2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: Bolaño's Irony
Summary: 5 Stars
In early reviews of the book, the reviewers--probably because of hasty readings--dwell on the obvious: Part 4 and the serial killings in Mexico. Also the title, that mysterious date, seems to draw like attention. While these are worthy points of interest, I suspect they are part of Roberto Bolaño's subterfuge.
If Part 4 and the murders is his reason for writing the book, why the four critics, why Amalfitano, why Mexico, why Archimboldi and his experience of the most brutal war in modern history? Surely something must tie these odd happenstances together.
For instance, what would tie Part 4 to Archimboldi's story (other than the fact that he went there, probably to help out Klaus)? First, I think Bolaño, in depicting WWII's eastern front akin to the brutal murders of women and the drug-related killings in Mexico, wants us to look at the role of violence in the human psyche. Germany, a heavily industrialized and technologically creative nation prior to WWII, committed its creative prowess to racial purity and war-fostered expansion, as did the Soviet Union.
Bolaño makes continual mention of Mexico's maquiladoras, the import and assembly zones for products previously made (most often) in the U.S. These were supposed to be a commercial godsend to a society immobilized by class strictures and poverty. But Bolaño's characters, while benefiting from these jobs, continually drift into crimes of various sorts, or are victims of such crimes. Whether he intended to expose Mexico's population as remaining education-poor and barely living on low wages, or whether he believed that such jobs left Mexicans soul-poor is unclear. But he does depict that technology and economic well-being orchestrated for all the wrong reasons leaves humanity to wallow in their baser instincts.
And what to make of the sexual crimes, the constant references to his characters in the throes of copulation? This seems to Bolaño to be both a human escape from the ravages of poverty and war and a physical preoccupation to counter spiritual and intellectual poverty.
Amalfitano, in hanging his geometry treatise on the clothesline, seems to be saying that human efforts to raise itself up through intellectual and spiritual pursuits remain at the mercy of natural forces - violence and sex. In this, Bolaño's thinking aligns itself with that depicted in Cormac McCarthy's violence and sex-soaked stories.
Finally, Bolaño the writer wanted, I suspect, to pass on, as his death neared, his views of the writing life, literary fame and the value of literature itself. The irony of the four critics looking for Archimboldi in Mexico--while a few oblique references seem to mention him as a ragtag wanderer in Mexico's outback--becomes poignant. They're looking for an academic, a person of literary fame. Archimboldi, on the other hand is a man bearing the burdens of war and scratching out an existence through writing, a life that seems similar to the plight of modern Mexican workers. If one were to extend this as metaphor, we could see humans grappling for meaning in all the wrong places, much as the four critics continue to search for Archimboldi as something he is not nor ever will be. Archimboldi, through his persistence as a writer, gains a measure of literary fame, but this is a veneer the world has placed over him that in no way represents the person. As such, Bolaño has created in Archimboldi the highest form of irony.
As for 2666 - the date? I see nothing particularly significant about it, other than to say that Bolaño sees only a continuation of this state of affairs some 660 years into our future. But most good writers take the time to expose such aspects of the human condition in the hopes that awareness of them will allow the rest of us to cope with our foibles in a constructive manner, to turn our human swords into plowshares that will sustain us. One can hope that such a monumental task wasn't beyond Bolaño's vision--and isn't beyond humanity's capabilities.
Book Review: The Heart of Corruption
Summary: 5 Stars
On a recent trip through Manchester airport I was amazed to see copies of 2666 piled high in the departure lounge bookstore. Who did they think the target audience was for this lengthy literary novel?
Part 1, The Part About The Critics, tells a mostly self-contained story about a quartet of academics who specialise in the obscure German author Benno von Archimboldi. Each of the four gets their own back-story, and we follow their quest to find the author, a trail which leads to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juarez). The story has highly stylised sections in the `magical realism' tradition (do academics ever beat up taxi drivers?) and appears to end inconclusively - perhaps a meditation on the strange paths of love, or the fickle ways of women? Or Santa Teresa's powers of deflection.
At this point of my journey, I'm wondering where this story gets us, noting that not a whole lot has happened, and that I'm only on page 159 of an 893 page novel.
I grit my teeth and continue.
The shorter Part 2, The Part About Amalfitano, takes a minor character from the first part - a Chilean literary academic at the University of Santa Teresa and his daughter Rosa - and fills out their back story, mostly concerning the runaway wife, Lola.
Part 3, The Part About Fate, describes an American reporter, Oscar Fate who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. While there, he gets involved with the local narcos and meets Rosa from part 2. Oscar by some miracle manages to escape Santa Teresa with his life. In this part we begin to circle around the increasing numbers of sexually-violated and murdered young women found in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the desert: crimes which the police seem unable to solve.
