2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: One of the most accomplished and powerful novels I've ever read
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolaño is an iconoclast among Latin American authors. While many have hailed him as the successor to the Colombian firebrand Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Chilean author's literary oeuvre suffers to be pigeonholed within the school of magical realism pioneered and extensively explored by the former. In fact, Bolaño shares more in common with the brand of cosmopolitan meta-fiction championed by the Argentineans Julio Cortázar (the random chapters of Hopscotch, their structure, or lack of it thereof) and Jorge Luis Borges (a fiction within a fiction, the paradoxically terse, yet labyrinthine scope of his writing).
Bolaño's writing not only divagates from the Boom archetypes of Spanish American literature; it also rakes a new path for the continent's new writers to explore a post-nationalist, generational paradigm shift in Hispanic though and culture without standing under the shadow of Marquez and contemporaries like Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. Nowhere else is his writing more decadently sampled than with his major novels--The Savage Detectives and his magnum opus, 2666, both translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 2666, the author's posthumously published novel, garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008. This massive, well-stuffed tome ingeniously covers a great deal of terrain that deals with a diverse pool of 21st century themes and tropes without ever providing closure--which, in a way, perhaps represents the most rewarding aspect of this novel.
The meandering storyline of 2666 plunges the mind into somnambulating within a world of quasi-surrealist dreams, entombing us within a parallel reality that "terrifies us all...amid blood and mortal wounds and stench." Indeed, what Bolaño accomplishes within the massive scope of his curiously varied literary terrain drowns us in the flood of questions--questions that urge us to digest on the tragic motifs of our broken humanity. Scenes exist in 2666 where the author waxes on that which is utterly grotesque and nauseating that we are awakened to a reminder of how we now live in an age that has become brutal by convention.
The novel is not seamless. It is a murder mystery, a fictional biography, a bibliophilic compendium of writers, and most of all a chronicle of the secret and parallel lives of Bolaño's fascinating characters who eventually converge to the city of Santa Teresa, Mexico. Within the sweep of its voluble, disturbing, experimental, and poetic prose, the author manages to create a stark contrast between a monochromatic and barren literary desert that is studded with the grotesque and the unnatural. His writing is verbose (some sentences tend to run for lines on end) and executed with a reckless abandon, but at the same time it is also dry and digressive; there is an abundance of characters who enrich the fictional landscape with their idiosyncrasies. Yet, he seems to ascribe little feeling to them, allowing the majority to wander about faceless. There are a few exceptions, however. Those that he does award with more than what is sparsely informative takes us across a whirlwind of images and dreams that push us further into unknown paths hemmed by obscure, shady, yet paradoxically drawing and lucid images.
The novel is divided into five distinct parts. The first book narrates a story about four obsessive academics who venture on a fruitless quest searching for the identity of the brilliant, mysterious, and elusive Thomas Pynchon-like persona Benno von Archimboldi. The trail leads them to Santa Teresa. At one point in this quixotic journey, the search is regarded as futile; the academics are then hinted about a wave of crimes that have ravaged the city. The next book tells the tale of a professor of letters in the University of Santa Teresa; he is a critic of the town's degenerate corruption, yet he is at the same time inescapably trapped within like a permanent fixture. Outside of his profession, his mind is rendered into a dull, drab graveyard apathetic to the ebb and flow of life. The third section introduces us to a New York sports writer who is sent to the city of Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match.
For the next three hundred pages, the novel turns into a dark and macabre vignette of impersonal images of death. Women are brutally murdered, raped, and nonchalantly disposed in the city, the desert, and the public areas of this drug cartel-infested cesspool. The women are either clandestine whores or helpless maquiladora (factory) workers who have come to the thriving industrial scene of Santa Teresa in search of money. For years, the crimes remain unsolved, and in the end, they never are. The fifth and last section is perhaps the finest and best crafted of the five novellas, revealing to us finally the identity of Benno von Archimboldi in a narrative that likewise reveals the true story of 2666.
