2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: Bolaño's Masterpiece - "a steaming cup of peyote."
Summary: 5 Stars
According to Mrs. Bubis, wife of publisher Mr. Bubis, one of the only people alive that knew Benno von Archimboldi, "how well anyone could really know of another person's work?"
Reading "2666" by Roberto Bolaño, I feel the same way. It has been quite a journey for the English reader with a talent of his kind. From "By Night in Chile" to the chilling "Romantic Dogs," (which I finished a week before this novel) to "2666," one of Bolaño's "longer" works, preceded by the fantastic "Savage Detectives."
Much has been written (and will be) concerning this novel (see the great reviews, beginning with the one in the New York Times). In short, and without giving too much away, the story revolves around five intervals, which Bolano wanted to be released separately (in 5 year increments), involving a cast of characters as thick as the book itself. Part 1 (About the Critics) concerns four critics: Jean-Claude Pelletier from France, Manuel Espinoza from Spain, Piero Morini of Italy, and Liz Norton who, through their love of Archimboldi, come together and discuss and revel in the mysterious nature of the man. Part 2 (About Amalfitano) and Part 3 (About Fate) concerns a Chilean college professor, Amalfitano, and his dealings with his daughter and a strange geometry books; and an African-American, Quincy Williams aka Fate, who takes a assignment in Mexico covering a boxing match, which soon gets derailed due to his interest in the murders of the women detailed in the next chapter. Part 4 (About the Crimes) concerns the cornerstone of the novel, the parts tying all these people together: the murders of women, detailed by Bolaño, in the city of Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juárez) in the Sonora Desert in Northern Mexico on the US border. Part 5 (About Archimboldi) gives the final insights into our characters and ends the novel much as we began.
With Bolaño, it is the manner of his story-telling that wins him fans as well as enemies. In "2666," he pushes the boundaries that he may have placed on himself before his death in 2003. My favorite passage, in which Liz Norton realizes the genius of Archimboldi, gives you a sense of his style, if you have not read him before. This could also sum up how some readers felt reading Bolaño their first time they tried to pay attention:
"It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote."
His style is attractive and inviting (although for some the large blocks of text and absence of quotations is a turn off) and the story itself is superb. If this was unfinished. If this novel was not how Bolaño envisioned or felt represented him, help us all what a complete "2666" would look like. Nevertheless, this is Bolaño's masterpiece. The hype is for real.
Book Review: Immense and overpowering
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a deeply troubling work. Not terrifying, quite, nor horrifying, nor shattering. Instead, demanding. Incriminating. An accusation of the most serious kind. Chilling. Mesmerizing. Giant, as it were.
The only thing I've read which approximates the scope or scale of this novel is War and Peace, but the comparison to War and Peace is a rotten one because if you haven't actually read 2666 yet but have read Tolstoy, such a comparison will give you absolutely the wrong idea.
2666 is a haunting, creeping, threatening, silently (and ever more) dangerous whisper that gradually accumulates, begins to hang in the air, the whisper of death, of all of the deaths of modernity, foremost amongst these the deaths of society and of a particular conception of humanity and civilization. It is not so much a eulogy for the modern project as it is the warning of an impending reckoning, a cold, calculated demand for payment, the calm before a dreadful storm that (thankfully) doesn't actually arrive in the novel's pages, but that continues to color the silence that follows, the certainty of its ultimate arrival at some unknown future date all too clear.
It is an implicit, intuitive, wild summary of existential dread, of the uniquely modern aggregation of history atop which we live, of holocausts and nuclear politics and terrorism and slavery and capitalism and totalitarianism and unrestrained virtuality and uncontrollable sexuality and the tyranny, the utter, utter tyranny of individual and collective human agency, which has proven to be restrainable neither with freedom nor with unfreedom, neither with technology nor through romanticized constructions of the "natural."
