I don't really understand why they're friends. Sure, they feed off of each other in their publishing cycles and they're all about this Archimboldi, but I don't get why they call each other and are friends. They don't really seem to know each other very well. Sometimes the novel moves as if to show the reader things about the main characters in ways that will not reveal those things to the other characters. Some parts feel almost dream-like in the way that the images pile on top of each other and then jump to another place. I'm having trouble remembering the details, but I wonder if that's intentional; a mysterious author writes a story about a mysterious author. Perhaps these are not characters at all, but merely facets of various human qualities?
I think it's intentional. Reading this book and trying to remember the details is a huge mistake, and you won't finish. I think it's as plain and simple as that. Witness the moment late in the first part where Amalfitano is explaining something and he goes into bizarre detail about a dream and a stage and life and finally after three pages one of the critics says, "I didn't understand a word you said," and Amalfitano says, "I know, I was just talking nonsense," and then they all move to a different topic without comment. Remember that passage when you're reading parts 2-5, hubski.
Back in the day, I did a lot of coke. And I had a few really really really good friends. We had nothing in common, except that we loved long nights and blow. We would talk, walk, laugh, cry, reveal deepest secrets, spend hours and hours and hours talking. These are still some of my close friends today. Do we have anything in common? Nope. Did we hang out much? Nope. But when we did it was always a great time, and even nights where it was just beer, or just weed, or completely sober, it was great. That happy, carefree, sharing time with someone who has seen you at your worst and knows your secrets so you aren't hesitant or self-conscious. It was a good time. Sometime's all it takes is a single common interest and reason to spend hours and days and nights together that makes a friendship superior. I think that's how I look at their friendship. Normally they wouldn't be friends, but they enjoy each others company and have a good time and talk and talk and talk with ease.I don't really understand why they're friends.
I think if we're honest, we all have some friends we enjoy the company of, though we have little in common. My issue is, as StJohn said, that the characters are unsympathetic. For me, it's because they lack depth; the way that love is treated is curious. Pelletier and Espinoza both love Norton. Why? Because she's around and she likes that one thing that they both like and it's easy to talk to her? Then Norton moves on, she and Morini are now in love. Why? They both like Archimboldi and Edwin Johns? This lack of depth makes me wonder again, whether or not that these are truly supposed to be "characters" that is, for all intents and purposes except for biological realization, living, thinking people with flaws. Yes, we certainly see their flaws and some of their thoughts, but not much by way of their feelings or how they experience things-- everything is seen at a distance. In fact, to me they seem two-dimensional in a way that makes me wonder if the author is actually telling the story through archetypes of academics, or of human beings in general. Also, there is no real conflict in the story. "Norton loves x, oh no! Let's read or fuck." And they simply travel and wonder about Archimboldi. In a way, it's a bit like Scooby-Doo. I like it, but it does make me wonder if the many reviews about it being an endurance test are right.
The critics are definitely supposed to be abstract. Their only distinguishing characteristic is their relationship to Archimboldi, and as readers we know even less about Archimboldi than they do. Archimboldi is vague enough to the reader you could project practically any imagined author into him. And so the critics are just as easily malleable. And fwiw the Morini transition seemed really obvious to me. Norton had always been emotionally closer to him than the others and his repeated explicit exclusion seemed like some heavyhanded foreshadowing.
Right, which makes me wonder, "Why go there? It's the obvious move." The academic with the least physical presence and the one with the least emotional presence get together . . . it's too on the nose. I can't figure out if I'm missing something or not.
I have to say I disagree about Norton's lack of emotional presence. I guess they are all pretty lacking but I never felt like Norton was particularly less developed than the two male critics. I'm wondering if your perception is not so actual and more due to the fact that the majority of our POV time is spent among the two male critics, and Norton is emotionally distant from them.
That's a possibility . . . I don't know, it strikes me as odd that Norton simply . . . goes along with sex. I'm not saying that casual sex = no emotions, but I find the way that she's written as implicit of that. Of course, I'm bringing my own experiences to the reading, but the only sense of emotion from her that I found to be an insight into the character was the anecdote about Jimmy, just before she tells the other two about Morini. Maybe it's just that I relate to Espinoza and Pelletier better, but either way, in my experience, a person who takes two close friends as lovers in the same time period are generally people I admit, I am more willing to characterize as emotionally distant. But again, as abstractions, what can really be said about the emotional validity of any of them . . .