The novel
2666 is the masterwork and, alas, swan song of the late Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean-born novelist and poet whom the New York Times has called
"the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation." Born in 1953, Bolaño left Chile for Mexico, and then returned after Allende was elected to build communism. He was arrested during Pinochet's coup, but miraculously released, and he returned to Mexico, never to return to Chile. The novel, 900 pages long, is a true twenty-first century transnational epic. To my mind, it stands on a par with Proust's
In Search of Lost Time, both in its vaulting ambition and its inexhaustible plenitude. It proceeds deliberately and indirectly, but in its decisive moments provides jolts with the power of a cardiac defibrillator. It has as its backdrop
the killings of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city on the border with the United States, a NAFTA wasteland.
Jump with me, and I'll tell you some more. (The following will include a basic outline of the plots of the various parts, but nothing that could truly be called a spoiler.)
2666 is divided into five parts: the Part about the Critics, the Part about Amalfitano, the Part about Fate, the Part about the Crimes, and the Part about Archimboldi. Apparently there was some discussion, prior to the book's publication, of whether the parts should published as individual novels, but in the end they were published together, and, it seems to me, rightly so.
The first part of the five concerns four friends, four academics, all of whom specialize in German literature, specifically in the work of the fictional and elusive contemporary master of the German novel, Benno von Archimboldi. Among the critics, there's an American, living in London, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, and an Italian. If this sounds like it has the makings of the setup for a joke, I think that is by no means accidental. This literary gang of four, with their common purpose of establishing Archimboldi's reputation in the academy as the the foremost writer in German of the postwar era, is rendered with a gently satirical touch, and their individual characteristics often seem to dissolve into a collective of literary likemindedness. This cadre of professional critical thinkers seems to traverse their world with a consensus that emerges effortlessly and constantly evolves, so that the narrative relates the actions of "the four friends" as often as it does any of the individuals involved. A rivalry emerges between the Frenchman and the Spaniard for the affections of the American, a woman, but even this seems to produce more solidarity; the rivals draw close to each other through their mutual striving after a seemingly unreachable goal.
Their collective muse, the writer Archimboldi, is a recluse about whom little is known. It is not even known if he is still alive, and no one seems to have seen him in decades. The four are eager to meet him and interview him, if he is indeed still among the living, and this agenda becomes the focus of the novel. The foursome follows the few clues to the writer's whereabouts that they are able to assemble (the literary detective is a conceit that recalls one of Bolaño's other major works, The Savage Detectives). Eventually, they get word that Archimboldi is alive and is headed to Mexico, to a city in the north called Santa Teresa, Bolaño's fictional Juarez. Three of the four, the woman and the two rivals, decide to go there to search for him; the fourth, wheelchair-bound, remains in Europe. The three explore Santa Teresa but are ineffectual as detectives. One of the two rivals starts an affair with a local girl, and becomes momentarily aware of the murders that are occurring in the city, but does not investigate further. Various episodes create an atmosphere of indefinite menace, in the spirit, perhaps, of David Lynch, but no discoveries are made. Eventually, the critics leave Santa Teresa, none the wiser with regard to Archimboldi, and a bit disquieted for their trouble.
The second part, entitled The Part About Amalfitano, focuses on a secondary character from the first part, a professor of philosophy at the university in Santa Teresa, Professor Amalfitano, a native of Spain, who once translated a novel by Archimboldi into Spanish. Amalfitano has a daughter whom he has raised alone, after his wife left to pursue a Bohemian life in Mexico and ultimately in Europe. Amalfitano seems to be battling for his sanity; a fascistic, homophobic voice in his head has begun to plague him. At one point, he hangs a book of philosophy from a clothesline in an imitation of one of Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, as a way of effacing the book's claims to authority and mastery, much to the consternation of his daughter Rosa, who seems to see his gesture as a form of self-indulgence. Amalfitano is concerned about the welfare of his daughter, a young woman of the type targeted in the ongoing murders in the city. Amalfitano seems infinitely more sensitive to all that is wrong around him than the critics of part one were, but seems paralyzed to give voice to his fears or otherwise confront the whatever is bothering him, and he seems to be paying for this failure with the strains on his mental health.
The third part, the somewhat deceptively titled Part About Fate, concerns a black American reporter named Oscar Fate who covers politics for an African-American magazine. At the outset of the novel, Fate's mother has died, and when the sports reporter from the magazine is killed in a domestic dispute, Fate is sent to Mexico to cover a boxing match between a black American boxer and a Mexican. Before he heads to Mexico, though, he interviews a former Black Panther named Barry Seaman, and hears him deliver a digressive but sometimes brilliant sermon in which he relates significant insights from his earlier life. When Fate heads to Mexico, he learns of the murders, and attempts to convince his editor that he should write a story on them for the magazine, but the editor doesn't go for it. Fate crosses paths with Rosa Amalfitano and a friend of hers, Rosa Mendez, and meets some of their dubious male friends, and also meets a female reporter who is covering the murders in Santa Teresa. Throughout, Fate is troubled by dreams involving his dead mother and other elements of his past, some brought on by bouts of heavy drinking, and seems to be haunted by a sense that he is living in a state of perpetual distraction from...something. He seems unable to put his finger on what that might be. Fate's name appears to be a mere coincidence, a brute fact, a maguffin, but looked upon from a vantage point from which the whole novel can be surveyed, it may, in the end, not be.
