'the world is a strange and fascinating place'

2666
by Roberto Bolaño

Near the end of The Savage Detectives we are told of an encounter with the poet Cesárea Tinajero, holed up in Santa Teresa, armed with a knife, in fear of her life and with a detailed, hand-drawn plan of a factory on the wall,

Cesárea spoke of times to come, and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn't help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could barely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.

It is a doom laden close to the novel and a prophetic date which has appeared elsewhere in Bolaño's fiction. The book which carries this date like a brand on the front cover is weighted down with expectation, not only as a potential master-work but its very real position as his final work. It is laden with so many different characters, styles, symbols, portents, images, thoughts, and ambitions driven by a fierce wave of creativity and fear that it's little wonder that your feeling on finishing it might be similar to mine and indeed his presumably when he finished writing it. Relief.

I felt like I might need a few days to marshal my thoughts together but after a few days I realised that in order to really do a book like this justice I would probably have to read it again, go to university to study Classics, history of art, South American political history, literary criticism, then probably read it once more, think for a few more weeks about it and then, perhaps I might feel better equipped to be a bit more definitive. And I don't really have time for all that. Or any of it. So I shall try to make some kind of an impression on a book which readers will no doubt be unravelling for years to come.

Just before that, it's worth mentioning that I found writing my thoughts down after each section incredibly valuable. You can access those here or by finding '2666' in the labels list on the right, you'll find they contain more specific thoughts and quotes (although be warned that they will display in reverse chronological order).


The picture above is Jupiter and Semele by Gustave Moreau, French Symbolist painter, details of which make up the cover of both the UK and US editions of this book (For the record I prefer the US one, the horrible digital font on the UK version makes everyone think you're reading sci-fi). According to the myth the mortal Semele, lover of Jupiter, asked him to appear to her in all his divine splendour (after having been given some bad advice by Juno, Jupiter's wife!), thus bringing about her own violent death in the face of his divine thunder. It is a brilliant painting to have chosen, encompassing some key themes from the book: sex, death, regeneration, fear and adoration of women, and what it means to be human (it also neatly symbolises my experience of reading the book - a bit overwhelming). Moreau himself commented on the painting:

"In the midst of colossal aerial buildings, with neither foundations nor roof-tops, covered with teeming, quivering vegetation, this sacred flora standing out against the dark blues of the starry vaults and the deserts of the sky, the God so often invoked appears in his still veiled splendour…At the foot of the throne, Death and Sorrow form the tragic basis of Human Life, and not far from them, under the aegis of the eagle of Jupiter, the great Pan, symbol of Earth, bows his sorrowful brow, mourning his slavery and exile, while at his feet is piled the sombre phalanx of the monsters of Erebus and Night…"

One particular sentence stands out there: 'Death and sorrow form the basis of human life.' This book is steeped in both of those; from the serial murders of women in Santa Teresa, to the battlefields of the second world war, mortality and the characters awareness of it seems to drive so much of what they do. Oscar Fate is still clearly reeling from the death of his mother and even a character like Morini, ill and confined to his wheelchair, acts like a living reminder of our fate and yet becomes the man that Norton allies herself with at the end of part one. All four of the critics use sex as the means to connect with one another, above and beyond the dry academia that initially brings them together, filling the void left in their lives by the mystery of Archimboldi's whereabouts. Archimboldi himself, in his fevered couplings with Ingeborg, shows their defiance at her illness and the slaughter that has surrounded them - sex as regeneration in the face of death.

The strengths of the work are closely related to its weaknesses. The epic structure of the book is bookended by the two sections dealing with Archimboldi, the first a neat novella, the second a sprawling personal history with plenty of dead ends. In between we have a portrait of mental degradation, sports reportage combined with creeping paranoia and a mind-numbing macabre litany. Each section differs stylistically recalling the work of Haruki Murakami, Denis Johson, Herman Melville, Don DeLillo and David Lynch. And those are just the styles I can give name to. There are startling images, piercing moments of perception, long runs of page turning prose, humour, insight and learning. But, and it's a big but, with all this variety there is confusion, inconsistency and spirit-sapping pages of tedium. The editors feel that this is as close to being a final text as could be hoped for. It means that there are times when the writing flows with the energy of a man driven to get his final thoughts down, but also moments where a red pen and a firmer editing hand were clearly needed. That said there is one person who deserves unqualified praise and that is Natasha Wimmer for her brilliant translation. I don't say this from having any experience of reading the Spanish language version (ha ha ha) but from the clear skills employed to bring out the different styles, character voices and idioms. Bolaño couldn't have asked for a better interpreter of his final words.

