2666

author:
ROBERTO BOLANO

Fiction
912 pages
FSG

Roberto Bolaño spent most of his life as a broke, nomadic poet wandering through South America, Mexico and Europe. A political exile from his home country Chile, he spearheaded the notorious infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico. He eventually left Latin America for Europe, where he lived the rest of his life. He was only 50 when he died of liver failure in 2003.

2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s last and most gut-wrenching novel, which he was still revising up to the last year of his life. The book is made up of 5 parts, and the separate narratives all weave around Santa Teresa, a city based on Ciudad Juarez in Northern Mexico where over four hundred murders of young women have taken place since 1993, and few have been solved.

It’s an absolutely singular work of fiction—not as haphazardly romantic or vibrantly poetic as Bolaño’s previous masterpiece The Savage Detectives—and yet 2666 is enigmatic, casually insightful, journalistically styled, and real, real, real. And it’s consumed with death—not surprising, seeing as how Bolaño knew he had little time left as he was struggling to complete the book.

The novel begins quietly, pleasantly: the first segment, “The Part about the Critics,” involves four literary scholars obsessed with the reclusive German writer Archimboldi, who has apparently disappeared in Santa Teresa. They go in search of the author, preoccupied all the while with their sexual liaisons and personal affairs. In contrast with the pages to come, the melancholy portrait Bolaño produces of the scholars discussing literature, forming romantic triangles, and idly reading and traveling seems superfluous, ridiculous in hindsight. But the superfluity is the point. Those notions of romance and yearning prove to be fleeting—they’re swallowed up in the ensuing vastness of the far more primordial and physical forces of sex and death.

Each subsequent part contributes a wealth of diverse characters and tales that meander, sometimes flippantly, around the dark course we begin to realize has been set. No matter how cheerful, banal, optimistic, or humorous each anecdote is, they’re inextricable from their environment, which, in Bolano’s subtly and expertly crafted not-so fictional world, is always filled with dying people, the legacy of the dead, and the unwavering sense of one’s own mortality.

Nowhere is this more emphatically the case than in the fourth, and longest, part of the novel, “The Part about the Crimes.” It’s an unrelenting chronicle of five years in Santa Teresa, and in a cold detached air, it details every gruesome rape and murder that targets the women, mostly young factory workers, of the unfortunate city.

Reading the repeated frank, dispassionate descriptions of murdered women, like studying five years’ worth of homicide excerpts from a police blotter, begins to seem mundane and tiring rather than shocking or saddening. And this is one of the ways in which Bolaño replicates our necessary attitudes towards death in 2666—we’re aware of it, and feel pity, but only up to a point—death looms over our entire lives as something we must observe but cannot fathom. This sequence has already been called by multiple critics ‘the grimmest sequence in contemporary fiction,’ and that’s an accurate summation.

The final part details the life of the reclusive writer Archimboldi, the one critics were trying to track down in the first segment, and it encompasses his strange, aloof childhood, his service in WWII, an obsession with the diaries of a dead Ukrainian Jew, the genesis of his own works of fiction, his solitary wanderings, and finally, the unfortunate familial tie that draws him to Santa Teresa. This section (along with the first) is classic Bolaño—a sweeping narrative that’s odd, engrossing, populated with brilliantly detailed characters and fictional histories, and pulsing with an almost mythic sensibility.

Like The Savage Detectives, this is a magnificently rich book—one to be read and reread. But in 2666, there’s no romantic idealism, however faulty it was in The Savage Detectives, to find solace or hope in. There’s merely the overwhelming sense of impermanence, and a tension-addled wait for that great plunge into chaos—which of course never comes, in any way we can quantify, at least.

Here, Bolano draws death out in every way, every form that he can, as if to subject his characters to its enormous, incomprehensible presence—and they of course do what we all do, and ultimately what Bolano does, when considering death—they move on, ignore it, write about it, fail to confront or contain it, and finally, they acknowledge it.

This review originally appeared in Death+Taxes Magazine #16

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