2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: One of the most accomplished and powerful novels I've ever read
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolaño is an iconoclast among Latin American authors. While many have hailed him as the successor to the Colombian firebrand Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Chilean author's literary oeuvre suffers to be pigeonholed within the school of magical realism pioneered and extensively explored by the former. In fact, Bolaño shares more in common with the brand of cosmopolitan meta-fiction championed by the Argentineans Julio Cortázar (the random chapters of Hopscotch, their structure, or lack of it thereof) and Jorge Luis Borges (a fiction within a fiction, the paradoxically terse, yet labyrinthine scope of his writing).
Bolaño's writing not only divagates from the Boom archetypes of Spanish American literature; it also rakes a new path for the continent's new writers to explore a post-nationalist, generational paradigm shift in Hispanic though and culture without standing under the shadow of Marquez and contemporaries like Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. Nowhere else is his writing more decadently sampled than with his major novels--The Savage Detectives and his magnum opus, 2666, both translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 2666, the author's posthumously published novel, garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008. This massive, well-stuffed tome ingeniously covers a great deal of terrain that deals with a diverse pool of 21st century themes and tropes without ever providing closure--which, in a way, perhaps represents the most rewarding aspect of this novel.
The meandering storyline of 2666 plunges the mind into somnambulating within a world of quasi-surrealist dreams, entombing us within a parallel reality that "terrifies us all...amid blood and mortal wounds and stench." Indeed, what Bolaño accomplishes within the massive scope of his curiously varied literary terrain drowns us in the flood of questions--questions that urge us to digest on the tragic motifs of our broken humanity. Scenes exist in 2666 where the author waxes on that which is utterly grotesque and nauseating that we are awakened to a reminder of how we now live in an age that has become brutal by convention.
The novel is not seamless. It is a murder mystery, a fictional biography, a bibliophilic compendium of writers, and most of all a chronicle of the secret and parallel lives of Bolaño's fascinating characters who eventually converge to the city of Santa Teresa, Mexico. Within the sweep of its voluble, disturbing, experimental, and poetic prose, the author manages to create a stark contrast between a monochromatic and barren literary desert that is studded with the grotesque and the unnatural. His writing is verbose (some sentences tend to run for lines on end) and executed with a reckless abandon, but at the same time it is also dry and digressive; there is an abundance of characters who enrich the fictional landscape with their idiosyncrasies. Yet, he seems to ascribe little feeling to them, allowing the majority to wander about faceless. There are a few exceptions, however. Those that he does award with more than what is sparsely informative takes us across a whirlwind of images and dreams that push us further into unknown paths hemmed by obscure, shady, yet paradoxically drawing and lucid images.
The novel is divided into five distinct parts. The first book narrates a story about four obsessive academics who venture on a fruitless quest searching for the identity of the brilliant, mysterious, and elusive Thomas Pynchon-like persona Benno von Archimboldi. The trail leads them to Santa Teresa. At one point in this quixotic journey, the search is regarded as futile; the academics are then hinted about a wave of crimes that have ravaged the city. The next book tells the tale of a professor of letters in the University of Santa Teresa; he is a critic of the town's degenerate corruption, yet he is at the same time inescapably trapped within like a permanent fixture. Outside of his profession, his mind is rendered into a dull, drab graveyard apathetic to the ebb and flow of life. The third section introduces us to a New York sports writer who is sent to the city of Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match.
For the next three hundred pages, the novel turns into a dark and macabre vignette of impersonal images of death. Women are brutally murdered, raped, and nonchalantly disposed in the city, the desert, and the public areas of this drug cartel-infested cesspool. The women are either clandestine whores or helpless maquiladora (factory) workers who have come to the thriving industrial scene of Santa Teresa in search of money. For years, the crimes remain unsolved, and in the end, they never are. The fifth and last section is perhaps the finest and best crafted of the five novellas, revealing to us finally the identity of Benno von Archimboldi in a narrative that likewise reveals the true story of 2666.
