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This
final novel by Roberto Bolaño, published after his
death in 2004 and translated into English this year, promises
to be the literary event of the decade. Like The Savage
Detectives, the book is a gorgeous cacophony of voices
from people from all walks of life, from over-educated literary
critics to factory girls, dealing with the big topics of love
and death. The novel is divided into five books that were
originally meant to be published separately, and at the center
of the book is "The Part About the Crimes," which is so brutal
and haunting that it manages to both swallow and regurgitate
everything else in 2666.
The first
novel, "The Part About the Critics" is a comedy about a romantic
quadrangle of literary critics who bond over the work of Benno
von Archimboldi, an obscure and reclusive German novelist.
Several male critics become rivals for the affections of fellow
critic Liz Norton. In many ways, "The Part About the Critics"
seems almost like a loving parody of Bolaño's earlier
works where literary critics were often used as semiotic stand-ins
for the over-educated who are paralyzed by knowledge. Two
of the critics try to track down the novelist, more interested
in gossip than scholarship. Liz is markedly different from
the men: She makes no pretext of being a scholar. "For her,"
Bolaño writes, "reading was directly linked to pleasure,
not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths,
as [fellow critics] Moroni, Espinoza, and Pelletier believed
it to be."
The search
for Archimbaldi eventually brings the critics to Santa Teresa,
a fictional town on the Mexican/American border that is based
on Suarez, Mexico, to meet a philosophy professor, Oscar Amalfitano,
who knew Archimboldi. The second novel, "The One About Amalfitano"
follows the professor and his teenage daughter Rosa. Amalfitano
is an urbane intellectual Spaniard teaching at the University
of Santa Teresa, described as "a cemetery that suddenly begins
to think, in vain." He finds a strange book among his boxes,
Testamento geométrico, divided into three parts
and considered to be "the final distillation of [author Rafael]
Dieste's reflection and research on Space," which may be an
allusion to 2666 itself. Amalfitano, perplexed by the
book's sudden appearance, decides to hang it from the clothesline.
When the critics visit Santa Teresa in search of Archimbaldi's
whereabouts, they see and comment on the book, and it's here
that we learn that the author of the geométrico
is also a Galecian poet, just as Bolaño was a poet
who also wrote novels.
It's
probably not until midway through Book Three, "The Part About
Fate," that readers may realize they need a spreadsheet or
color-coded tags at the very least to follow the story. "Fate"
is written in a pot-boiler style, full of shady characters
cracking wise. Oscar Fate, an American reporter for a small
newspaper who gets sent to Mexico to cover a title fight,
ends up hanging out with ne'er-do-wells Chucho Flores and
Charly Cruz, and their friends Rosa Amalfitano and Rosa Méndez.
Bolaño here is intentionally trying to confuse the
readers by naming the two women the same. The guys often refer
to one or the other just as "Rosa," even when both women are
present. But in this conversation related by Rosa Amalfitano
between the two about making love to a policeman, she makes
specific points of mentioning Rosa Méndez's full name,
even though there couldn't be any confusion here about which
woman is which. But to emphasize the confusion, the conversation
itself is confusing.
"It's
hard to explain, mana," said Rosa Méndez,
"but it's like fucking a man who isn't exactly a man.
It's like becoming a little girl again, if that makes
sense. It's like being fucked by a rock. A mountain. You
know you'll be there, on your knees, until the mountain
says it's over. And in the end you'll be full."
"Full of what?" asked Rosa Amalfitano, "full of semen?"
"No, mana, don't be disgusting, full of something
else, it's like you're fucking a mountain but you're fucking
inside a cave, know what I mean?"
"In a cave?" said Rosa Amalfitano.
"That's right," said Rosa Méndez.
"In other words it's like being fucked by a mountain in
a cave inside the mountain itself," said Rosa Amalfitano.
"Exactly," said Rosa Méndez.
It becomes
clear in Book Three that the women are synecdoches for the
heart, while the men are symbols of the intellect. Bolaño's
women are sympathetic, complex characters, and it's obvious
that his allegiances lie with them.
Book
Four, "The Part About the Crimes" is a brutal detailing of
a few of the thousands of murders that have taken place in
Santa Teresa. Based on real-life murders in Sonora, Mexico,
the endless descriptions of the young women and their deaths
are horrible and riveting. In a way, Bolaño has given
dignity and closure to the lives of these young women who
have been forgotten by the Mexican government. Bolaño
breaks up the frenetic, intense rhythm of these descriptions
by adding space with subplots about several detectives and
an elderly woman who comes to fame as a TV psychic. The pace
and relentlessness of this section have a similar cadence
to the interviews/documentary section in his previous novel,
The Savage Detectives, and just like in his previous
book he follows it with a section that drastically slows down
the pace—Book Five, "The Part About Archimbaldi."
At first,
"The Part About Archimbaldi" seems to have very little to
do with the reclusive German author—he doesn't make an
appearance until halfway through. This section reveals many
of 2666's secrets, and despite all odds manages to
tie together all the disparate threads of the book in a strange
and satisfying way. The "Archimbaldi" section, with its nods
to historical fiction, is also a critique on the publishing
industry where who one knows can be more important than what
one writes.
It seems
that the point Bolaño is trying to make in 2666
is that too much importance is placed on intellect, symbolized
by the critics' quest for Archimbaldi, while not enough is
placed on baser matters, like love and death. The search for
idols, or for the soul of literature itself, was explored
in The Savage Detectives. Writer and critic Francisco
Goldman, writing about The Savage Detectives, said,
"So all Bolaño's themes have converged: the poets'
search for the elusive idol, or for the myth of poetry itself;
the interrelationship of poetry and crime; the violence that
Latin Americans born in the Fifties can't get away from; the
trinity of youth, love, and death." He could have written
the same thing about 2666, Bolaño's last book
addresses all these major themes in a pyric fashion—
2666 explodes with the energy of youth, comforts and
tortures with the cruel and soothing hands of love, and envelopes
the reader with the void of death.
(November,
2008)
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