2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: The first great novel of the global age
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is astonishing. There is more life - with all of its blood, hope, love, stench, tenderness, confusion, morality, fear, violence, sex, mystery, loneliness, and death - pulsing through these pages than any other book I can think of save, perhaps, War & Peace. It presents compelling and absolutely convincing portraits of multiple male and female characters from diverse cultures, ethnicities and generations. It covers almost an entire century in time, right up to the present, and takes place on at least three continents. The novel contains stories inside of stories inside of stories, and the result is that it seems as if half the world's population walks between the covers of this book. And Bolano illuminates many dark chambers of their individual and collective souls. Many, many passages left me staring into space in stunned silence for the quality of the language and the quality of the Truth with a "T." Characters might appear for just a few pages and then vanish from the text, but while they are present they appear as fully formed people with wants, fears and desires that seem profoundly real. I have read nothing like it.
Critics will complain about the lack of plot unity (although it, like history, all does come loosely together) and story progression (as in life, the random people talking about things both frivolous and essential juxtaposed with the mindnumbing number of horrific and inexplicable homicides are all part of his point), but I suspect their criticism results from the book not meeting their preconceptions of what a book is or should be. I suspect they don't know what to make of all of these characters coming and going in a manner that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to advance the story. To those readers who have initial difficulty with the book, I would advise to stop waiting for "things to happen," stop waiting for one plot point to lead inevitably to the next. Instead, concentrate on the characters you meet along the way. Try to recognize their individual passions, fears and concerns and notice how these may or may not be like your own passions and fears and concerns, and rejoyce in our oddities. Bolano shows us we are all a riddle inside a paradox. While there are big and important themes in this book, initial pleasure is found by recognizing the awe in and of the individual characters in small and even disconnected realizations. As my mother often reminds me, the real joy of life is found in the small moments. If you only care about the big moments, life will be a disappointment. The same is true with 2666.
But, as I said, there is much more beyond the small moments of this book. There are big themes and multiple layers. One (and only one) important layer to the book, and perhaps the reason some people have claimed Bolano is a writer for writers, is that the whole thing is a metaphor for an artist's relationship with his work in light of mortality, specifically Bolano's concerns about his own literary legacy in light of his impending death. I don't want to say too much about the ending of the book, which I found, like the rest of the book, to be glorious for its presentation of life's silmultaneous profundity and meaninglessness. But the ending is a perfect example of a random character, who literally enters the book on the second to last page, talking, with a distinct and convincing voice, about something (and someone else who is not in the book) that is interesting but mundane and seemingly totally irrelevant. Yet behind the voice of the character we recognize that the real speaker is Bolano wondering about his own literary legacy. As we all do, he is asking himself if he will be remembered, and if so, for what? Will it be for his masterpiece, or for some small thing in his life that he does not even recognize? After all, what will you be remembered for, and by whom? Can you say? Probably not. When the book is read with this understanding, it is never, to borrow a word from 2666, "cloying."
This book comes out of the tradition of masterly works, and like the works of all the masters before, it charts an entirely new course in literature. It is silly and pointless to hold up masterpieces against one another - I treasure many books that have been written in my lifetime - but if there is a better or more important book written in the last forty years, I have not read it. Yes, 2666 has imperfections, but somehow those imperfections are like beauty marks and only add to its colossal grandeur. If ever there was a book that was meant to be unfinished (and it doesn't read like it was unfinished), this is the book, for it is a representation of the world with its unending cycles of births and deaths and all that happens between. Like the other very, very great books, this book doesn't just change what is possible in fiction; it changes our understanding of our world and of our places in it. This is less a book than a symphonic mirror held up to our humanity and our history, to what we are and what we have wrought. God help us, and God bless Roberto Bolano.
Book Review: MANKIND CANNOT BEAR VERY MUCH REALITY
Summary: 5 Stars
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(T.S. Eliot, from "Burnt Norton")
When asked for a title for this review, the first thing that came to mind was that line from Eliot's Four Quartets. God, what a lot of reality! I sympathize and for a while almost agreed with the reviewer who wondered why he was wasting his life reading it. After the first part you start to suspect that it's going nowhere, that all the incidental stories and digressions are not leading anywhere and that their links to each other are tenuous at best and often nonexistent. The critics' search for a mysterious author fail (although I must say that this part of the book does have its own unexpected and rather sweet resolution), the part about the Santa Teresa serial killings, an endless litany of blood, rape and gore, remains unsolved, and the whole book ends in mid-stride--not like Finnegans Wake, which loops you back to the beginning, but at a moment pregnant with a future we can never know: What might happen and what has happened, pointing to one end, which is always present. In a way it's a return to the episodic picaresque tales which preceded the modern novel as we understand it. At the same time Bolaño takes a bold leap into the unknown. It's hard to talk about him without contradicting yourself.