While the five books within this novel paint a surreal picture within Bolaño's fictional universe, we are likewise able to draw parallelisms between his world and ours. For instance, the city of Santa Teresa that serves as its spatial locus strongly mirrors Mexico's Ciudad Juárez. But it is more than just that. It is a hell, a black hole that draws migrants to slave in foreign-owned maquiladoras that exploit them in the service of a global economic order oiled by the capitalist machinations of affluent industrialists. Santa Teresa is symbolic of the backroom where much of the real activity happens--the warehouse, the production line, the intricate system of cogs that keep the Western world afloat with an unjustly arrogated affluence. Like a black hole, it inevitably draws people into a promise of wealth that is coeval with the corruptive, fetid stench of a system stained by greed. Yet we are tempted to keep rummaging, to continue in our quest for moral ideals buried in Bolaño's fictional pandemonium.
One can perhaps say that the language and the style of this novel are ultimately difficult to ascribe into a defined, literary structure. The author deftly alternates between terse glimpses and an excessive, dizzying decadence. Some passages are spiked with a sparse sprinkling of adjectives, and later are deliberately ornamented with a copious outpouring of word paints that leave an abundance of open-ended questions about Bolaño's intentions in character, space, and plot. There is the constant presence of the simile and the metaphor. There is chaos and madness, and ironically there is order and beauty within this madness, challenging us to inspect the map of his jagged fiction with a lens focused on the author's construction of human aesthetics.
Throughout the novel's massive scope, Bolaño communicates a need to address the unexplored recesses of these morbid reveries through a deranged, corruptive maelstrom where reflections of reality become clearer as we wander across the mystical, metaphoric planes of these fabricated dreams. It is in the unexplained and the unknown that we must feel our way across the whispers, the muted details, and the wraith-like allusions in search for a glimmer of light in the pervasive darkness. While redemption is an absent feature in this novel, we are made even more aware of its rare and illuminating beauty in a novel preponderated by blackness and pain. The reader is invited and even coerced to grovel submissively into the grotesque and the grim asked only by the very greatest of books, and we awaken...more aware of the flaws of our broken humanity.
Book Review: A Set of Diamonds in the Rough
Summary: 4 Stars
I have a hard time imagining that any new novel I read this year will fill me as completely as 2666 did. I encourage you to read the book with interest, but without the expectation of perfection.
In 2666, the monumental novel that has brought so much joy to readers since the 18th and 19th centuries returns in the twenty-first century. Roberto Bolano displays enough breadth of vision to give Dickens something to think about. It's hard to describe this book without giving away details that might spoil your pleasure, but it's clear that everything and everybody are connected. That's also part of the attraction . . . because you want to know what all the connections are.
Bolano's 2666 provides a perspective that we don't get often enough in monumental novels, that of a novelist. In Part 1 "The Part about the Critics" we meet four academics who build careers (and indeed personal lives) around a little-appreciated German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi whom they have never met. The author's name alone will give you a clue that not all is as it seems. This story is by turns wicked satire, patronizing descriptions, tendentious morality tale, and hilariously warped view of the academic part of the literary establishment and its goings on. Only the obvious escapes them in their desire for privacy, comfort, career, and avoidance of loss. Before this part ends though, you'll feel like a strong magnet is pulling you and the characters towards an important appointment, one that will initially resist your understanding.
In Part 2 "The Part about Amalfitano" you will get to know Amalfitano who lives with his daughter Rosa in Santa Teresa, Mexico, a border town south of Tucson where sweat shop factories draw willing young workers from all over Mexico. You might think of Amalfitano as eccentric (after all, he has a book pinned to his clothes line based on something that Duchamp had once recommended), but it eventually turns out that he is a man in close contact with himself and reality. He is an educated man (a professor) from Europe who finds himself in a dusty town where the values are the opposite of any culture that he values. Like many of the characters, he has interesting dreams that help tell the story and enjoys the world of ideas. Some will see him as a stand-in for Don Quixote.
In Part 3 "The Part about Fate" you meet Oscar Fate (born Quincy Williams), an African American who is pulled away from his normal reporting to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. Fate doesn't have a clue about boxing and knows perhaps less about Mexico. Once there, he meets Guadalupe Roncal, a reporter from Mexico City, who wants to write about the many women who are being sexually attacked and killed in the Santa Teresa area. After the fight, Fate meets Rosa Amalfitano and eventually her father. Fate becomes our eyes into a culture that is terribly dangerous for women. Before the part's end you meet a mysterious blond giant.
In Part 4 "The Part about the Crimes" you will read in nauseating detail about what has been happening to women in and around Santa Teresa. Bolano buries you through repetition into being numb about the horrors, the callousness of those who prey on the women, and the attitudes of the police and other officials in the context of a very male chauvinist culture. By the end of this part, you'll piece together what's going on . . . which is more than the investigators do. I advise you to read this segment when you are in a good mood and in small doses.
