This is a wonderful, strange 900-page book that I’ve been living with for the past couple of months. I’d read one previous book by Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, two or three years ago and liked it a lot. 2666 is a bit intimidating—it consists of five loosely related parts that are only linked to each other in very oblique ways. The five parts almost read like separate books, and in fact Bolaño, before his death in 2003, requested that they be published separately. But his editors or executors decided to publish the five parts as one book, and I think they made the right decision.
Bolaño was a poet and literary/political iconoclast until he turned 40, at which time, after marrying and having children, he turned to novel writing as a way to provide for his family. This is how his wikipedia article describes it:
He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño said that he began writing fiction because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet.
What a ridiculous notion, that someone would compromise himself for money by….writing strange oblique literary novels. As if the the world were insatiable for such things.
2666 is the farthest thing from a pot boiler. If you stay with it it’s because you enjoy the journey and not because you’re expecting a stunning resolution. From the beginning, it’s abundantly clear that this tour bus will not be taking you to any of the usual roadside attractions. But if the grand concept of the book is a bit remote, the writing is always clear, witty, and entertaining. I never felt confused or disoriented while reading 2666. It’s a weird and eerie book whose mysteries and enigmas are unmistakably deliberate.
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The fourth section of 2666, which is the longest, gives us four years’ worth of murders in the city of Santa Teresa, in northern Mexico. This section closely follows real events in the actual city of Cuidad Juarez, where hundreds of women have been killed since the early 1990s. Most of the victims were young factory workers, and the murders usually involved sexual assault.
It is unquestionably hard to read paragraph after paragraph of the following sort for almost 300 pages:
The next dead woman was found near the Hermosillo highway, five miles from Santa Teresa, two days after Lucy Anne Sander’s body turned up. The discovery fell to four ranch hands and the ranch owner’s nephew. They had been searching for runaway cattle for more than twenty hours. The five trackers were on horseback, and when they could see that it was a dead woman, the nephew sent one of the hands back to the ranch with orders to tell the boss, while the rest of them stayed behind, perplexed by the bizarre position of the body. Its head was buried in a hole. As if the killer, clearly a lunatic, had thought it was enough to bury the head. Or as if he’d thought that by covering the head with earth the rest of the body would be invisible. The body was facedown with its hands pressed to its body. Both hands were missing the index and little finger. There were stains of coagulated blood in the chest region. The woman wore a light dress, purple, the kind that fastens in front. She wasn’t wearing stockings or shoes. In the subsequent forensic examation it was determined that despite multiple cuts to the chest and arms, the cause of death was strangulation, with a fracture of the hyoid bone. There was no signs of rape.
There are perhaps sixty or eighty such descriptions in part four of 2666. Some are not as grisly as the preceding; some are more grisly. So how, you may be wondering, does that make for a good read? Well, there is more to the tale than just murders. For one thing, there are the stories of the people in Santa Teresa whose lives are affected by the murders. There are the affecting and tragic stories of the murdered women and their families. We read so many such accounts that we develop a sort of feel for what life is like in Santa Teresa—the maquilladoras, or factories, where young women from all over Mexico come for grim, oppressed, low-paying jobs that they feel lucky to have. We read of the the garbage dumps and arid fenced spaces where the bodies are found, of the hapless, casually corrupt cops who come to realize that the person or persons responsible for these crimes have better connections than they do, and of the journalists who investigate the crimes and become unnerved by the all-encompassing malevolence of Santa Teresa, where violence almost seens to condense out of the polluted atmosphere.
But there is more even than that. There are threads of strange stories through this part of 2666, like the story of the cop who falls in love with an older woman who is the director of an insane asylum. Or the story of the gay reality show host who brings a psychic woman onto his show to speak about the evil that possesses Santa Teresa. It’s like a weird telenovela where stories and characters—and corpses—keep piling up. I was frequently reminded of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as I read this part of the 2666. Both demonstrate the ability to combine the macabre with the humorous and the mundane, as well as an indifference or even aversion to resolution.
Sometimes when I would pick up 2666 while I was reading this section I would be fascinated by one or another character or event. Other times I would be dismayed by the relentless sequence of forensic descriptions. Every three or four pages we read of another woman’s body thrown on some trash heap in the desert. The we read (sometimes) of who she was, where she lived, and what she did in the hours before her disappearance. These episodes take their toll, the reader grows restless and a bit distressed. Where are where going, how will it end? It does not go anywhere, it does not end, until this section ends, and then we breathe again.
