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# 2666: A Novel

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A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: TOP TEN THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa―a fictional Juárez―on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Review: No Doubt in My Mind This Is a Contemporary Masterpiece - Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, completely unknown to me, and left behind a semi-finished work entitled 2666. What drew me to 2666 was initially the number in the title which belies much of the book. What caused me to follow through with reading it was the extremely diverse culture the Chilean born son of a truck driver/boxer that emigrated to Mexico. Also note that this isn't a book for nerds but rather a book for book nerds who may be seeking a very distinct departure from their normal reading. Like reading James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth for the first time, Bolaño's 2666 gave me the impersonation that there was something much much more to the subtext of what I was reading than I could ever hope to grasp. 2666 dragged me violently across present day literary criticisms to the entire European theater of World War II to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It was embarrassingly unknown to me that this place of convergence (Santa Teresa) in the story is in real life a place where hundreds of women and girls have actually been brutally raped and murdered since 1993 with many indications of a serial killer present. To save many of you the time of reading this entire review in my novice hand, I will first reveal that I recommend this book to no one despite my rating of five stars. One of the reasons is that this took me several months to read and at times felt like a burden or chore--a terminal weight upon my shoulders. The other reason is that this book, which is broken into five parts, is rumored to have a sixth and final part yet to be published that may tie these parts together in a more satisfactory manner. The book's title is a year in which all of these stories were supposed to converge according to all supplementary reading I've done and yet there is no evidence of this other than it being an "imaginary center" upon which everything converges. With that in mind, proceed with caution before reading this book. The plot follows an arc in time with the pacing often resembling a sine wave plotted against another (out of phase) sine wave of relevance to the story. The first part of this book revolves around four critics. They are all from different countries and they all become friends upon discovering their severe desire for a very mysterious German writer named Benno Von Archimboldi. If the name sounds absolutely absurd to you, it is a pen of a very mysterious individual of which little is known. The four critics are known for being absolutely brilliant in their literary endeavor to dissect and analyze Archimboldi's works. Norton, the English female of the four, starts a love affair with one of the three men. At times Bolaño sounds like lyrical poet describing their emotions for each other and how much they are brought together by their youth and criticism of Archimboldi. And at other times, he callously reveals a detail in one sentence--a detail that might have taken him five pages to reveal it in the same chapter. Push/Pop stacks litter this story like several stories within the story or several pages relaying a notebook found in a fireplace about a painter. The critic in the wheelchair, Morini, takes the story on a quest also to find an artist, Edwin Johns, who for his epic masterpiece he "cut off his right hand, the one he painted with, and attached it to a kind of multiple self-portrait." When Morini finds the artist, he asks him "Why did you mutilate yourself?" He answers Morini by leaning toward and whispering something in his ear. Morini seems to have caught a touch of the insanity that binds Johns to his institution where they visit him but Morini reveals later what "he thinks" was Johns' motivation for mutilation: money. Bolaño's experiences with literature and love of authors is well revealed in this section. It was at this point that I speculated Bolaño wrote this book to relay to me the sorry state of the world where friends have sex, transmit diseases and betray each other. I would soon find myself sorely mistaken and learn new horrors. As the story slowly moves from Europe to Mexico in search of the mysterious Archimboldi, the four employ the help of Amalfitano who is slightly tied to them in the plot line. Amalfitano is an interesting character--and also the second part of the book--who hangs a book entitled Testamento Geometrico because he felt at ease when he knew "that the wind could go through the book, choosing its own problems, turning and tearing out the pages." Amalfitano, like many of the characters of this book are not all there and have vivid dreams relayed by Bolaño to the reader. And Bolaño reveals yet more about himself, a respected short story author, for example: "What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. 