a little novel about one
hundred pages long, maybe longer, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and
twenty-five pages, and he carried the novel in his jacket pocket, and,   strangely,   the   Swabian remembered
Archimboldi's jacket more clearly than the novel crammed into its pocket, a
little novel with a dirty, creased cover that had once been deep ivory or a
pale wheat color or gold shading into invisibility, but now was colorless and
dull, just the title of the novel and the author's name and the colophon of the
publishing house, whereas the jacket was unforgettable, a black leather jacket
with a high collar, providing excellent protection against the snow and rain
and cold, loose fitting, so it could be worn over heavy sweaters or two
sweaters