Part 4, The Part About The Crimes, takes us directly into the unending horror of underclass life in Santa Teresa. This is by far the longest novel in the collection. We meet the police: uneducated, casually violent, brutally chauvinistic and content to tiptoe around the atrocities of the powerful. We meet the suspect, a German businessman banged up for years while the crimes continue. And we discover the private lives of the narco lords: drug and sex-fuelled parties in their desert ranches with no inconvenient witnesses afterwards.
Part 5, The Part About Archimboldi, takes us back to the mysterious German author who was the subject of the quest in part 1. We now learn his life story, his wartime exploits and why, in his late life, he finally found himself for the first time in Santa Teresa.
In the Notes to the First Edition at the back of the book, Ignacio Echevarria, Bolano's literary executor, tries to account for the title. He looks to an earlier novel of Bolano, Amulet, where a seedy, downbeat avenue at night in some Mexican town is described as like a cemetery: "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."
Santa Teresa may be the physical centre of this interlinked novel-set, as Echevarria observes, but it is also a symbol - a submerged, carnivorous, tentacled thing that draws in the powerless and horribly consumes them. Omnipresent corruption, where the powerful use ordinary people for their money or their bodies, then dispose of them with casual, lethal brutality. The murderous events depicted in 2666 actually occurred in Ciudad Juarez, where more than 400 women have been the victims of sexual homicides.
These five novels are five journeys into the heart of corruption, starting from afar and gradually taking us closer to its centre. If anyone thinks a corrupt society is just about the venal sin of taking bribes, this novel will make them think again.
Book Review: Imperfection Perfected
Summary: 5 Stars
2666, originally published in Spanish in 2003, is the last novel of Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre, completed just before his death of that same year. Translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008, the deceased Chilean author's 900-page magnum opus has, since its November 11th release in the United States, received unanimous acclaim. TIME, for instance, proclaimed it the best novel of 2008 as did The New York Times, setting it beside four others. Some are considering it the entire re-invention of the novel...the novel not of America, no...it's not the next great American novel, nor is it the next great Latin American novel, not anything like that...the novel of the WORLD (as someone else has said here). The next great World novel. The Book is around 900 pages and is separated into 5 parts, all of which are distinctive by themselves with their own set of characters but connect together in a gigantic thematic web reaching across the tome's pages. And the pages themselves across the entire world.
Much of the novel is centered around what Bolaño called "The World's Graveyard," Ciudad Juarez, which is given, in the book, the fictionalized name "Santa Teresa," an industrial city on the border of Mexico and the US. There, for the past 10 years or so, women have been subject to a growing number of serial killings, more than 500 documented thus far. The novel consists of five separate, overlapping story arcs, each, in subtle ways, more dark and violent than the one preceding, that is, until the fourth part "The Part About the Crimes," the climax, where some 200 dead women are documented in the fashion of a police or autopsy report with flat, objective prose. It's this lack of emotion in the telling of the horrible violence that ironically brings forth sympathy from the reader. It's a dark outlook on the violence present in humanity, especially that in Mexico which often is brushed aside. Is this the first time YOU'VE ever heard of Ciudad Juarez?
And, yet, just as well, it is a meditation on literature. Each section's main characters are scholars, professors, journalists, novelists, &c., and it's through these narratives that Bolaño expresses his own feelings of current writing. He felt that too much literature isn't as free-wheeling and raw as it should be. Or that the risky works aren't read as much as they should. Or that there are too many rules for ambitious writers. Rules that Bolaño disregards. Writing is not a perfected art and should never be created with that type of goal in mind for the end product. 2666 isn't perfect; in fact, it's an ugly and messy and battled work of art, so anyone who reads 2666 should expect Lynchian non-sequiturs, digressions galore, and unanswered questions. If none of the above is "your thing," this book you should, at all costs, stay away from. In it, a character Amifaltano thinks the following:
"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. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
--I don't doubt this quote will become a classic one as I've seen it in most every review I've read so far.
It's the epitome of what Literature is supposed to do, and what most don't. "Masterpiece," "spellbinding," "wonderful," blah blah blah...but most importanly, it is: a testament of what literature can truly do. And that, Bolaño has proven, is a lot.
Book Review: Bolaño's Masterpiece - "a steaming cup of peyote."
Summary: 5 Stars
According to Mrs. Bubis, wife of publisher Mr. Bubis, one of the only people alive that knew Benno von Archimboldi, "how well anyone could really know of another person's work?"