While the five books within this novel paint a surreal picture within Bolaño's fictional universe, we are likewise able to draw parallelisms between his world and ours. For instance, the city of Santa Teresa that serves as its spatial locus strongly mirrors Mexico's Ciudad Juárez. But it is more than just that. It is a hell, a black hole that draws migrants to slave in foreign-owned maquiladoras that exploit them in the service of a global economic order oiled by the capitalist machinations of affluent industrialists. Santa Teresa is symbolic of the backroom where much of the real activity happens--the warehouse, the production line, the intricate system of cogs that keep the Western world afloat with an unjustly arrogated affluence. Like a black hole, it inevitably draws people into a promise of wealth that is coeval with the corruptive, fetid stench of a system stained by greed. Yet we are tempted to keep rummaging, to continue in our quest for moral ideals buried in Bolaño's fictional pandemonium.
One can perhaps say that the language and the style of this novel are ultimately difficult to ascribe into a defined, literary structure. The author deftly alternates between terse glimpses and an excessive, dizzying decadence. Some passages are spiked with a sparse sprinkling of adjectives, and later are deliberately ornamented with a copious outpouring of word paints that leave an abundance of open-ended questions about Bolaño's intentions in character, space, and plot. There is the constant presence of the simile and the metaphor. There is chaos and madness, and ironically there is order and beauty within this madness, challenging us to inspect the map of his jagged fiction with a lens focused on the author's construction of human aesthetics.
Throughout the novel's massive scope, Bolaño communicates a need to address the unexplored recesses of these morbid reveries through a deranged, corruptive maelstrom where reflections of reality become clearer as we wander across the mystical, metaphoric planes of these fabricated dreams. It is in the unexplained and the unknown that we must feel our way across the whispers, the muted details, and the wraith-like allusions in search for a glimmer of light in the pervasive darkness. While redemption is an absent feature in this novel, we are made even more aware of its rare and illuminating beauty in a novel preponderated by blackness and pain. The reader is invited and even coerced to grovel submissively into the grotesque and the grim asked only by the very greatest of books, and we awaken...more aware of the flaws of our broken humanity.
Book Review: Embracing Literature, Details of Contemporary Life, Universality
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolano's last novel, 2666, evokes so much of life even as it seems to violate form and content prescriptions for writing fiction. It is also a page turner despite its length and the often violent nature of one subtext related to the ongoing unsolved murders of so many young Mexican women, many of whom are poor factory workers. The novel simultaneously embraces literature, encompasses details of contemporary life, and evokes universality.
Professor Mitchell's summary review offers a larger outline of sorts of the books five parts, but I would like to offer a few sections that show readers details behind the more abstract words of praise.
The first part about critics lays bare many problems with current academic literary criticism - its isolated and isolating search for an obscure author who ostensibly "reveals" life, who might become the Nobel recipient, but who is elusive and thus prized or at least greatly discussed in academic circles. The supposed little known German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, becomes the singular life focus of certain critics (from France, Spain, and England as well as Italy) about whom they publish and give talks at conferences. Their personal lives become intensely intertwined as they write about and then search for Archimboldi which becomes, in effect, a search for meaning in their own lives. Near the end of this first section, three of the critics arrive in back-water northern Mexico (University of Santa Teresa), meet a professor there, Amalfitano, supposedly another Archimboldi expert. They initially judge him with the following long sentence in typical Bolano style where he breaks most grammar rules yet yields something more:
"The first impression the critics had was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the awful terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border." (pg. 114)
Bolano ends the paragraph by describing the critics' perceptions: two saw him as failed because though he [Chilean-born, they discovered later] had lived and taught in Europe but had not developed have the necessary tough veneer and "his innate gentleness gave him away in the act." One thought him a sad person whose life was slipping away quickly.