In Part 5 "The Part about Archimboldi, you get to look behind the author's legend to meet the man and his family. It's the best part of the book and reminded me a lot of reading what Gunter Grass had to say in Peeling the Onion about emerging as a writer. Bolano adds power by dropping in little stories and events that complete and magnify other parts of the book. I savored this part right up to the final shoe dropping.
Bolano has an amazing ability to pile story on top of story on top of story so that you are seeing the subject (or the world) through an endless series of mirrors that display all dimensions simultaneously. His imagination to do this is immense. Due to his untimely death as he raced to finish this work, I don't think that these complex structures always received the polish they deserved. For instance, there are a few facts of 2666 that are never finished. Clearly, a good editor would have helped Bolano to flesh out such chinks in the reflective surface.
The translation often seems rough. You can tell because other parts are extremely smooth and well developed. It's not clear how much of this is due to the original not being fully polished or the translation being rushed.
To me, a monumental novel has to convey a sense of what the world is really about. You see that in a work like Crime and Punishment. Bolano also shares his worldview through the actions his characters take and their fates. The philosophy is clearly summarized by John Donne in that we are all connected and the loss of any one is a loss to all. Much of the story's development can be seen in the context of Catholic theology with many of the references unavoidable (such as the crucified general). Bolano's view is also that every thing we think or do affects everyone else. Ultimately, he sees us as all tied together because we are attracted to one another (even if the attraction is sometimes a perverse one). Behind all of these connections is a strong force drawing us to right wrongs, even when there seems to be no chance to succeed.
Although you can feel that the book spends too much time on the tawdry, its ultimate message is a very positive and life-affirming one . . . you can make a positive difference, if only you make the effort.
Book Review: Embracing Literature, Details of Contemporary Life, Universality
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolano's last novel, 2666, evokes so much of life even as it seems to violate form and content prescriptions for writing fiction. It is also a page turner despite its length and the often violent nature of one subtext related to the ongoing unsolved murders of so many young Mexican women, many of whom are poor factory workers. The novel simultaneously embraces literature, encompasses details of contemporary life, and evokes universality.
Professor Mitchell's summary review offers a larger outline of sorts of the books five parts, but I would like to offer a few sections that show readers details behind the more abstract words of praise.
The first part about critics lays bare many problems with current academic literary criticism - its isolated and isolating search for an obscure author who ostensibly "reveals" life, who might become the Nobel recipient, but who is elusive and thus prized or at least greatly discussed in academic circles. The supposed little known German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, becomes the singular life focus of certain critics (from France, Spain, and England as well as Italy) about whom they publish and give talks at conferences. Their personal lives become intensely intertwined as they write about and then search for Archimboldi which becomes, in effect, a search for meaning in their own lives. Near the end of this first section, three of the critics arrive in back-water northern Mexico (University of Santa Teresa), meet a professor there, Amalfitano, supposedly another Archimboldi expert. They initially judge him with the following long sentence in typical Bolano style where he breaks most grammar rules yet yields something more:
"The first impression the critics had was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the awful terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border." (pg. 114)
Bolano ends the paragraph by describing the critics' perceptions: two saw him as failed because though he [Chilean-born, they discovered later] had lived and taught in Europe but had not developed have the necessary tough veneer and "his innate gentleness gave him away in the act." One thought him a sad person whose life was slipping away quickly.
Shortly thereafter in the same first section follows another Bolano extended passage (pgs 120-23), this time as Amalfitano responds to the critics' discussion about Latin American intellectuals. He says that many Mexican (and Latin American) intellectuals just wanted to get by whereas some were more interested in writing. As the critics ask what he means, Amalfitano launches into a three-page discourse on intellectuals there and in Europe, their means of support, particularly state support and university jobs in which they lose their way (what he calls their shadow) and often abuse alcohol to forget their lost shadow. And then Amalfitano then begins a long passage that echoes not only Shakespeare and Plato but also life itself:
"And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The state is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoetic noise, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads they can't see anything. The only sounds they hear come from deep in the mine. And they translate and reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they hear a hurricane, they try to be eloquent when they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence..." (121-122) Amalifanto's monologue continues about life and art and their intersection for another page or so, to which one critic then merely replies that she doesn't understand a word he's said.
