2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: The Whole Universe Falling on Your Head
Summary: 5 Stars
Suppose you were lucky enough to be alive in Paris when Joyce's "Ulysses" first appeared or when Proust's Marcel arrived; wouldn't you feel blessed and lucky and amazed? Well, here's your chance: you are alive when the novels of Roberto Bolano are first appearing, the most important literary event in South American and world literature since the arrival of Gabriel Garcia Marques. Unfortunately, Bolano is not alive to share in your excitement but in his great novel, "2666" he clearly anticipated the posthumous career of a creator who can reveal himself only through his creations.
Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) began as a poet; his magical novel, "The Savage Detectives" described the hopeless search for the founders of a bizarre Mexican literary movement, one of whose leaders is Arturo Belano, the unnamed narrator of "2666". The latter novel, only recently detonated in the English-speaking world, is the author's masterpiece, a great baggy word-intoxicated book with all of the ambition, and some of the mechanics, of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". Like Proust, the set pieces move at a speed one might call "real" time in that it takes as much time to read about the event as it probably took to experience it in real life. Like Proust's great work, Bolano's books are arriving posthumously, year after year, volume after volume. Concerned about the financial security of his family after his premature death, Bolano intended for the five long novellas of "2666" to appear one after the other. His heirs decided to print the five novels as a unified whole, a decidedly wise decision. It is only through the compression of reading the entire 893 pages in one sitting that one can detect the correspondences between the different sections and note the transformation in the writer's strategy from the omniscience of Proust to the dogged Thomas Mann of "The Magic Mountain".
In section V, The Part About Archimboldi, the novel's locus moves from Mexico and North America to Germany and time steadily speeds up from the Second World War to the present, exactly the time-lapse strategy of The Magic Mountain's final pages. Section V solves the identity of the writer chased by the critics in Part I and, in a chilling description of how ordinary townspeople could shoot Jews in pits during the Second World War, explains the banality of evil underlying the multiple rapes and deaths of young Mexican women in Part IV. In its restraint and quietude, Part V is the most moving and dramatic literary explanation of the Holocaust ever written, a triumph achieved without sentimentality and without a single description of the camps. In section III, The Part About Fate, Bolano brings a black reporter from Detroit to Santa Teresa, the town where the murders are occurring, and stretches his canvas to cover all nationalities and ethnicities. To my taste, Section II, concerning the removal of one of Archimboldi's critics from Spain to Mexico, is the weakest part of "2666", though the writing, as always, is detailed and poetic in the best sense of the term. The drum beat of rapes and murders in Part IV, each of which carries the plot outline for an entire novel by a lesser writer, creates an inexorable tension, one that is relieved by the more conventional narrative flow of Part V.
Bolano's novels are as much about writing per se as the poems of Wallace Stevens are about the art of poetry. Both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" are set up as a type of detective fiction because life and creativity are fundamental mysteries; that the novels end somewhat inconclusively is consistent with the profound difficulties of such mysteries. Part 1 is an extended set piece on academic life, the pretensions of critics, and the mysterious explication of a writer's life and the meaning of his work. It is the most humorous part of the book and tenderly sexual in a way that the rest of the novel is not. That an unknown author might be a candidate for the Nobel Prize is a painful irony that the dying Bolano understood only too well; Death is introduced as an explicit character in Part V. One must remember that Bolano gave up the chance for a life-saving liver transplant in order to complete "2666".
The novel eschews ordinary plot development, standard grammar and the use of quotation marks to break up the solid blocks of prose. This is simply another way of saying that although Bolano stopped writing poetry in order to feed his family from his fiction, "2666" reads like an extended poem. When the mysterious writer of Part I is uncovered in Part V standing beneath a sky lit by stars burnt out long ago, he and his girlfriend are described returning to a village "while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads." In this encyclopedic novel, you will feel that way too, alone and connected to everything.
Book Review: The Great World Novel!
Summary: 5 Stars
As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here).
Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant).
This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did.
The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly.
I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter.
Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again.
Book Review: Bolaño's Irony
Summary: 5 Stars
In early reviews of the book, the reviewers--probably because of hasty readings--dwell on the obvious: Part 4 and the serial killings in Mexico. Also the title, that mysterious date, seems to draw like attention. While these are worthy points of interest, I suspect they are part of Roberto Bolaño's subterfuge.