Shortly thereafter in the same first section follows another Bolano extended passage (pgs 120-23), this time as Amalfitano responds to the critics' discussion about Latin American intellectuals. He says that many Mexican (and Latin American) intellectuals just wanted to get by whereas some were more interested in writing. As the critics ask what he means, Amalfitano launches into a three-page discourse on intellectuals there and in Europe, their means of support, particularly state support and university jobs in which they lose their way (what he calls their shadow) and often abuse alcohol to forget their lost shadow. And then Amalfitano then begins a long passage that echoes not only Shakespeare and Plato but also life itself:
"And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The state is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoetic noise, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads they can't see anything. The only sounds they hear come from deep in the mine. And they translate and reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they hear a hurricane, they try to be eloquent when they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence..." (121-122) Amalifanto's monologue continues about life and art and their intersection for another page or so, to which one critic then merely replies that she doesn't understand a word he's said.
These are only two examples of how Bolano's novel embraces and conveys life in all its complexity. This does not seem like fiction: it mixes art, life, and universal truths. It is worth not only a first read but many more.
2666: A Novel
Book Review: The first great novel of the global age
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is astonishing. There is more life - with all of its blood, hope, love, stench, tenderness, confusion, morality, fear, violence, sex, mystery, loneliness, and death - pulsing through these pages than any other book I can think of save, perhaps, War & Peace. It presents compelling and absolutely convincing portraits of multiple male and female characters from diverse cultures, ethnicities and generations. It covers almost an entire century in time, right up to the present, and takes place on at least three continents. The novel contains stories inside of stories inside of stories, and the result is that it seems as if half the world's population walks between the covers of this book. And Bolano illuminates many dark chambers of their individual and collective souls. Many, many passages left me staring into space in stunned silence for the quality of the language and the quality of the Truth with a "T." Characters might appear for just a few pages and then vanish from the text, but while they are present they appear as fully formed people with wants, fears and desires that seem profoundly real. I have read nothing like it.
Critics will complain about the lack of plot unity (although it, like history, all does come loosely together) and story progression (as in life, the random people talking about things both frivolous and essential juxtaposed with the mindnumbing number of horrific and inexplicable homicides are all part of his point), but I suspect their criticism results from the book not meeting their preconceptions of what a book is or should be. I suspect they don't know what to make of all of these characters coming and going in a manner that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to advance the story. To those readers who have initial difficulty with the book, I would advise to stop waiting for "things to happen," stop waiting for one plot point to lead inevitably to the next. Instead, concentrate on the characters you meet along the way. Try to recognize their individual passions, fears and concerns and notice how these may or may not be like your own passions and fears and concerns, and rejoyce in our oddities. Bolano shows us we are all a riddle inside a paradox. While there are big and important themes in this book, initial pleasure is found by recognizing the awe in and of the individual characters in small and even disconnected realizations. As my mother often reminds me, the real joy of life is found in the small moments. If you only care about the big moments, life will be a disappointment. The same is true with 2666.
But, as I said, there is much more beyond the small moments of this book. There are big themes and multiple layers. One (and only one) important layer to the book, and perhaps the reason some people have claimed Bolano is a writer for writers, is that the whole thing is a metaphor for an artist's relationship with his work in light of mortality, specifically Bolano's concerns about his own literary legacy in light of his impending death. I don't want to say too much about the ending of the book, which I found, like the rest of the book, to be glorious for its presentation of life's silmultaneous profundity and meaninglessness. But the ending is a perfect example of a random character, who literally enters the book on the second to last page, talking, with a distinct and convincing voice, about something (and someone else who is not in the book) that is interesting but mundane and seemingly totally irrelevant. Yet behind the voice of the character we recognize that the real speaker is Bolano wondering about his own literary legacy. As we all do, he is asking himself if he will be remembered, and if so, for what? Will it be for his masterpiece, or for some small thing in his life that he does not even recognize? After all, what will you be remembered for, and by whom? Can you say? Probably not. When the book is read with this understanding, it is never, to borrow a word from 2666, "cloying."