These are only two examples of how Bolano's novel embraces and conveys life in all its complexity. This does not seem like fiction: it mixes art, life, and universal truths. It is worth not only a first read but many more.
2666: A Novel
Book Review: I found this long-winded, unfocused and pretentious
Summary: 2 Stars
I was really looking forward to reading "2666." Not only did this book make the 2008 top-10 list of just about every fiction critic in the country, but the book's ostensible subject matter, the unsolved rape/murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican state of Sonora, certainly deserves serious literary attention. It took me two months to read, however, and while parts of it were interesting, even compelling, most of it was a slog, and there never comes a point at which it all came together in any way at all for me, let alone one that cried "genius."
I fully admit that Bolano is smarter and better-read than I am. So is Umberto Eco. But when Eco starts rattling off the names of other literary works, as he does with some frequency in, say, "Foucault's Pendulum," it always feels like it's relevant to the plot. In "2666," it feels like Bolano is just throwing out laundry lists of literature, philosophy, art, history, and even biology and math, solely to impress you with the depth and breadth of his knowledge. It may or may not relate to the plot, which isn't surprising, since there really isn't much of a plot. The five books that make up this volume are only loosely related, and even within the different books, there is not always much cohesion. Bolano will start out talking about one or more characters, but the minute he sees the literary equivalent of a shiny object, he runs off after it. While chasing said shiny object, he may see another shiny object and abandon the chase for the first one. At some point, he might remember what he was doing before he wandered off-course, but not always. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness with lots of accounts of people's dreams. If you don't mind rambling thoughts and "deep" philosophy that goes on for so long that when he does occasionally return to an early character you find yourself wondering who he's talking about, you might be enchanted. But if you need to have characters that you love or like, or even ones you hate, you're out of luck here.
As an example of the character problem, let's take Book 1, which focuses on four scholars who are obsessed with the works of an obscure German writer named Archimboldi. Three of the scholars are male, and all are in love with the one female scholar, although I was never sure why, since Bolano doesn't give her any traits that would seem to inspire that level of devotion. Two of the three men are completely interchangable -- other than the fact that one is Spanish and one is French, they might be the same person. Maybe that was the point, but if so, I missed it. The third one is Italian and in a wheelchair. Otherwise, he is just as sketchily drawn. I didn't like them, I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them and when their story suddenly ended, along with Book 1, never to be taken up again, I wondered why Bolano had wasted so much time with them.
Books 2 & 3 fare somewhat better, but Bolano can't stick with the interesting characters. I loved Book 3 when it dealt with Oscar Fate, a writer who gets roped into covering a boxing match in Sonora for his magazine when the sports writer dies, but first Oscar has to spend 75 pages or so with a formerly jailed black radical for no apparent reason. Then it's on to Mexico, where the raped/murdered women still rate barely a sentence background mention. We finally get to those women in Book 4. Boy do we get to them.
Book 4 is l...o...n...g and, as others have noted, filled with lots of gruesome and sad details about the girls & women who've been raped and murdered. At first I thought, "yes -- someone is giving these women an identity and a voice," but after awhile there are so many of them, and so little story to them, that you stop caring. Again, this could be the point. There are some interesting characters in this section, but there are so many people, it's hard to know who or what is important. Maybe none of it is. And when Bolano talks about how the American police profiler was always referred to at home in the U.S. by his young lawyer and doctor neighbors as Mr. ______, you doubt he even knows what he's talking about. Is anyone in your neighborhood under retirement age referred to by everyone else as Mr.? Bolano has clearly read a lot, but it feels like most of what he's writing about he learned in books, rather than by experience, and it creates a sense of distance that doesn't seem intentional but is off-putting nevertheless.
The final book is about Archimboldi's days as a strange, young German named Hans Reiter, but the story wanders all over Romania and Russia with a lot of divergences, most of them unconvincing. I kept waiting for Bolano to tie it all together, but he never did. Ultimately, the book seemed to be a portrait of despair and indifference, which was represented at its most perfect by Sonora.
As a final warning to potential readers, the middle three books are written without paragraphs, and sections often go on for pages. There is even a sentence at one point that is about 5 pages long. 900 pages is not actually that long a book, but those pages are extremely dense and the translation is grammatically awkward in places, making it slower-going still.