Flawed masterpiece. It's a phrase you hear a lot (just recently poor Sebastain Barry had his moment of glory punctured slightly by Costa judge Matthew Parris using the dreaded f-word at the same time as awarding him the top prize for The Secret Scripture) and I used it myself to describe Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson's Vietnam era opus, which was one of my top novels for 2007. I guess what it means is that you forgive those authors whose books dare to reach that little bit further, whose ambition has them attempting to name the unnameable, forgive them those moments when they don't quite pull it off, or do so in an ungainly fashion. It is often books like these which seem to endure through time; nobody would describe War and Peace or Moby Dick as flawless (or short - and some wouldn't describe them as masterpieces either), the question only remains does it accomplish enough? 2666 didn't quite come together enough for me and whilst it remains a book that I admire, and am still slightly in awe of, it isn't a book which is easy to recommend.

If you want to read some in depth reviews then you could try Sam Sacks' piece in Open Letters which has the most brilliant opening to a review I've read in a long time (and which also picks up on my own observation of the negating aspect to Bolaño's work) or Scott Esposito's in The Quarterly Conversation.

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2666 - The Part About Archimboldi

So we finally get to hear the story of the mysterious writer we began searching for over 600 pages ago. Hans Reiter, as he is born in 1920 to a blind mother and a one-legged father, is a boy first obsessed with the sea. A book on 'Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region' is his constant companion and he is twice rescued from drowning. After dropping out of school he begins work at the house of Baron von Zumpe where his mother is a servant, forming a friendship with Hugo Halder, the Baron's nephew, and becoming an accomplice to his gradual looting of the silverware. This early section sees a welcome return to many of things which made The Savage Detectives such an entertaining read. A colourful cast of characters, rich and evocative language and most importantly perhaps (especially after the last section), humour.

"The Welsh are swine," said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son. "Absolute swine. The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh. Though really they're the same, but they make an effort not to seem it, and since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The Scots are bigger swine than the English and only a little better than the Welsh. The French are as bad as the Scots".

Reiter's father then works his way through the rest of Europe before declaring of course that 'The only people who aren't swine are the Prussians'. That Reiter comes from a country that no longer exists is only the beginning of the rootlessness that sees him drift from place to place in the theatre of Europe's second World War with very little control of his direction. He becomes just one of many men who change or alter their history as Germany suffers defeat and the reprisals and trials begin.

Before that we have the first of many digressions. Bolaño has a habit of allowing a character to act like a portal, taking our attention away from the narrative we are following, giving us a fully formed chunk of something else entirely, before dropping us back where we were before. Whilst holed up in an occupied house, recovering from a gunshot wound which has rendered him speechless, Reiter finds some papers in a secret hiding spot at the back of the fireplace. These belong to Ansky, a Russian soldier whose story we then follow and which in turn will allow us to meet other characters like Ivanov, a science fiction writer. Ansky begins to figure in Reiter's dreams and in one, which plays on his fear that he may have been the very man that felled this Russian soldier, he finds a corpse which bears his own face. Waking with relief, his voice returns - 'Thank God it wasn't me.'

Chance or fate are themes which return again and again. When on the Eatern Front Reiter meets again the Baroness von Zumpe, daughter of the house he onced worked in, ('wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance') and along with some of his fellow soldiers watches a night of brutal sex she endures with a prodigiously endowed Romanian general. From her he hears about what happened to his childhood friend Halder, his work as a painter, and symbolically his pictures of dead women. Death's hand is all over this section with warfare, slaughter, disease and poverty and yet from this chaos comes Reiter's impulse to create, to write and indeed to reinvent himself.