If Part 4 and the murders is his reason for writing the book, why the four critics, why Amalfitano, why Mexico, why Archimboldi and his experience of the most brutal war in modern history? Surely something must tie these odd happenstances together.
For instance, what would tie Part 4 to Archimboldi's story (other than the fact that he went there, probably to help out Klaus)? First, I think Bolaño, in depicting WWII's eastern front akin to the brutal murders of women and the drug-related killings in Mexico, wants us to look at the role of violence in the human psyche. Germany, a heavily industrialized and technologically creative nation prior to WWII, committed its creative prowess to racial purity and war-fostered expansion, as did the Soviet Union.
Bolaño makes continual mention of Mexico's maquiladoras, the import and assembly zones for products previously made (most often) in the U.S. These were supposed to be a commercial godsend to a society immobilized by class strictures and poverty. But Bolaño's characters, while benefiting from these jobs, continually drift into crimes of various sorts, or are victims of such crimes. Whether he intended to expose Mexico's population as remaining education-poor and barely living on low wages, or whether he believed that such jobs left Mexicans soul-poor is unclear. But he does depict that technology and economic well-being orchestrated for all the wrong reasons leaves humanity to wallow in their baser instincts.
And what to make of the sexual crimes, the constant references to his characters in the throes of copulation? This seems to Bolaño to be both a human escape from the ravages of poverty and war and a physical preoccupation to counter spiritual and intellectual poverty.
Amalfitano, in hanging his geometry treatise on the clothesline, seems to be saying that human efforts to raise itself up through intellectual and spiritual pursuits remain at the mercy of natural forces - violence and sex. In this, Bolaño's thinking aligns itself with that depicted in Cormac McCarthy's violence and sex-soaked stories.
Finally, Bolaño the writer wanted, I suspect, to pass on, as his death neared, his views of the writing life, literary fame and the value of literature itself. The irony of the four critics looking for Archimboldi in Mexico--while a few oblique references seem to mention him as a ragtag wanderer in Mexico's outback--becomes poignant. They're looking for an academic, a person of literary fame. Archimboldi, on the other hand is a man bearing the burdens of war and scratching out an existence through writing, a life that seems similar to the plight of modern Mexican workers. If one were to extend this as metaphor, we could see humans grappling for meaning in all the wrong places, much as the four critics continue to search for Archimboldi as something he is not nor ever will be. Archimboldi, through his persistence as a writer, gains a measure of literary fame, but this is a veneer the world has placed over him that in no way represents the person. As such, Bolaño has created in Archimboldi the highest form of irony.
As for 2666 - the date? I see nothing particularly significant about it, other than to say that Bolaño sees only a continuation of this state of affairs some 660 years into our future. But most good writers take the time to expose such aspects of the human condition in the hopes that awareness of them will allow the rest of us to cope with our foibles in a constructive manner, to turn our human swords into plowshares that will sustain us. One can hope that such a monumental task wasn't beyond Bolaño's vision--and isn't beyond humanity's capabilities.
Book Review: The Heart of Corruption
Summary: 5 Stars
On a recent trip through Manchester airport I was amazed to see copies of 2666 piled high in the departure lounge bookstore. Who did they think the target audience was for this lengthy literary novel?
Part 1, The Part About The Critics, tells a mostly self-contained story about a quartet of academics who specialise in the obscure German author Benno von Archimboldi. Each of the four gets their own back-story, and we follow their quest to find the author, a trail which leads to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (based on Ciudad Juarez). The story has highly stylised sections in the `magical realism' tradition (do academics ever beat up taxi drivers?) and appears to end inconclusively - perhaps a meditation on the strange paths of love, or the fickle ways of women? Or Santa Teresa's powers of deflection.
At this point of my journey, I'm wondering where this story gets us, noting that not a whole lot has happened, and that I'm only on page 159 of an 893 page novel.
I grit my teeth and continue.
The shorter Part 2, The Part About Amalfitano, takes a minor character from the first part - a Chilean literary academic at the University of Santa Teresa and his daughter Rosa - and fills out their back story, mostly concerning the runaway wife, Lola.
Part 3, The Part About Fate, describes an American reporter, Oscar Fate who is sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. While there, he gets involved with the local narcos and meets Rosa from part 2. Oscar by some miracle manages to escape Santa Teresa with his life. In this part we begin to circle around the increasing numbers of sexually-violated and murdered young women found in deserted parking lots, isolated ravines, abandoned buildings and the desert: crimes which the police seem unable to solve.