It is perhaps the most incriminating thing I've ever read, a pronouncement about the human condition in the age of exponential population growth, encroaching climate change, the unchallenged dominance of capital and the banalization of violence. As a sociologist, I found it to be endlessly illuminating and diverting. As a fan of fiction, I found it to be innovative and surprising. As a professional writer, I found it to be the most willfully "incorrect" body of writing that I ever been unable to put down.
ADDENDUM:
After reading more of the reviews that have appeared here, particularly those that gave the work just one star, I wanted to add to the review that I wrote above (written immediately after finishing the work).
Many of the one-star reviews complain about a lack of plot, suggest that the individual "books" in the work are unconnected, or talk about a lack of resolution or the absence of central characters. Many also frame their review by saying "Maybe I missed the point, but..."
My response would be that they did indeed miss the point. There is one plot here, and it is in fact coherent. It kept me turning pages throughout the entire work, and the more it came together, the more enthralled (and shocked) I became. There is also one character, the protagonist of the book if you will, that is the fulcrum of said plot. Those who didn't notice the plot and didn't identify the protagonist have indeed "missed the point" entirely, and I can understand why they must be frustrated.
Book Review: Five wonderful novels that have brought the evolution of the novel a step forward
Summary: 5 Stars
Balano orginally wished to publish these books as five seperate novels to be released 1 year apart. His heirs decided that one "novel' in 5 parts was a better way to bring this to market.
The five novels in these books are releated to each other by sharing minor characters and minor characters. But each novel could stand alone.
The translation is wonderful and riveting also.
I think that the humor in the first book The Part About the Critics is misundersood. Balano has chritics who are self important and name drop who are supposedly enlightented and forward thinking. But they are stimied in idiotic sexual leasions and brutal attacks sometimes verbal and often physical. The first book is a parody of the relation of critics giving there lives to an authors work they neither understand nor can own.
The second book often I think throughs readers because it is no longer a parody but a story of a man going into madness. He is driven made by the city Santa Teresa which is corrupt and deadly. His enlightened mind falls appart because of his enviroment. It shows how men who aproach insanity can function normally but slowly loss a grip of the world. Also there is a cautionary note that the insane often know things about reality that the rest of us try to ignore.
The third book is about a reporter who is almost destroyed by Santa Teresa. It validates the second books main characters insanity. As well as shows the danger the same city Santa Teresa has for the sane.
The Santa Teresa saga continues in the fourth part about the crimes. Where we see that Santa Teresa is a vailed description of Jarez Mexico and the killings of women that are still to this day going on. This section is graphic and chilling. But as you read of the murders you become more and more empatheic with their plight.
The final section is about a reclusive author who haunts the first five books and ties everything together but leaves the ending of the book open to our minds.
The books are allgedly unfinished but my opinion is that the last book was finished but some final cuts were not made. I believe the story is intact and an extra 20 pages that were not edited out of this 900 page book make little difference to the story. the first five books are highly polished and the last book is great but could have had a few unnecessary things cut. Again this does not distract greatly from the beauty of the last book nor the sum of all five novels.
This book is a new step forward in the idea of the novel. I am sorry that Balano will not write again, his death is a tragedy to literature. His previous books I found distracted and lacked what this book did not. this is a mature writers legacy. I am sure Balano's imment death greatly shaped the book and brought it a richness that deserves a place in anyones libary.
The book begins with three Quitoxe and ends with a reluctant Cyrano.
This is the best book I have read this year. I have to say that the joy of reading this book and Nathan Englanders Ministry of Special Cases has made my recent reading completely satifying and exillerating.
Book Review: Astonishing
Summary: 5 Stars
I was initially reticent about reading this book because I struggled through The Savage Detectives, which was maddeningly abstruse. Not being familiar with esoteric Spanish/Mexican literati, much of its sly wit escaped me. But I was willing to engage myself in Bolano's final masterpiece because he is so probing and original. I was warmly astonished.