Real live women are being raped and murdered in Cuidad Juazez to this day. It may even be that Bolaño has taken his details directly from the newspapers, that he is not inventing the grotesque details.
Each of the five parts of 2666 has its own mysteries and wonders—way too many for me to summarize. Each part has connections to one or more of the other parts. The two major focal points are the town Santa Teresa and a reclusive German author named Benno von Archimboldi. There are many threads that connect these two subjects, and yet when we finish the book we do not know for sure if Benno von Archimboldi has ever been to—or even heard of—Santa Teresa.
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I’ve always loved the surrealistic tendencies of Latin American writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Julio Cortázar to Álvaro Mutis. I like Gabriel García Márquez too, though I am aware that “magical realism” has lost a lot of its luster these days, and to many suggests a kind of self-indulgent, insular writing. Here is Cormac McCarthy, quoted in Time magazine:
I’m not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible."
But terms like “surrealistic” and “magical realism” are imprecise terms for describing the particular quality of reality that an author creates. Inferior writers create inferior realities—they are like children playing with dolls. Great writers can take liberties with plot, characterization, and “prose style,” provided they can create first-class realities. Some writers aspire to create realities that do nothing to contradict the impression that they are equivalent to the reality we live in. This is called realism. But the world we live in and the world of a book can never be equivalent—trying to write a completely realistic novel is like trying to create a globe from a piece of paper. So what a gifted writer does is to warp the apparent reality of his or her book to evoke the three-dimensional reality of the world of people, places and things. That reality can never be fixed and unvarying, any more than a person’s mind and perceptions are fixed and unvarying. Or any more than one person’s reality can be empirically compared to another’s.
2666 offers a reality that’s often consistent and convincing, but it's an unstable reality, like some exotic element far down in the periodic table, and it is easily hijacked by dreams or digressions. It’s a haunted place. It reminds me a bit of The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, where the frontier American settlers of planet Mars do not evict the aboriginal Martian residents so much as overwrite them. The Martians do not die, they fade. Like a radio station out on the prairie. In 2666, we read about a German soldier in Russia during World War II; that soldier finds the diary of a Russian writer hidden in a chimney and for the next 30 pages we are in the world of that Russian writer. When we finally return to the German soldier it’s like like waking from a dream—we are a bit bemused to find ourselves back where we started.
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Some books stay with you, and some don’t. I think 2666 will stay with me. It has ballast, it felt real—I lived in this book for several weeks. What is it that gives some books the substance, the density to stay with us? What makes a book big? It’s not so much a matter of length but rather of the scope of the universe some books are able to create. Bolaño himself had an appreciation of such books; as one of the characters in 2666 muses:
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 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 love books that are worlds unto themselves, places were I can go to live for a while. That have their own rules, customs, and logic. That reveal themselves, but do not explain themselves.
I think the effect is achieved in part using the literary equivalent of perspective, as per the painters of the Renaissance. When you look at Mediaeval paintings they are often beautiful, but their worlds seem small and flat because the painters did not understand perspective—vanishing points and so forth. Later artists could astonish us by creating apparently three-dimensional images that had a kind of visual gravity—the world behind the paint could almost compete with the one in front of it.
The universe of 2666 is made dense and three-dimensional by way the different sections of the books relate to each other in time and space. Certainly there are copious quantities of space and time involved—the action occurs in Russia, Europe, Mexico, and the United States, from the 1920s to the early 2000s. But there is also the matter of the way the sections relate to each other. It’s a kind of Stonehenge of a book, where we do not doubt that there is a pattern, a coherence of the whole, even though we cannot fully understand it. There are many enigmas; things are searched for and not found. Key characters are seen indirectly or not at all—not least the person or persons murdering so many women in Santa Teresa. There are also surprising convergences and coincidences—we read in the first section of a character who discovers a disturbing mirror in her hotel room that does not quite behave as the laws of optics prescribe and then, 500 pages later, in the fourth section, we read of another character who encounters such a mirror and we realize that it must be the same hotel room, even though our conception of the city has changed so much in the interval that we are a bit stunned to find ourselves back in the same place.
I think the book’s title is a bit of a nod to the idea of literary perspective—as though at some distant point in time, perhaps from Mars, we could see and understand everything.