Part 4, The Part About The Crimes, takes us directly into the unending horror of underclass life in Santa Teresa. This is by far the longest novel in the collection. We meet the police: uneducated, casually violent, brutally chauvinistic and content to tiptoe around the atrocities of the powerful. We meet the suspect, a German businessman banged up for years while the crimes continue. And we discover the private lives of the narco lords: drug and sex-fuelled parties in their desert ranches with no inconvenient witnesses afterwards.
Part 5, The Part About Archimboldi, takes us back to the mysterious German author who was the subject of the quest in part 1. We now learn his life story, his wartime exploits and why, in his late life, he finally found himself for the first time in Santa Teresa.
In the Notes to the First Edition at the back of the book, Ignacio Echevarria, Bolano's literary executor, tries to account for the title. He looks to an earlier novel of Bolano, Amulet, where a seedy, downbeat avenue at night in some Mexican town is described as like a cemetery: "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."
Santa Teresa may be the physical centre of this interlinked novel-set, as Echevarria observes, but it is also a symbol - a submerged, carnivorous, tentacled thing that draws in the powerless and horribly consumes them. Omnipresent corruption, where the powerful use ordinary people for their money or their bodies, then dispose of them with casual, lethal brutality. The murderous events depicted in 2666 actually occurred in Ciudad Juarez, where more than 400 women have been the victims of sexual homicides.
These five novels are five journeys into the heart of corruption, starting from afar and gradually taking us closer to its centre. If anyone thinks a corrupt society is just about the venal sin of taking bribes, this novel will make them think again.
Book Review: Imperfection Perfected
Summary: 5 Stars
2666, originally published in Spanish in 2003, is the last novel of Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre, completed just before his death of that same year. Translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008, the deceased Chilean author's 900-page magnum opus has, since its November 11th release in the United States, received unanimous acclaim. TIME, for instance, proclaimed it the best novel of 2008 as did The New York Times, setting it beside four others. Some are considering it the entire re-invention of the novel...the novel not of America, no...it's not the next great American novel, nor is it the next great Latin American novel, not anything like that...the novel of the WORLD (as someone else has said here). The next great World novel. The Book is around 900 pages and is separated into 5 parts, all of which are distinctive by themselves with their own set of characters but connect together in a gigantic thematic web reaching across the tome's pages. And the pages themselves across the entire world.
Much of the novel is centered around what Bolaño called "The World's Graveyard," Ciudad Juarez, which is given, in the book, the fictionalized name "Santa Teresa," an industrial city on the border of Mexico and the US. There, for the past 10 years or so, women have been subject to a growing number of serial killings, more than 500 documented thus far. The novel consists of five separate, overlapping story arcs, each, in subtle ways, more dark and violent than the one preceding, that is, until the fourth part "The Part About the Crimes," the climax, where some 200 dead women are documented in the fashion of a police or autopsy report with flat, objective prose. It's this lack of emotion in the telling of the horrible violence that ironically brings forth sympathy from the reader. It's a dark outlook on the violence present in humanity, especially that in Mexico which often is brushed aside. Is this the first time YOU'VE ever heard of Ciudad Juarez?
And, yet, just as well, it is a meditation on literature. Each section's main characters are scholars, professors, journalists, novelists, &c., and it's through these narratives that Bolaño expresses his own feelings of current writing. He felt that too much literature isn't as free-wheeling and raw as it should be. Or that the risky works aren't read as much as they should. Or that there are too many rules for ambitious writers. Rules that Bolaño disregards. Writing is not a perfected art and should never be created with that type of goal in mind for the end product. 2666 isn't perfect; in fact, it's an ugly and messy and battled work of art, so anyone who reads 2666 should expect Lynchian non-sequiturs, digressions galore, and unanswered questions. If none of the above is "your thing," this book you should, at all costs, stay away from. In it, a character Amifaltano thinks the following:
"Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
--I don't doubt this quote will become a classic one as I've seen it in most every review I've read so far.
It's the epitome of what Literature is supposed to do, and what most don't. "Masterpiece," "spellbinding," "wonderful," blah blah blah...but most importanly, it is: a testament of what literature can truly do. And that, Bolaño has proven, is a lot.