Rating: Excellent
The late Roberto Bolano was a unique writer, who produced compelling narratives that were often experimental, particularly in terms of form and featured complex thematic threads with meanings that hovered like literary mirages over wrecked narrative landscapes. Bolano's themes usually concerned the nature of art, writing, poetry, writers, politics, morality, fascism and nitty gritty of life and death, often set in an immoral or amoral landscape of human folly. 2666, his last work, completed as a first draft before his death in 2003 from liver failure, was meant to be published as five separate novels, mainly because Bolano believed that it would benefit his family financially, but after his death the managers of his estate decided that the novel would be published as a whole, with the proposed novels presented as parts. My edition complicates the matter, being a special edition presented in a slipcase and divided into three volumes. Due to the sheer size of the work, well over a thousand pages, I decided to read and review the first volume (which contains the first three parts/novels) and then read the other two volumes later. Also 2666 is challenging conceptually, with dark undercurrents of violence, mental illness, existential bleakness and death, written in a style that blends beautiful poetic turns of phase with realism that borders on straight ahead reportage. Stylistically, Bolano was one of those writers of which you can say his prose was very much an extension of himself and when you read him you become fully immersed in his world; indeed, my experience reading 2666 was one of total immersion.
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| The special slipcase edition |
The Part About the Critics
The first part of 2666 is the longest featured in the first volume and perhaps the most fully realised. Here the mysterious German writer, Benno von Archimboldi is introduced, a cult writer who has managed to build an ever increasing readership, including four Europeans who become critical and academic experts of his oeuvre, Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton and Pierio Morini. This part is precise, yet sedately paced as we are immersed in the lives of the four critics, their friendship, their work, petty jealousies and love-life. All four characters are well fleshed out and there's some beautiful writing here, in particular some evocative passages of description and mood setting. The four critics meet Archimboldi's publisher and then a Mexican who tells them that he knows someone who encountered the writer in Mexico. They decide to pilgrimage to the border-city, Santa Teresa, in the hope of meeting the elusive writer. Important elements (in terms of being keys to understanding the overall meaning of 2666, from my perspective in any case; having read about the novel and Bolano in general, no one, it seems, really knows for sure...) in The Part About the Critics are the cult artist, Edwin Johns, a disturbed individual admired by the critics; a violent incident involving the critics and an Arab taxi driver and then their experiences in Mexico, which are ultimately futile and imbued with disturbing background elements. In the first part, as with the others, what is not said and not shown is perhaps more important than what is; also the mundane and the extraordinary is, essentially, treated in the same way.
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| A youthful Bolano |
The Part About Amalfitano
The critics meet fellow academic Oscar Amalfitano in the first part and he his seen through their eyes, so all we know about him is from when they interact with him, or he appears within their circle; one of the critics thinks that he is having some kind of a breakdown. In the second part Amalfitano becomes the main protagonist and we learn about his life in Spain, prior to taking up his teaching position in Santa Teresa. He's an intriguing character with a tragic background - his wife, Lola, having left him and their daughter, Rosa, to search for an insane homosexual poet whom Lola and another woman admire to the point of blind worship (one of the main thematic thrusts of the novel is, I believe, the notion that art and artists of all sorts should not be set apart from humanity as exemplars of virtue, reason and morality, nor do they have the answers to life's great mysteries; Bolano himself was very cynical about the latin American literary scene and could be a harsh critic of literary pretence). Amalfitano appears damaged by his life experience, he finds life in Mexico difficult and worries that his now teenage daughter may become another victim of the hundreds of femicides occurring thought the city. The key aspects of The Part About Amalfitano are the mysterious book Amalfitano finds in his belongings, Rafael Dieste's Testamento Geometrica (1975), which he decides to hang from his clothes line (therefore recontextualising it in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp, perhaps as a fulcrum for the geography of the horror, male dysfunction and murders occurring in the city), the moral depravity and insanity of the poet and the emerging awareness of the femicides, which Bolano based on Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city in which five hundred women were murdered during the 1990s and 2000s.
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| An older Bolano, contemplating 2666 |
The Part About Fate
This part follows black American journalist, Oscar Fate, and his assignment in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match after the violent death of the newspaper's sports journalist and the tragic death of Fate's mother. Death stalks this part much more obviously than in the first two parts. At this stage the novel reads like a descent into the dark, violent environs of both the human psyche and Santa Teresa itself (one and the same?). Fate comes across as a mostly passive observer, trying to navigate a world that is, at the very least, against him just for being black. Fate is an outsider in his own society, coming into a foreign city of horrors, which emphasises his outsider nature even more. Fate makes some Mexican acquaintances, such as fellow journalist, Chucho Flores and Guadalupe, a female journalist who is terrified of the prospect of being sent on assignment to a prison to interview a chief suspect of the femicides. As this part progresses it becomes darker and darker, with Flores becoming mercurial, menacing and with an array of suspicious characters being added into the mix. The Part About the Critics and The Part About Amalfitano intersect when Flores introduces Fate to Rosa, Amalfitano's daughter, whom is sexually involved with him. By this stage it occurred to me that the characters and the plot was heavily influenced by David Lynch; something that was confirmed later when Fate finds himself in the strange house of eccentric film buff, Charly Cruz, watching bizarre cult movies while discussing the oeuvre of David Lynch. The end of this part takes on an intense forward momentum, a creeping dread prevails, filled with tension; of particular note is the reappearance of Amalfitano and a visit to prison for an impactful scene involving the femicides main suspect, who, if you are paying attention, seems very familiar indeed (or typically, not at all). 2666 and Bolano's writing certainly makes for a challenging and disturbing ride, but for readers who enjoy a conceptual and philosophical challenge, 2666 is a brilliant literary achievement, particularly considering that Bolano was severely ill during its writing and it is a first draft. Amazing.
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