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." And as this text--which is wonderfully translated--weaves sentences that last sometimes as long as five pages and sometimes fewer than five words, you realize this is the work of a great master of Latin America. The third section is about Fate. Not fate as in destiny but Oscar Fate, a reporter from Chicago sent down to cover a boxing match near Santa Teresa. With the fight that Fate is covering, the book transitions from mostly non-violent story telling to almost the extreme opposite. In this description of events leading up to the fight and the fight itself, one can see the dualism in Bolaño's writing where the setup lasts well over 50 pages and the fight itself is several short sentences occupying three inches of a page. The strangest descriptions are flayed out in front of the reader only to have (what would be the juiciest part to just about any other author) last a heart beat to the reader. Maybe that's how boxing matches feel, I've never been to one. But I'll never forget the description of the Mexican arena between the opening fight (which got more of Bolaño's attention than the main event) and the match Fate was covering, a description that stuck in my head for several days: "Three thousand Mexicans up in the gallery of the arena singing the same song in unison. Fate tried to get a look at them, but the lights, focused on the ring, left the upper part of the hall in darkness. The tone, he though, was solemn and defiant, the battle hymn of a lost war sung in the dark. In the solemnity there was only desperation and death, but in the defiance there was a hint of corrosive humor, a humor that existed only in relation to itself and in dreams, no matter whether the dreams were long or short." Following the fight, Fate gets mixed up in some unpleasantness. Fate discovers the crimes the book centers around and wants to cover them but cannot get his boss to agree to it. This transitions the reader to the fourth, most violent and tiresome section of the book: The Part About the Crimes. The crimes are 200+ clips written sometimes very police-report-style and an occasional detail of savagely raped and murdered girls and women surrounding Santa Teresa. Laced between them are a few character developments and a gringo law enforcement officer bent on finding out who is behind them that meets his untimely demise. The strange part about these crimes is that some are perfectly plain cut and they have a confession from someone who committed the homicide. This section delves into many things including a love relationship between a psychologist and police officer that cannot amount to anything, an individual who suffers from sacrophobia by urinating in a string of churches and even a seer who can view the crimes and appears on TV while channeling them. But one of my favorite characters arises in this section of the book--Lalo Cura. Lalo enters as a hired guard to the wife of a narco (drug runner) and earns his respect by being one of the few people in the middle of everything who actually cares and can see what is going on and what is about to happen. The fifth part of the book succeeds in tying together many of the above sections as the author constantly picks up characters and discards them. We see many characters from the book resurface and tie into the story in a brilliant and satisfying way. While at times the plot of this book seemed weak or not at all present, the delivery and descriptions of this author should be noted by people across the globe. Oftentimes I reflected on the sheer task the translation of this work must have been and I praise Natasha Wimmer for her work on this epic piece of modern literature. The last thing I would like to mention about this book is that it is packed with references to classic works and culture the world over. Borrowing from The Bible, Greek & Roman Mythology, other authors and modern legends, Bolaño rises up as someone well versed in a very large realm of world culture. In the end, I felt awestruck to have read something dripping with such allusions. I also was blindingly aware that the cultural differences that separated me from this author added more to my enjoyment of this novel than I thought possible. This book left such imagery and concentrated essence of itself in a residue on my mind that I found myself thinking and rethinking about it and often stuck on a passage I had read over a few times while performing inane tasks like driving to work. This was an escape into horror so realistic about real events in history and modern life that I feel it transcends Stephen King while at the same time the two authors may share some aspects of borderline obsessive compulsive attention to detail. I sincerely regret (as with most works in foreign tongues) not being able to enjoy this in its original language. If you asked me to summarize this book into a single sentence I would first pilfer the words of a reviewer of Archimboldi from the fifth and final chapter, "I don't know, I don't know." But I am certain I would, in the end, most likely settle on the book's epigraph attributed to Charles Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."