Reading "2666" by Roberto Bolaño, I feel the same way. It has been quite a journey for the English reader with a talent of his kind. From "By Night in Chile" to the chilling "Romantic Dogs," (which I finished a week before this novel) to "2666," one of Bolaño's "longer" works, preceded by the fantastic "Savage Detectives."
Much has been written (and will be) concerning this novel (see the great reviews, beginning with the one in the New York Times). In short, and without giving too much away, the story revolves around five intervals, which Bolano wanted to be released separately (in 5 year increments), involving a cast of characters as thick as the book itself. Part 1 (About the Critics) concerns four critics: Jean-Claude Pelletier from France, Manuel Espinoza from Spain, Piero Morini of Italy, and Liz Norton who, through their love of Archimboldi, come together and discuss and revel in the mysterious nature of the man. Part 2 (About Amalfitano) and Part 3 (About Fate) concerns a Chilean college professor, Amalfitano, and his dealings with his daughter and a strange geometry books; and an African-American, Quincy Williams aka Fate, who takes a assignment in Mexico covering a boxing match, which soon gets derailed due to his interest in the murders of the women detailed in the next chapter. Part 4 (About the Crimes) concerns the cornerstone of the novel, the parts tying all these people together: the murders of women, detailed by Bolaño, in the city of Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juárez) in the Sonora Desert in Northern Mexico on the US border. Part 5 (About Archimboldi) gives the final insights into our characters and ends the novel much as we began.
With Bolaño, it is the manner of his story-telling that wins him fans as well as enemies. In "2666," he pushes the boundaries that he may have placed on himself before his death in 2003. My favorite passage, in which Liz Norton realizes the genius of Archimboldi, gives you a sense of his style, if you have not read him before. This could also sum up how some readers felt reading Bolaño their first time they tried to pay attention:
"It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote."
His style is attractive and inviting (although for some the large blocks of text and absence of quotations is a turn off) and the story itself is superb. If this was unfinished. If this novel was not how Bolaño envisioned or felt represented him, help us all what a complete "2666" would look like. Nevertheless, this is Bolaño's masterpiece. The hype is for real.
Book Review: Immense and overpowering
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a deeply troubling work. Not terrifying, quite, nor horrifying, nor shattering. Instead, demanding. Incriminating. An accusation of the most serious kind. Chilling. Mesmerizing. Giant, as it were.
The only thing I've read which approximates the scope or scale of this novel is War and Peace, but the comparison to War and Peace is a rotten one because if you haven't actually read 2666 yet but have read Tolstoy, such a comparison will give you absolutely the wrong idea.
2666 is a haunting, creeping, threatening, silently (and ever more) dangerous whisper that gradually accumulates, begins to hang in the air, the whisper of death, of all of the deaths of modernity, foremost amongst these the deaths of society and of a particular conception of humanity and civilization. It is not so much a eulogy for the modern project as it is the warning of an impending reckoning, a cold, calculated demand for payment, the calm before a dreadful storm that (thankfully) doesn't actually arrive in the novel's pages, but that continues to color the silence that follows, the certainty of its ultimate arrival at some unknown future date all too clear.
It is an implicit, intuitive, wild summary of existential dread, of the uniquely modern aggregation of history atop which we live, of holocausts and nuclear politics and terrorism and slavery and capitalism and totalitarianism and unrestrained virtuality and uncontrollable sexuality and the tyranny, the utter, utter tyranny of individual and collective human agency, which has proven to be restrainable neither with freedom nor with unfreedom, neither with technology nor through romanticized constructions of the "natural."
It is perhaps the most incriminating thing I've ever read, a pronouncement about the human condition in the age of exponential population growth, encroaching climate change, the unchallenged dominance of capital and the banalization of violence. As a sociologist, I found it to be endlessly illuminating and diverting. As a fan of fiction, I found it to be innovative and surprising. As a professional writer, I found it to be the most willfully "incorrect" body of writing that I ever been unable to put down.
ADDENDUM:
After reading more of the reviews that have appeared here, particularly those that gave the work just one star, I wanted to add to the review that I wrote above (written immediately after finishing the work).
Many of the one-star reviews complain about a lack of plot, suggest that the individual "books" in the work are unconnected, or talk about a lack of resolution or the absence of central characters. Many also frame their review by saying "Maybe I missed the point, but..."
My response would be that they did indeed miss the point. There is one plot here, and it is in fact coherent. It kept me turning pages throughout the entire work, and the more it came together, the more enthralled (and shocked) I became. There is also one character, the protagonist of the book if you will, that is the fulcrum of said plot. Those who didn't notice the plot and didn't identify the protagonist have indeed "missed the point" entirely, and I can understand why they must be frustrated.