Reiter becomes Archimboldi after two events. When in a camp at the end of the war he meets a man calling himself Zeller, a civil servant of the Third Reich, who relates his tale of Jewish liquidation as bureaucratic inconvenience. Reiter kills him and after meeting a former fortune teller who impresses upon him the importance of breaking the chain his new identity is born. He will be reunited with the Baroness again through his publisher, and she is not the only figure from his past to return again. This sense of return and unification continues right until the end where Bolaño manages to pull off a loose-thread-tying finish which he just about gets away with. I'll be honest and say that I was grateful for some resolution after such a dizzying and digressive ride (and that's just in this section).

I finished it. That I feel a sense of achievement is what worries me. There are some books that you read and on finishing them feel not so much joy, or inspiration, or even the simple need to talk to someone about it, but just exhaustion. I feel a bit like that. It'll take a while to sort through my thoughts but I'm not sure this is a book I'll be recommending to people. I'm not sure yet how or why I would. Plenty of people have asked what it is I'm reading and I've opened my mouth to try and explain to them what it's all about and found myself struck dumb for a few seconds, struggling to think where even to begin. As Archimboldi says himself near the very end, 'I don't know what to think.'

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2666 - The Part About The Crimes

Ow. It's starting to hurt now. The fourth part of the journey is almost as long as the three before it put together and from the first sentence it is clear things aren't going to be pleasant (well, the title is another clue, obviously)

The girl's body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores. She was dressed in a white long-sleeved T-shirt and a yellow knee-length skirt, a size too big.

In Santa Teresa (standing in for the real-life town of Ciudad Juarez) the bodies of women and young girls are found with alarming frequency, broken and abandoned in the desert. Is it the work of a serial killer or killers? What we have here is a police procedural. With forensic detail and over almost 300 pages we 'meet' the many victims, with the repetitive, monotonous prose of police bureaucracy. The clinical delivery of these macabre findings has a numbing effect, much like the boring detail contained within American Psycho, so that they soon become less and less shocking and, worryingly, more and more acceptable. There are many characters to get a handle on (but with Bolaño you never know on meeting someone whether they will be significant or never heard from again) including one of the detectives assigned first to a case involving a man they call 'the Penitent', wanted after desecrating a church and then murdering a priest. The diagnosis of Elvira Campos, director of the asylum, is sacrophobia ('fear or hatred of the sacred, of sacred objects, especially from your own religion') which links back to the discussion about the end of the sacred from part three. Whilst she reels off a list of phobias she alights on one which is significant I think to the novel as a whole.

...Or gynophobia, which is fear of women, and naturally afflicts only men. Very widespread in Mexico, although it manifests itself in different ways. Isn't that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexican men are afraid of women. I don't know what to say to that, said Juan de Dios Martinez.

He will go on to show his own fear when a relationship develops between the two of them but always on her terms (much like the ménage in part one)

The list of phobias isn't the only time I found my eyes wanting to skim a little. The back story of a TV seer, La Santa, doesn't add much to a character who raves on TV about the killings without furthering our knowledge of them. Similarly, the lineage of a young boy who becomes a cop was a bit like trawling through the 'and so-and-so begat so-and-so' pages of the Old Testament. Bolaño is known for subverting convention and it is a strange experience to read a crime thriller which isn't thrilling and which leaves you no clearer as to who the killer(s) might be. This refusal to play by the rules is fine as long as you intend to replace what should be there with something else. It's just that at the moment I'm not quite sure what that thing is. This 'undercutting' which I have mentioned before happens again when a female Governor whose friend has gone missing in Santa Teresa finally brings some passion to the proceedings, only to have them negated by the private detective she has hired.

Do you mean you think Kelly is dead? I shouted. More or less, he said without losing his composure in the slightest. What do you mean, more or less? I shouted. For fuck's sake, you're either dead or you're not! In Mexico a person can be more or less dead, he answered very seriously. I stared at him, wanting to hit him. What a cold detached man he was. No, I said, almost hissing, no one can be more or less dead, in Mexico or anywhere else in the world. Stop talking like a tour guide. Either my friend is alive, which means I want you to find her, or my friend is dead, which means I want the people who killed her. Loya smiled. What are you laughing at? I asked him. The tour guide part was funny, he said.