This book comes out of the tradition of masterly works, and like the works of all the masters before, it charts an entirely new course in literature. It is silly and pointless to hold up masterpieces against one another - I treasure many books that have been written in my lifetime - but if there is a better or more important book written in the last forty years, I have not read it. Yes, 2666 has imperfections, but somehow those imperfections are like beauty marks and only add to its colossal grandeur. If ever there was a book that was meant to be unfinished (and it doesn't read like it was unfinished), this is the book, for it is a representation of the world with its unending cycles of births and deaths and all that happens between. Like the other very, very great books, this book doesn't just change what is possible in fiction; it changes our understanding of our world and of our places in it. This is less a book than a symphonic mirror held up to our humanity and our history, to what we are and what we have wrought. God help us, and God bless Roberto Bolano.
Book Review: MANKIND CANNOT BEAR VERY MUCH REALITY
Summary: 5 Stars
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
(T.S. Eliot, from "Burnt Norton")
When asked for a title for this review, the first thing that came to mind was that line from Eliot's Four Quartets. God, what a lot of reality! I sympathize and for a while almost agreed with the reviewer who wondered why he was wasting his life reading it. After the first part you start to suspect that it's going nowhere, that all the incidental stories and digressions are not leading anywhere and that their links to each other are tenuous at best and often nonexistent. The critics' search for a mysterious author fail (although I must say that this part of the book does have its own unexpected and rather sweet resolution), the part about the Santa Teresa serial killings, an endless litany of blood, rape and gore, remains unsolved, and the whole book ends in mid-stride--not like Finnegans Wake, which loops you back to the beginning, but at a moment pregnant with a future we can never know: What might happen and what has happened, pointing to one end, which is always present. In a way it's a return to the episodic picaresque tales which preceded the modern novel as we understand it. At the same time Bolaño takes a bold leap into the unknown. It's hard to talk about him without contradicting yourself.
The book is a flood of present moments that can drown the reader. The incidents are sometimes nested inside one another like Chinese boxes, sometimes springing out of nowhere and going nowhere--just like life! But isn't art supposed to give us some refuge from life? bring some order to the chaos of reality? Bolaño answered this in an interview. He said, "We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie." This sounded so good to me that I put the quote on my website, because it seemed to reflect my own work as a painter. But when I was about halfway through these 893 pages, I thought, no, that's not right. A work of art is a focal point, an object to reflect upon, a still point of the turning world, to quote Eliot again. Dashiel Hammet, David Mammet, Edward Hopper--they have the right idea: Exclude everything irrelevant to the story, the movie, the painting. Bolaño is the exact opposite of those guys! He throws in everything! Everything in his peripheral vision is examined, every rumor speculated upon, every dream faithfully recorded, every possibility elaborated upon. (In this he sometimes reminds me of Saramago, especially when he appropriates the Portuguese writer's reinvention of punctuation). I began to feel that he was abdicating his responsibility as an artist to give us something to focus on, and I removed the quote from my web site.
However, I couldn't stop reading the book. For some reason that I can't quite explain, it's a page-turner! But I continued to have a bad feeling that I was going to be disappointed and left hung out to dry at the end. Which is sort of true ... but only on the surface. It wasn't until I was maybe 20 pages from the end that I began to get it and realize that I was going to be satisfied after all. Up until then, even though it had given me lots of food for thought about what art is and is not, I would not have recommended this book to anybody. But now I see that I was wrong. There is a kind of profound resolution in its very lack of resolution. Bolaño looks for truth not at the center but at the edges of life.
But here's another contradiction: There is a focal point, but it's not visible. That is the central mystery of 2666. All the stories, all the digressions, all the lives which almost but not quite touch, like people in a maze, inches from each other but separated by a wall, all the loving and hating, all the sex and killing, all are circling around a central point, like lost planets orbiting an invisible sun, "the still point of the turning world."
For Bolaño a novel is not a single predominant thread but the whole infinite tangle of threads, the sum of all those trivial moments. One of his characters--I suppose you could call him the central character--Archimboldi, says "that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness." I think that's how Bolaño views life too, and the art of writing. When he finished this book he died.