The fourth part, the Part about the Crimes, is the pulsing heart of the novel and is a true tour de force. Much of this part consists of a cataloguing of the hundreds of murders of women in Santa Teresa, most of the victims workers at the sweatshops, the maquiladoras, that have sprung up as part of the free trade corridor. Bolaño brings a journalist's dispassionate eye to this process, which puts the reader into unsparing confrontation with many of the gruesome details of the killings, but also affords at the same time a kind of clinical distance from the crimes, which is needed since there will be so many of them. It's clear that some of them are the work of a single murderer or group, as they involve a signature: a nipple that has been torn off, anal penetration of the victim, and/or strangulation as the cause of death. At the same time, there are murders of women that are included in the narrative that have nothing to do with what came to be known as the femicides, but are just, apparently, garden variety killings of women by their spouses, johns, or whoever else. There are a number of plot lines woven throughout, including a couple of good cops attempting to function in the midst of an at best inept and at worst complicit police force, the psychiatrist one of those cops is involved with, a psychic, a serial desecrator of churches, an American vigilante, a reporter, a talkshow host, a prime suspect in the murders, and a powerful Mexican congresswoman. All of these characters have some kind of perspective on what is happening with the crimes, but they are also mostly in the dark. From our vantage point as readers, however, what is actually happening and who is behind them eventually begins to come into focus. This part of the novel builds slowly and relentlessly towards a horrific dawning of comprehension that recalls Oedipus' terrible discoveries about what he has unwittingly been party to. My experience of the conclusion of this part was truly visceral and deeply cathartic. I found myself exclaiming involuntarily as I understood the depth and reach of the depravity Bolaño was envisioning.
In the last part, the Part about Archimboldi, Bolaño narrates the life of Benno von Archimboldi, born Hans Reiter (rider, knight), the writer whom the critics in part I are seeking. Archimboldi's father had been a soldier in the First World War, and young Hans ends up on the Eastern front in the second. This part is told, in a sense, like a fairy tale; there is very little in the way of actual historical reality or the harsh realities of war. The Holocaust is included, but in a very surprising way; Bolaño has certainly read his Arendt, I'll leave it at that. This fifth part of the novel, for the bulk of it, anyway, is more of a picaresque than anything else, in which the writer, likened to the legendary Parsifal, the holy Fool, wanders through the war and discovers in the diaries of a lost Soviet-Jewish writer a kindred spirit and a way forward. After the war, he takes up writing novels, reinvents himself as Benno von Archimboldi, and finds success, but remains a traveling recluse, as he believes that fame is anathema to a writer. Only his publisher knows his whereabouts. Eventually, Archimboldi is drawn into the orbit of Santa Teresa and the killings, but I won't say more about how that comes about. While I found this fifth part of the book to be the least compelling, it does end powerfully, not with any kind of full resolution of the plot, but with a recovery of lost origins that provides enough closure to be satisfying aesthetically.
An oft remarked-upon feature of Bolaño's writing is that while literature and writers are a major concern, in this case, Archimboldi and his work, we never get to read a single sentence of his writing. Similarly, Bolaño's other major work, The Savage Detectives, focuses on a group of poets in Mexico who call themselves the visceral realists, but we read nothing of their writing. The texts of Archimboldi and of the visceral realists are conspicuous in their absence, and leave us wondering about the writers in question: are we to take them as seriously as their world does (or doesn't?) As seriously as they take themselves?
Throughout, the book relies on a strategy of obliqueness, of presenting a reality that is adjacent to something more powerful and more frightening, but which remains obdurately obscured. The central matter of the murders remains almost totally peripheral for the first three parts of the novel. We see the how the preoccupations of those that we are following, entirely legitimate objects of concern, mostly, prevent them from focusing on the horror happening at the margins. However, I don't get the sense that this book is meant as a call to wake up, a kind of political exhortation to get active, so much as a recognition that lives are lived in the shadows of larger social and historical processes over which individuals seldom have any influence and even have a hard time scrutinizing; Plato said only a good man can look at the sun. In a diner along the highway between Tuscon and Santa Teresa, Oscar Fate hears someone say that the secrets of the universe are contained in the Santa Teresa murders. Unfortunately, no one in the novel, except perhaps the novelist himself, in his avatar Archimboldi, seems to be adequately positioned to extract those secrets from the bloody corpses in which they are embedded.