I'm not sure what I'm searching for in this book, but I'm beginning to worry that despite still having over 250 pages to go I may never find it.

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2666 - The Part About Fate

The skill of the translator is a difficult thing to quantify. It is often when the writing seems effortless, when you don't notice the translation, that you know you are reading a really good one. The scope of this novel, and the range of Bolaño's writing gives Natasha Wimmer an opportunity to show just how good she is. This third section, telling the story of Oscar Fate (it's a nick-name loaded with portent), is immediately different in style. As someone who reads a lot of American fiction it had begins with that reassuring tone of realism, of statement, feeling almost Chandleresque.
Fate is a journalist for 'Black Dawn', a small Harlem magazine focusing on black-interest stories, and is still it seems reeling from the death of his mother. When he is assigned to cover a boxing match in Mexico he feels professionally out of depth and with the unfamiliar surroundings Bolaño creates a brilliant sense of unease. This is a man with his centre missing; he feels unaccountably sick to the stomach, unable to focus clearly and the creeping sense of unreality blurs the distinction between what is real and what he dreams. It is hard to articulate what this feels like until Bolaño does it for you. In a conversation with a motel clerk the name David Lynch pops up and that's when you realise why it all feels so vivid without being tangible.

Whilst in Mexico Fate gets to hear about the killings, the mysterious deaths of maybe two hundred women.

"That's a lot for one person," he said.
"That's right amigo. Too many. Even for a Mexican killer."
"And how are they killed?" asked Fate.
"Nobody's sure. They disappear. They vanish into thin air, here one minute, gone the next. And after awhile their bodies turn up in the desert"

Without the support of his editor and with little interest in the fight (Bolaño does one of his brilliant undercuts by describing the warm-up bout with flair and then dispensing with the disappointing big fight in a few lines) Fate gets drawn into the story, first through a female reporter and then through Rosa Amalfitano (daughter of the professor from parts 1 and 2) and a group of friends around her. That sense of unease I mentioned earlier builds as the pace of the plot ratchets up, Fate becoming convinced that Rosa is in danger, perhaps in line to be the next victim. Rather than this simply being an increase in pace, it is an increase in style, the language subtly warping so that as this section reaches its conclusion you are as confused as Fate himself, and perhaps as nauseous.

Even in a throw away conversation about the advent of the multiplex and the death of the cinema experience Bolaño is able to throw the doors open onto something which reaches much further, something he calls the end of the sacred.

The end had begun somewhere, Charly Cruz didn't care where, maybe in the churches,when the priests stopped celebrating the Mass in Latin, or in families, when the fathers (terrified, believe me brother) left the mothers. Soon the end of the sacred came to movies.

The breakdown of society is palpable, but without feeling grandly apocalyptic, it's hidden in the shadows at the corner of the room. That is what makes the killings possible as an overheard conversation in a restaurant makes clearer. A 'white-haired man' discusses how the many deaths of those outside society go unremarked, whilst the single murder within it becomes a headline. And then, throwing those doors open again,

'In the nineteenth century...society tended to filter death through the fabric of words...We didn't want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed..Everything changes you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes'

How's that for a theme? I have a feeling that the 'white-haired man' will have more to say.

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2666 - The Part About Amalfitano

In the first section of this novel when three critics go to visit the home of the professor assigned to guide them they are bemused to discover a book hanging on the washing line. A book of geometry written by a poet and hanging on a line not to dry, having clearly been there for some time, but hanging there with some purpose.
The character of Amalfitano doesn't make a great impression on the critics initially and in the second, and shortest, section of this book we go back a little in time to see the breakdown of his mind following the loss of his wife. She wishes to visit a poet in an asylum, a poet she claims to have slept with before she met Amalfitano (something he knows to be false, knowing him to be gay and having introduced her to the poets work himself) and leaves him caring for their daughter, keeping him updated on her exploits in a series of bizarre letters.

It isn't until seven years later that he sees her again, and then only briefly, the madness in her letters and this last visit perhaps providing the tug that begins the gradual unravelling of Amalfitano's mind. It begins with the book, which he doesn't remember buying or receiving, a book which clearly represents the one we ourselves are reading:

On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento Geometrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole" and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections...