If you like rambling, philosophical musings, and don't mind characters, stories and events that just end whenever the writer gets tired of exploring them, you're not in a hurry when you read, and you don't mind reading being hard work, you might like this book. Certainly a lot of people did. I just wasn't one of them.
Book Review: A 900 Page Twitter Feed
Summary: 2 Stars
If you are considering reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666, no doubt you are already aware of the overwhelming, even rapturous praise this book has received from literary critics. Bolaño is something of a cult-hero among literary intellectuals and has been elevated to a near-mythical status; the book has been heralded as both revolutionary and brilliant. Given such praise, this reader was left sorely disappointed by the book and mystified by the intensity of the praise.
Bolaño attempts to write a `cosmic' novel that stretches far beyond the narrow confines of a single character or narrative. This book is hugely ambitious, although that wasn't readily obvious for much of the reading. Bolaño's cosmos is disorderly, mostly random, emotionally flat, and depressive - one might say that it is filled with despair, except that despair suggests stronger emotions than the narrative ever shows. Rambling across the 900 pages of Bolano's 2666 are 5 different novels, each one only loosely connected to the others. The book opens with 500 pages of narrative that is banal, boring and mostly pointless. The narrative often works through digressions and random connections, a technique that could be interesting enough (and occasionally during the 900 pages is). At their best (the fifth book) the tangents can be rather fun as one story gets sidetracked into another. In other instances this strategy produces disturbing results - a feeling of the general inconclusiveness of human projects, even a sense of meaninglessness. However, for the most part the digressions feel pointless, almost all of them unenlightening. At its worst, this habit of digressing just resembles (very strongly) bad writing; so much so, I find it indistinguishable. One has little idea why the author has chosen to relate one set of details or occurrences instead of another. Imagine reading a 500 page twitter feed and you begin to get an idea.
Like the narrative, the characters who inhabit this novel are mostly underdeveloped and for the most part totally unconvincing (with few exceptions). One has to believe that Bolaño intended this - but that it happened somewhat by default. He just couldn't be bothered or didn't care to flesh out his characters in a way that his readers might actually relate to or feel for them. They wander through his narrative landscape confused, directionless, and emotionally flat. Perhaps they are tribe of "strangers" out of Camus; perhaps they are simply the creations of an extreme depressive. I'm not sure.
I was left with two questions that are not about the book so much as its relation to the current cultural context. First: what did Bolaño think he was doing? Second: why has the literary establishment been creaming itself over this book (excuse the vulgarity)? I don't have any good answers to the first question. The closest I can come is that the author is subverting classical narrative urges and writing a novel where narratives have no closure; either they sidetrack into tangents or they simply lose volition and peter out. Given that this probably willful, one cannot accuse the author of lacking skill or craft. The second question has led me to a hasty review of the reviews of this book. The literature is extensive, but the following seem rather typical: In the New York Review of Books, Sarah Kerr writes "Amalfitano calls to mind a medieval squire, wanting but failing to protect the girl..." Of course, if you haven't read the book this makes no sense. But it makes no more sense if you have read the book as there is nothing about medieval squires in this book. It is basically a free-association (as is much of the book). Writing in the more middlebrow Time, Lev Grossman, turns vice into virtue, writing that, "the relentless gratuitousness of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which builds into something overwhelming that hits you all the harder because you don't see it coming." Actually, I didn't see it coming, didn't see it when it came, and didn't see it when it had already come. There was nothing to see. The New York Times praises 'narrative velocity". This in a book where nothing happens for 500 pages.
Perhaps this really is the birth of a new literature (that's another bit of praise from the critics). But my own take is that these people read so much literature good and bad that they are just really bored of the conventional elements that make most of us enjoy a story: well drawn, convincing characters, a fascinating narrative that is neither too obvious or overly incoherent, expressive language, philosophical depth, an engagement with other narratives - historical, psychological, philosophical and yes, even literary, -- and perhaps some linguistic or intellectual treats for the attentive reader. However, such effusive praise for a book like this is an insult to good writers (and good writing); writers who succeed on multiple levels of telling a good story, giving us characters we care about, insights into the world around us, and food for the intellect to chew on. For large stretches, even most of 2666, Bolaño gives the reader none of that. Are the critiques all afraid to say what is so blatantly obvious, afraid of their own reputations in front of their peers?
Read this book if you want to be part of this conversation. It's not hard. But there are lots of other good, great, and even 'cosmic' novels you could spend your time with.