Review: The first great novel of the global age - 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.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #1,900 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #6 in International Mystery & Crime (Books) #232 in Literary Fiction (Books) #363 in Suspense Thrillers |
| Customer Reviews | 4.3 out of 5 stars 2,056 Reviews |

## Images

![2666: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/A1cy7M6FkrL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ No Doubt in My Mind This Is a Contemporary Masterpiece
*by E***N on June 8, 2010*

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, completely unknown to me, and left behind a semi-finished work entitled 2666. What drew me to 2666 was initially the number in the title which belies much of the book. What caused me to follow through with reading it was the extremely diverse culture the Chilean born son of a truck driver/boxer that emigrated to Mexico. Also note that this isn't a book for nerds but rather a book for book nerds who may be seeking a very distinct departure from their normal reading. Like reading James Joyce, Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth for the first time, Bolaño's 2666 gave me the impersonation that there was something much much more to the subtext of what I was reading than I could ever hope to grasp. 2666 dragged me violently across present day literary criticisms to the entire European theater of World War II to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It was embarrassingly unknown to me that this place of convergence (Santa Teresa) in the story is in real life a place where hundreds of women and girls have actually been brutally raped and murdered since 1993 with many indications of a serial killer present. To save many of you the time of reading this entire review in my novice hand, I will first reveal that I recommend this book to no one despite my rating of five stars. One of the reasons is that this took me several months to read and at times felt like a burden or chore--a terminal weight upon my shoulders. The other reason is that this book, which is broken into five parts, is rumored to have a sixth and final part yet to be published that may tie these parts together in a more satisfactory manner. The book's title is a year in which all of these stories were supposed to converge according to all supplementary reading I've done and yet there is no evidence of this other than it being an "imaginary center" upon which everything converges. With that in mind, proceed with caution before reading this book. The plot follows an arc in time with the pacing often resembling a sine wave plotted against another (out of phase) sine wave of relevance to the story. The first part of this book revolves around four critics. They are all from different countries and they all become friends upon discovering their severe desire for a very mysterious German writer named Benno Von Archimboldi. If the name sounds absolutely absurd to you, it is a pen of a very mysterious individual of which little is known. The four critics are known for being absolutely brilliant in their literary endeavor to dissect and analyze Archimboldi's works. Norton, the English female of the four, starts a love affair with one of the three men. At times Bolaño sounds like lyrical poet describing their emotions for each other and how much they are brought together by their youth and criticism of Archimboldi. And at other times, he callously reveals a detail in one sentence--a detail that might have taken him five pages to reveal it in the same chapter. Push/Pop stacks litter this story like several stories within the story or several pages relaying a notebook found in a fireplace about a painter. The critic in the wheelchair, Morini, takes the story on a quest also to find an artist, Edwin Johns, who for his epic masterpiece he "cut off his right hand, the one he painted with, and attached it to a kind of multiple self-portrait." When Morini finds the artist, he asks him "Why did you mutilate yourself?" He answers Morini by leaning toward and whispering something in his ear. Morini seems to have caught a touch of the insanity that binds Johns to his institution where they visit him but Morini reveals later what "he thinks" was Johns' motivation for mutilation: money. Bolaño's experiences with literature and love of authors is well revealed in this section. It was at this point that I speculated Bolaño wrote this book to relay to me the sorry state of the world where friends have sex, transmit diseases and betray each other. I would soon find myself sorely mistaken and learn new horrors. As the story slowly moves from Europe to Mexico in search of the mysterious Archimboldi, the four employ the help of Amalfitano who is slightly tied to them in the plot line. Amalfitano is an interesting character--and also the second part of the book--who hangs a book entitled Testamento Geometrico because he felt at ease when he knew "that the wind could go through the book, choosing its own problems, turning and tearing out the pages." Amalfitano, like many of the characters of this book are not all there and have vivid dreams relayed by Bolaño to the reader. And Bolaño reveals yet more about himself, a respected short story author, for example: "What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. 