These are five books in one with a common thread through all of them--the murder of over 400 women in the past 15 years in the fictional town of Santa Teresa (based on true accounts of these murders in Ciudad Juarez). The first story is a search for the elusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi, and a love triangle (or quadrangle) of Archimboldi scholars. The second story concerns a Professor who hears voices telling him to hang a geometry book on the clothesline, and is very fetching with bittersweet humor. In the third section, a reporter named Fate goes to the Mexican border to cover a boxing match. All these stories lead us to Santa Teresa, where the fourth and most staggering story takes place. It is a penetrating account of the deaths of these forgotten women and the sociopolitical and socioeconomic forces that shape the investigation. The last section does a full circle to illuminate Archimboldi's life.
Bolano could describe trousers drying and leave you haunted and awash in the beauty of his prose. While reading his words, the way sentences are stitched together like soft resplendent fabric, I felt like I was walking in it, or it was walking in me. This was liquid, fluid, creamy prose. It was very accessible because it was so natural. Never synthetic, never dry, never pretentious. In fact, it felt effortless and gliding. It was stark in its landscape but lush and sinewy in its tone, not one word wasted and yet it draped a world with a hypnotizing glow. It often was surreal; at times I felt I was entering a fifth dimension, but not in a David Lynch/David Foster Wallace/Nabokovian manner (but interesting that Bolano paid homage to Lynch). That is what dazzled me so deeply--that Bolano could rupture all the boundaries while maintaining them, that he could make you feel like you are in a postmodern world but easily so-- by writing with clarity and simplicity and alacrity. (Sometimes it was like being on LSD even though the writing was so pure, which was a feat in itself. You don't need to struggle to understand his novel).
Finally, what made this book so transcendent, so unutterably beautiful, was this massive, monumental heart at its center. There is so much love in it and so much humble wisdom and naked truth, that it cried. It cried for the women and it cried for humanity, and it did this without grandstanding, without asking it from us or telling us with trumpets. It just spoke for itself with mortality and through its mortality, its immortality.
Book Review: Towering, magisterial epic
Summary: 5 Stars
To try to summarise Roberto Bolaño's "2666: A novel" in less than the 900-odd pages in which the book itself unfolds amounts to a more or less futile exercise, so I will not even try! Published posthumously in this English-language translation in a single volume (in contravention of the author's instructions that it be published in five separate volumes to maximise earnings for his heirs) this master-work meanders through just about every topic and subject area imaginable to some extent or another, making a languorous way through intellectual backwaters and cul-de-sacs aplenty on its nevertheless inexorable path towards its conclusion.
If you like your literature simple and your stories direct, then this most certainly is not the book for you. But if you prefer words that need to be mulled over, sentences that needed to pondered (often for their relevance) and facts and figures that need to be sifted for their significance, and you're willing to commit to a heady world-encompassing tour of literary academia, sexual relations, murder, and much more besides, which at times will have you wondering where on earth it is heading (or even if it is heading anywhere at all) then "2666" may be just the ticket. Just bear in mind that it makes otherwise heavyweight books -- Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", for example -- feel positively light and yet ponderous by comparison.
Although the story is often dark and complex, the text is never in any way impenetrable -- in fact just the opposite, with its light, almost conversational style making the story-telling feel very close and intimate, almost at times seeming to be written for the individual personal benefit of the reader. Its division into short blocks of text (rather than chapters) also gives the sensation of a continuous on-going narrative from which it is hard to disconnect for fear of being left behind if one pauses for breath! (And you may sometimes feel you do indeed need a breather; one sentence in particular, at over 2000 words, must qualify as one of the longest outside of any written by James Joyce!) This endless driving narrative, coupled with the constant inclusion of every last detail in the story's scenes and events, gives the book the same surreal and dream-like quality achieved by Alexander Sokurov in his single-take film-work, "Russian Ark".
Originally published in 2004, this book has been a long time coming to press in English; it has been well worth the wait.