The book is a flood of present moments that can drown the reader. The incidents are sometimes nested inside one another like Chinese boxes, sometimes springing out of nowhere and going nowhere--just like life! But isn't art supposed to give us some refuge from life? bring some order to the chaos of reality? Bolaño answered this in an interview. He said, "We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie." This sounded so good to me that I put the quote on my website, because it seemed to reflect my own work as a painter. But when I was about halfway through these 893 pages, I thought, no, that's not right. A work of art is a focal point, an object to reflect upon, a still point of the turning world, to quote Eliot again. Dashiel Hammet, David Mammet, Edward Hopper--they have the right idea: Exclude everything irrelevant to the story, the movie, the painting. Bolaño is the exact opposite of those guys! He throws in everything! Everything in his peripheral vision is examined, every rumor speculated upon, every dream faithfully recorded, every possibility elaborated upon. (In this he sometimes reminds me of Saramago, especially when he appropriates the Portuguese writer's reinvention of punctuation). I began to feel that he was abdicating his responsibility as an artist to give us something to focus on, and I removed the quote from my web site.
However, I couldn't stop reading the book. For some reason that I can't quite explain, it's a page-turner! But I continued to have a bad feeling that I was going to be disappointed and left hung out to dry at the end. Which is sort of true ... but only on the surface. It wasn't until I was maybe 20 pages from the end that I began to get it and realize that I was going to be satisfied after all. Up until then, even though it had given me lots of food for thought about what art is and is not, I would not have recommended this book to anybody. But now I see that I was wrong. There is a kind of profound resolution in its very lack of resolution. Bolaño looks for truth not at the center but at the edges of life.
But here's another contradiction: There is a focal point, but it's not visible. That is the central mystery of 2666. All the stories, all the digressions, all the lives which almost but not quite touch, like people in a maze, inches from each other but separated by a wall, all the loving and hating, all the sex and killing, all are circling around a central point, like lost planets orbiting an invisible sun, "the still point of the turning world."
For Bolaño a novel is not a single predominant thread but the whole infinite tangle of threads, the sum of all those trivial moments. One of his characters--I suppose you could call him the central character--Archimboldi, says "that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness." I think that's how Bolaño views life too, and the art of writing. When he finished this book he died.
2666 is a date. It's never mentioned in the book, but a clue to its meaning is given in an earlier novel of his, Amulet (1999). "Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
Book Review: Bolano's Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Bolano's 1100 page (Spanish Edition) magnus opus is mesmerizing and hypnotic; full of magical stories, violence, sex, meta-fiction, and lies--a lot of lies and a great deal of misdirection.
When I finished the novel I started again; it was the only thing to do; there was too much to absorb on the first reading; too many themes--writing, violence, detectives, murder, identity, travel, death, books, libraries, biographies, success, failure, race, fascism, Nazis, and war.
The writing in itself is beautiful, a poet's book, written by a poet, and translated beautifully by Natasha Wimmer.
The story, in a nutshell, is the life story of a German soldier by the name of Hans Reiter, who, in mid-life in the bombed-out city of Cologne, after the Second World War, changes his name to Benno von Archimboldi and writes his first novel. This story seems to be a conflation of several writers' biographies--Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, and surely Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau (I don't think you will see this in any other critique of the book but Bolano gives a brilliant clue at the end of the novel and the parallels between Benno and Prince Herman are quite interesting to trace. Why did he chose him? Because he is better remembered for the ice cream named after him than the books he a wrote and the life he lived.)
From this brief synopsis grows a story of the world in the Twentieth Century. It begins with Reiter's birth in Prussia and ends in the present day. The book contains hundreds of characters and their stories, each told by the same voice, a narrator, who Bolano once said was the fictional poet, Arturo Belano, a character in his brilliant novel--"The Savage Detectives."
So, we have a story told, not shown, which covers eighty years.
The novel contains five parts, which are almost self-contained, but when read together fit perfectly. The five parts are: (1) The Part about the Critics; (2) The Part about Amalfitano; (3) The Part about Fate; (4) The Part about the Crimes; and (5) The Part about Archimboldi.
Part One tells the story of four academics reading, studying, and writing about the reclusive Archimboldi, who is being considered for the Nobel Prize. Their study leads them ultimately to Sonora, to Santa Teresa (a conflation of Jaurez and Heroica Nogales), where a serial killer is operating.
Parts Two, Three, and Four take place in Sonora and involve--a university professor, an American journalist, and many detectives. These three sections all involve the killings in Santa Teresa from one view or another.
Part Five is a chronological telling of the life of Archimboldi, which precedes the action in Part One.
Throughout the telling of the story hundreds of books are mentioned and discussed. Some are real books; some are made up; and others are simply conflated. However, ultimately, it is a writer's book or perhaps just a book for readers, real readers, readers interested in mystery and games, language games, and ghastly murders.
The plot of the novel is driven by mysteries: where is Archimboldi, who is Archimboldi, who is killing the women of Santa Teresa? However, the beauty of the book is in the slow telling of the stories and the minutia of the details.