2666 is a date. It's never mentioned in the book, but a clue to its meaning is given in an earlier novel of his, Amulet (1999). "Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
Book Review: Bolano's Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Bolano's 1100 page (Spanish Edition) magnus opus is mesmerizing and hypnotic; full of magical stories, violence, sex, meta-fiction, and lies--a lot of lies and a great deal of misdirection.
When I finished the novel I started again; it was the only thing to do; there was too much to absorb on the first reading; too many themes--writing, violence, detectives, murder, identity, travel, death, books, libraries, biographies, success, failure, race, fascism, Nazis, and war.
The writing in itself is beautiful, a poet's book, written by a poet, and translated beautifully by Natasha Wimmer.
The story, in a nutshell, is the life story of a German soldier by the name of Hans Reiter, who, in mid-life in the bombed-out city of Cologne, after the Second World War, changes his name to Benno von Archimboldi and writes his first novel. This story seems to be a conflation of several writers' biographies--Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, and surely Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau (I don't think you will see this in any other critique of the book but Bolano gives a brilliant clue at the end of the novel and the parallels between Benno and Prince Herman are quite interesting to trace. Why did he chose him? Because he is better remembered for the ice cream named after him than the books he a wrote and the life he lived.)
From this brief synopsis grows a story of the world in the Twentieth Century. It begins with Reiter's birth in Prussia and ends in the present day. The book contains hundreds of characters and their stories, each told by the same voice, a narrator, who Bolano once said was the fictional poet, Arturo Belano, a character in his brilliant novel--"The Savage Detectives."
So, we have a story told, not shown, which covers eighty years.
The novel contains five parts, which are almost self-contained, but when read together fit perfectly. The five parts are: (1) The Part about the Critics; (2) The Part about Amalfitano; (3) The Part about Fate; (4) The Part about the Crimes; and (5) The Part about Archimboldi.
Part One tells the story of four academics reading, studying, and writing about the reclusive Archimboldi, who is being considered for the Nobel Prize. Their study leads them ultimately to Sonora, to Santa Teresa (a conflation of Jaurez and Heroica Nogales), where a serial killer is operating.
Parts Two, Three, and Four take place in Sonora and involve--a university professor, an American journalist, and many detectives. These three sections all involve the killings in Santa Teresa from one view or another.
Part Five is a chronological telling of the life of Archimboldi, which precedes the action in Part One.
Throughout the telling of the story hundreds of books are mentioned and discussed. Some are real books; some are made up; and others are simply conflated. However, ultimately, it is a writer's book or perhaps just a book for readers, real readers, readers interested in mystery and games, language games, and ghastly murders.
The plot of the novel is driven by mysteries: where is Archimboldi, who is Archimboldi, who is killing the women of Santa Teresa? However, the beauty of the book is in the slow telling of the stories and the minutia of the details.
I cannot do the novel justice; it has to be read closely to appreciate it, but there is a clue to its most fundamental theme: throughout the novel people are buried in mass graves, the graves are hidden because more often than not the murderers are trying to hide their crimes. However, in each instance, the graves are discovered and the bodies uncovered; just as stories are told and the secrets revealed. And herein lies the meaning of the title and I think the fundamental theme of a book full of themes and ideas; it arises or it is hidden in a quote from the "Savage Detectives:" "Guerreo, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
In other words, our world is more like an uncovered cemetery of the future, full of violence and death. The science of the Twentieth Century devised ways to systematically kill thousands of people. But even now, after the war, the killing continues in the bizarre nightmare milieus of border towns, the situs of the maquiladoras, in refugee camps in Africa, in race wars all over the war, the Fifth Ward, in Compton, in our back yards.
Santa Teresa is supposedly modeled on Juarez where there are 340 maguiladoras operating. Here is the future, stranger than we can imagine, which makes the book in my mind slipstream.