Borrowing an idea from Duchamp he hangs the book on his washing line 'to see if it learns something about real life', much to the chagrin of his daughter, 'You're getting crazier every day, you know'. And indeed he is. He begins to hear a voice talking to him, finds that he has doodled diagrams and lists that make no sense. As his story progresses a distance opens up between him and the other people in his life, the text becomes dominated by his intellectual ramblings, and we get closer and closer to 'the melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field' of the first section.

Despite being only 65 pages long it isn't an easy read. No paragraphs and the sluggish energy make it harder work than it should be but I'm going to take heart from Amalfitano's reaction to meeting a man whose taste in books restricts him to the safer, minor efforts of the classic writers (The Metamorphosis rather than The Trial, Bartleby over Moby Dick)

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choses 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 strugggle 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.

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2666 - The Part About The Critics

In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño's riotous road-movie of a novel, a small group of writers head off into the deserts of Mexico on the trail of an enigmatic poet who has been missing for years. In the first part of his final work, 2666, we again join the search for a mysterious writer, this time a novelist, that will take us to Mexico once again but also encompassing the Europe that is his homeland and also that of his pursuers. There is something immediately comic about the set-up as we meet our four critics (one female, three male), one each from England (Norton), Italy (Morini), Spain (Espinoza) and France (Pelletier), making it sound like the beginning of a dirty joke. Which isn't as far off the mark as it sounds.



United by their admiration for the improbably named German writer Benno von Archimboldi they meet first at conferences and lectures, becoming a cohesive group when in opposition to a rival faction of 'Archimboldians'. As their meetings increase in frequency so the professional lines begin to blur and Pelletier and Espinoza embark on their own seperate affairs with Norton. These marathon sex sessions seem to provide the only excitement or meaning in their otherwise dry existences. The tedium of conference after conference and the frustrating search for Archimboldi himself (who has only ever been seen by his publisher and a handful of others) is all too effectively conveyed, the sex punctuating the text much like the dots which separate each of the short sections. As only academics could, both men discuss their relations, openly aware of the other's involvement, but both of them powerless to get what they want from the relationship. Another man in Norton's life warns them both away invoking the image of the gorgon Medusa which recurs later. The tension between them actually acts like a glue, keeping them together, with only the invalided Morini excluded (although he too is aware of what is going on). This tension finds a release when the three of them savagely beat a Pakistani taxi driver who insults them, an event as surprising as it is brutal.

When they stopped kicking him they were sunk for a few seconds in the strangest calm of their lives. It was as if they'd finally had the ménage à trois they'd so often dreamed of.

One lead in their search for Archimboldi takes them to Mexico where they are guided by Amalfitano, a professor whom the group first view negatively, trusting him more when they realise his scholarship but remaining baffled by much of that he says. Here we get some of Bolaño's trademark humour, the puncturing of pomposity, as when Amalfitano finishes rambling after two and half paragraph-less pages about 'the relationship of Mexican intellectuals with power'.

"I don't understand a word you've said," said Norton.
"Really I've just been talking nonsense, said Amalfitano.

Away from the grey officialdom of Europe we also get more of the evocative images Bolaño seems to conjure effortlessly ('The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower'), bringing a dark-hued colour to the writing.

It certainly stands on its own as a novella, but I'm sure that if I was reading it as a stand alone work I'd be left feeling a little unsatisfied. The emptiness at the centre of each of the critics, which would presumably be filled by their finding Archimboldi, remains vacant; filled by their unsatisfactory personal relationships which reach a, dare I say it, predictable conclusion.

What isn't predictable with a writer like Bolaño is what will come next.

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2666 ÷ 5 = ?

I'm doing it. I'm reading the big one. Roberto Bolaño's final work before his death in 2003 is the 900 page epic '2666'. A note at the front of the book explains that Bolaño's wish had been for the five parts of novel to be published as separate books, one per year, to help provide for his children's future. Respecting the artistic value of the work, this decision was reversed by his executors and so it comes to us first as a hefty opus. Given that it's going to take some time to get through, I thought I'd post my initial thoughts on each section before attempting a grand view of the work as a whole. I have no idea whether that will add anything to the experience but I guess we'll see.

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