I cannot do the novel justice; it has to be read closely to appreciate it, but there is a clue to its most fundamental theme: throughout the novel people are buried in mass graves, the graves are hidden because more often than not the murderers are trying to hide their crimes. However, in each instance, the graves are discovered and the bodies uncovered; just as stories are told and the secrets revealed. And herein lies the meaning of the title and I think the fundamental theme of a book full of themes and ideas; it arises or it is hidden in a quote from the "Savage Detectives:" "Guerreo, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
In other words, our world is more like an uncovered cemetery of the future, full of violence and death. The science of the Twentieth Century devised ways to systematically kill thousands of people. But even now, after the war, the killing continues in the bizarre nightmare milieus of border towns, the situs of the maquiladoras, in refugee camps in Africa, in race wars all over the war, the Fifth Ward, in Compton, in our back yards.
Santa Teresa is supposedly modeled on Juarez where there are 340 maguiladoras operating. Here is the future, stranger than we can imagine, which makes the book in my mind slipstream.
Book Review: The Whole Universe Falling on Your Head
Summary: 5 Stars
Suppose you were lucky enough to be alive in Paris when Joyce's "Ulysses" first appeared or when Proust's Marcel arrived; wouldn't you feel blessed and lucky and amazed? Well, here's your chance: you are alive when the novels of Roberto Bolano are first appearing, the most important literary event in South American and world literature since the arrival of Gabriel Garcia Marques. Unfortunately, Bolano is not alive to share in your excitement but in his great novel, "2666" he clearly anticipated the posthumous career of a creator who can reveal himself only through his creations.
Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) began as a poet; his magical novel, "The Savage Detectives" described the hopeless search for the founders of a bizarre Mexican literary movement, one of whose leaders is Arturo Belano, the unnamed narrator of "2666". The latter novel, only recently detonated in the English-speaking world, is the author's masterpiece, a great baggy word-intoxicated book with all of the ambition, and some of the mechanics, of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". Like Proust, the set pieces move at a speed one might call "real" time in that it takes as much time to read about the event as it probably took to experience it in real life. Like Proust's great work, Bolano's books are arriving posthumously, year after year, volume after volume. Concerned about the financial security of his family after his premature death, Bolano intended for the five long novellas of "2666" to appear one after the other. His heirs decided to print the five novels as a unified whole, a decidedly wise decision. It is only through the compression of reading the entire 893 pages in one sitting that one can detect the correspondences between the different sections and note the transformation in the writer's strategy from the omniscience of Proust to the dogged Thomas Mann of "The Magic Mountain".
In section V, The Part About Archimboldi, the novel's locus moves from Mexico and North America to Germany and time steadily speeds up from the Second World War to the present, exactly the time-lapse strategy of The Magic Mountain's final pages. Section V solves the identity of the writer chased by the critics in Part I and, in a chilling description of how ordinary townspeople could shoot Jews in pits during the Second World War, explains the banality of evil underlying the multiple rapes and deaths of young Mexican women in Part IV. In its restraint and quietude, Part V is the most moving and dramatic literary explanation of the Holocaust ever written, a triumph achieved without sentimentality and without a single description of the camps. In section III, The Part About Fate, Bolano brings a black reporter from Detroit to Santa Teresa, the town where the murders are occurring, and stretches his canvas to cover all nationalities and ethnicities. To my taste, Section II, concerning the removal of one of Archimboldi's critics from Spain to Mexico, is the weakest part of "2666", though the writing, as always, is detailed and poetic in the best sense of the term. The drum beat of rapes and murders in Part IV, each of which carries the plot outline for an entire novel by a lesser writer, creates an inexorable tension, one that is relieved by the more conventional narrative flow of Part V.
Bolano's novels are as much about writing per se as the poems of Wallace Stevens are about the art of poetry. Both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" are set up as a type of detective fiction because life and creativity are fundamental mysteries; that the novels end somewhat inconclusively is consistent with the profound difficulties of such mysteries. Part 1 is an extended set piece on academic life, the pretensions of critics, and the mysterious explication of a writer's life and the meaning of his work. It is the most humorous part of the book and tenderly sexual in a way that the rest of the novel is not. That an unknown author might be a candidate for the Nobel Prize is a painful irony that the dying Bolano understood only too well; Death is introduced as an explicit character in Part V. One must remember that Bolano gave up the chance for a life-saving liver transplant in order to complete "2666".
The novel eschews ordinary plot development, standard grammar and the use of quotation marks to break up the solid blocks of prose. This is simply another way of saying that although Bolano stopped writing poetry in order to feed his family from his fiction, "2666" reads like an extended poem. When the mysterious writer of Part I is uncovered in Part V standing beneath a sky lit by stars burnt out long ago, he and his girlfriend are described returning to a village "while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads." In this encyclopedic novel, you will feel that way too, alone and connected to everything.
Book Review: The Great World Novel!
Summary: 5 Stars
As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here).
Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant).
This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did.
The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly.
I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter.
Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again.