I wouldn’t actually review a critically-acclaimed 900-page novel in three inane sentences, which is why I’m expanding on yesterday’s joke review. What I said there was true: this is an excellent book, and most of it does take place in Mexico. But it’s a big, complicated, messy book, and a few days after finishing, I’m still mulling over what I just read (whatever it was.)
2666 received a lot of boisterous praise a couple of years ago, a posthumous postmodern epic. Bolaño (who was Chilean-Mexican-Spanish) wrote it in a hurry as he was dying of liver disease. It’s five novels in one, and he originally intended for them to be published separately. They intersect and overlap, but there’s no neat conclusion that brings them all together. But the book (wonderfully translated by Natasha Wimmer) somehow just works.
The first section of the book is about four European literature professors—French, Spanish, Italian, and English—who become obsessed with an obscure German writer named Benno von Archimboldi. None of them know much about Archimboldi, though they attend conferences and write articles about the writer. Over a period of years, their long-distance friendships get complicated, and three of them become involved with Liz, the one woman in the group. They eventually get a hint that Archimboldi is living in Santa Teresa, a city in Northern Mexico, and they travel there to find him.
Photo: Kevin Cochran
The professors never find
Archimboldi, but they do meet a Chilean professor named Amalfitano, who lives in Santa Teresa with his teenage daughter. The book’s next section follows Amalfitano, who seems to be slowly losing his grip on sanity. Suddenly that section ends, and we’re in New York, where a journalist named Oscar Fate writes for a news magazine aimed at the black community. Fate’s editor sends him to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, though he becomes interested in a series of ongoing murders that has been happening in Santa Teresa for years. Investigating them is a risky plan—many previous reporters had been killed while looking into the killings.
None of these three plotlines are ever really resolved, and the book shifts abruptly into the fourth section, which is long and brutal and difficult to read. For a decade before the events of the novel, hundreds of women have been disappearing in Santa Teresa, only to turn up dead a few days later, often in the desert by the highway. (Santa Teresa is standing in for the Ciudad Juárez, where these crimes really happened.) Bolaño describes each and every crime in detail. Reading so many accounts of rapes and stabbings and bodies found in alleys, I was alternately depressed, terrified and most disturbingly, ambivalent–just like the police and the residents of Santa Teresa. By fatiguing his audience with all the gruesome details, Bolaño makes them empathize with the people of Santa Teresa in a way. The readers, like the people of Santa Teresa, is so worn out by the number of crimes that we no longer care.
Another jarring thing about the part about the crimes (which is actually called “The Part About The Crimes”—all five sections in the novel are named in that matter-of-fact pattern) is the contrast between the poor people of Santa Teresa and the educated middle class characters in the other sections. The women who are murdered are, for the most part, impoverished factory workers. The other characters are academics and reporters who show interest in the crimes, but who are far removed from them by nationality, education, and social status.
The section about the crimes ends abruptly, and suddenly Bolaño is in Germany in the 1920s. Hans Reiter is born in Prussia, grows up, fights in World War II, and becomes a writer under the name of Benno von Archimboldi. He changes his name for fear of getting caught after he killed a fellow POW (one who admitted to killing hundreds of Jews because he couldn’t figure out what else to do with them.)
This last section is so different from the previous ones that it felt like a completely different novel, but it was also my favorite. Maybe because there were echoes of Günter Grass in it, maybe because I’m more used to reading about Germany and Eastern Europe than I am about Mexico, or maybe because it was the last section I read. (By the time I got to the end, the writers and critics of the beginning of the book were only a vague memory. The reader has found Archimboldi, but the book’s other characters never do.)
2666 is difficult to describe. It’s long and it’s disjointed and it’s depressing. The title is never explained. The book’s major themes are death and violence. But it’s entertaining and at times even darkly funny. And even though it never neatly comes together, it somehow feels coherent. (There’s a moment at the end of Amalfitano’s section where he notes to himself: Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. This book falls into the latter category.) I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those books that sticks with me for a long time.
