I’ve just finished the late Roberto Bolańo’s 2666. At 893 pages, it is an enormous brick of a book that defies simple description. Ostensibly, it is a work primarily concerned with and set in the fictional northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa in the mid-to-late 1990’s, though it is truly a transnational novel.
It is divided into five parts. The first three vary greatly in style and intent. “The Part About the Critics,” is a largely mundane story of a love quadrangle (one woman, three men; all scholars) and the participants’ preoccupation with a German novelist, one Benno Von Archimboldi. The second, “The Part About Amalfitano,” is a wildly surreal exploration of a professor and his estranged (and strange) wife. The third, “The Part About Fate” introduces a reporter and is a stylish variation on noir in the vein of David Lynch (who is name-dropped in this section, I cannot believe coincidentally). These first three portions, while connected only tangentially, combine into a mosaic of impending and cycling dread. We are witnesses to a gradual decline into chaos, in both an immediate and global sense: “…it’s a sign,” a character quips in Part Three. “’A sign of what?’ asked Fate. ‘That we’re living on a planet of lunatics,” said the editor.”
With Bolańo as our Virgil, we arrive at the threshold of the abyss in the novel’s fourth section: “The Part About the Crimes” and Bolańo wastes no time in descending even further. Abandon all hope, indeed.
Part Four, the anchor, is primarily concerned with narrating the events and circumstances around the deaths of 400 some odd women in Santa Teresa. Frequently, Bolańo writes in gruesome detail about their separate (yet frequently referred to as collective) fates. In the hands of a less skilled writer, the novel would become just another exercise or example of misogyny or “horror porn.” Rather than thrilling to the murders of so many women, what we find is that the relentless onslaught, the description after description after description, is eventually and unfortunately – though perhaps purposefully – desensitizing. Conversely, other stories appearing between the killings more fully engage us. How is it that a story about church desecration, for example, enraptures more than the fates of the factory women? Why are we more invested? It is a complete irony: we care more about the sensational events that happen in the churches – mere buildings, really – than we do about the women, the humanity, the church is designed to serve. The same can be said to a greater or lesser degree about the events that transpire in a prison. Like the guards who remove their hats and take out cameras to film the atrocities perpetrated on and by the inmates, we are riveted to the scene, invested more in the criminals than the victims. Bolańo indicts us as voyeurs of the worst sort.
That is exemplar of Bolańo’s real point here: how can the killings of so many women be casually dismissed out of hand? The reader, numbed by the descriptions, is complicit. We shrug. The narrative departures from the killing catalog are largely about the men (The Penitent, Juan de Dios Martinez, Klaus Haas, the narcos, etc.). These stories draw us in more fully and are more fascinating. Part of that is stylistic – Bolańo presents the masculine stories with more artistry and flair. The killings themselves are somewhat coldly and journalistically described with an air of detachment. Figuratively and stylistically, they are newspaper clippings or police reports. It is a tribute to Bolańo’s technique that he can execute on these stylistic back-and-forths with seeming effortlessness and a completely unified voice. Through these devices, Bolańo amplifies our sense of separation from the women and their fate. Bolańo seems to be saying ours is a society that wants to own, consume, and ultimately dispose of women. Until that changes, what hope is there for anything else? Any other kind of real, significant meaning? How can you not see this hell around you?
The sensation is cumulative over the first four sections: the female scholar, the professor’s wife and daughter, the reporter’s mother, the murdered women. The gradual descent. The fourth section is the exclamation, the shouting from the proverbial rooftop.
And then there’s that enigmatic title. It is a cue from the artist. 2666: “To 666” or “To Hell.” It’s not a year, folks, it’s a destination. But is there a difference? We’re talking eventualities here.
The final portion is devoted to the German novelist Benno Von Archimboldi referred to in sections 1 and 2. It is the story of Hans Reiter and his transformation over time from an imaginative child and caring brother into an adult. Born in 1920, Reiter grows into manhood and is quickly enlisted into the German service, fighting in World War 2 along the Russian Front. Bolańo uses his stories-within-stories-within-stories device here to great effect. We observe Reiter’s evolutions and devolutions and his life and loves. Despite some very grisly descriptions of war and the horrors of Nazi Germany, this section has the most cohesive narrative structure overall. And, despite the fact that there have been countless narratives about World War 2 and Nazi Germany, we are really entering new terrain here. Bolańo’s take on the scene is surreal and dramatic and artistic. The recursive nature amplifies the question implicit in the narrative: what is the role of the artist in our chaotic and often nightmarish world?
As readers, we carry with us into Part Five the expectation is that, somehow, this last section will bring all of the diverse elements of the novel together. That it will, as Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley about The Portable Faulkner, make “the whole thing fall into pattern like a jigsaw puzzle when the magician's wand touched it." Alas, it is not to be. What we get instead is a glimpse into the writer’s life and perhaps a small window on the artist’s role in challenging the chaotic nature of the universe. Is Archimboldi a stand-in for Bolańo himself? The mysterious man? The ever elusive author? Who knows?
In terms of style, 2666 is written simply, the prose unornamented. In those places where Bolańo does offer up a strange, uniquely-his-own metaphor (“They moved like commandos lost on a toxic island on another planet.”), it is a bit jarring. The denser passages and the paragraphs that go on for pages can become a little hypnotic. The stories within stories element in all of the parts is a nice narrative device. It works in 2666 just as well as it does in other favorite novels: Don Quixote and Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing come to mind. It makes the narrative richer, more real, and yet still manifests the characteristics of a dream. I cannot quite bring myself to call it a flaw in execution that, sometimes, at the ends of these little vignettes, I had to page back and return to the context of the linear narrative that led into the tangent. I blame myself for getting sucked into the departure so completely.
In the end, 2666 is a discordant piece of music. Our mind’s ear craves some resolution to that discord. Or maybe it is a riddle that requires an answer, a solution to the puzzle. What we discover is that the answer to the riddle is that there is no riddle, no puzzle, and hence no answers or solutions. Or, if you prefer, the music is the discord, the puzzle is the answer. The artist celebrates this disconnect and, for all its unpleasantness, makes it worth beholding.
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