Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea ***

In the early 1990s, Greg Mortenson got lost on his descent after an attempt on K2. The people in the small Pakistani village where he ended up took such great care of him that he promised to come back and build them a school. With luck and persistence, he was able to fulfill this promise, and he went on to build many other schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. The moral is that one person can make a significant difference.

The first half of the book tells the story of Mortenson's dawning vocation in vivid, novelistic fashion. (In the third person, surprisingly, given that Mortenson is listed as the primary author.) It is a strong story about a guileless, naive, and somewhat passive protagonist learning about the difficulties of his chosen quest. Once he has completed the first school, the book takes on a more journalistic tone. It is a less strong story that paints Mortenson as a saint who gets things done. Everyone Mortenson meets, from US Congressmembers to Taliban leaders, declares him remarkable and donates to his cause.

I think Mortenson's life provides fantastic material for a finely shaded character study. This book opts for hagiography instead.  He clearly has a magnetic personality that leads people to like him instantly. I suspect his clumsy naivete makes people want to care for him. I can't deny the success he has had, but I believe that the reasons for it are different from the reasons he believes they are.

I would be interested in a biography of Mortenson that explored his talents and faults in equal measure, and thought about how they work together to account for his successes and failures. I think there is a story along the lines of All the King's Men there. I sense some corruption and incompetence even through the positive spin. For example, after Mortenson's foundation gets a huge influx of cash, he uses it to provide a scholarship for one of his lieutenant's daughters. More generally, it seems like Mortenson uses his personal preferences to determine where money is spent, and he takes unnecessary risks to preserve his self-image.

Roberto Bolano, 2666 ** 1/2

Roberto Bolano is a very talented writer who deserves all of the critical attention he has received since The Savage Detectives was translated into English. As it says on the back cover, "With 2666, Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel...deploying encyclopediac knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it." In other words, 2666 is akin to Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, or the recently reviewed Life: A User's Guide, and as with these other masterworks, I found more to admire than to love in 2666. I often found myself slogging through its 893 pages.

The book is divided into five major sections, linked by common characters, locales, and motifs. The best, and longest, and arguably the most draining section is the fourth, which concerns a decade-long series of killings in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa. The shared theme of all five sections — and of The Savage Detectives, if I think back to it — seemed to be how people organize their lives around absences: the absent author Archimboldi, the absent wife of Amalfitano, and so on. There are also multiple artists confined to mental institutions, suggesting a message about the role of the artist.

For me, Bolano's best feature as a writer is his way with sensory metaphors. For example:

They dug up the barbecue, and a smell of meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder, and vanished mysteriously as the women carried the plates to the table, leaving clothing and skin impregnated with its aroma. (p 130)

 When the visitors returned to the surface... they were divided into two groups: those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naivete of the human race. (p 680)