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." And as this text--which is wonderfully translated--weaves sentences that last sometimes as long as five pages and sometimes fewer than five words, you realize this is the work of a great master of Latin America. The third section is about Fate. Not fate as in destiny but Oscar Fate, a reporter from Chicago sent down to cover a boxing match near Santa Teresa. With the fight that Fate is covering, the book transitions from mostly non-violent story telling to almost the extreme opposite. In this description of events leading up to the fight and the fight itself, one can see the dualism in Bolaño's writing where the setup lasts well over 50 pages and the fight itself is several short sentences occupying three inches of a page. The strangest descriptions are flayed out in front of the reader only to have (what would be the juiciest part to just about any other author) last a heart beat to the reader. Maybe that's how boxing matches feel, I've never been to one. But I'll never forget the description of the Mexican arena between the opening fight (which got more of Bolaño's attention than the main event) and the match Fate was covering, a description that stuck in my head for several days: "Three thousand Mexicans up in the gallery of the arena singing the same song in unison. Fate tried to get a look at them, but the lights, focused on the ring, left the upper part of the hall in darkness. The tone, he though, was solemn and defiant, the battle hymn of a lost war sung in the dark. In the solemnity there was only desperation and death, but in the defiance there was a hint of corrosive humor, a humor that existed only in relation to itself and in dreams, no matter whether the dreams were long or short." Following the fight, Fate gets mixed up in some unpleasantness. Fate discovers the crimes the book centers around and wants to cover them but cannot get his boss to agree to it. This transitions the reader to the fourth, most violent and tiresome section of the book: The Part About the Crimes. The crimes are 200+ clips written sometimes very police-report-style and an occasional detail of savagely raped and murdered girls and women surrounding Santa Teresa. Laced between them are a few character developments and a gringo law enforcement officer bent on finding out who is behind them that meets his untimely demise. The strange part about these crimes is that some are perfectly plain cut and they have a confession from someone who committed the homicide. This section delves into many things including a love relationship between a psychologist and police officer that cannot amount to anything, an individual who suffers from sacrophobia by urinating in a string of churches and even a seer who can view the crimes and appears on TV while channeling them. But one of my favorite characters arises in this section of the book--Lalo Cura. Lalo enters as a hired guard to the wife of a narco (drug runner) and earns his respect by being one of the few people in the middle of everything who actually cares and can see what is going on and what is about to happen. The fifth part of the book succeeds in tying together many of the above sections as the author constantly picks up characters and discards them. We see many characters from the book resurface and tie into the story in a brilliant and satisfying way. While at times the plot of this book seemed weak or not at all present, the delivery and descriptions of this author should be noted by people across the globe. Oftentimes I reflected on the sheer task the translation of this work must have been and I praise Natasha Wimmer for her work on this epic piece of modern literature. The last thing I would like to mention about this book is that it is packed with references to classic works and culture the world over. Borrowing from The Bible, Greek & Roman Mythology, other authors and modern legends, Bolaño rises up as someone well versed in a very large realm of world culture. In the end, I felt awestruck to have read something dripping with such allusions. I also was blindingly aware that the cultural differences that separated me from this author added more to my enjoyment of this novel than I thought possible. This book left such imagery and concentrated essence of itself in a residue on my mind that I found myself thinking and rethinking about it and often stuck on a passage I had read over a few times while performing inane tasks like driving to work. This was an escape into horror so realistic about real events in history and modern life that I feel it transcends Stephen King while at the same time the two authors may share some aspects of borderline obsessive compulsive attention to detail. I sincerely regret (as with most works in foreign tongues) not being able to enjoy this in its original language. If you asked me to summarize this book into a single sentence I would first pilfer the words of a reviewer of Archimboldi from the fifth and final chapter, "I don't know, I don't know." But I am certain I would, in the end, most likely settle on the book's epigraph attributed to Charles Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The first great novel of the global age
*by R***X on March 29, 2009*

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.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A mystical vision in reverse...
*by B***. on July 12, 2013*

It would be hard to imagine a more apt epigraph for Roberto Bolano's ambitious novel, 2666, than the one Bolano himself chose: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom". The line is from Charles Baudelaire and it manages to sum up the novel in a single sentence. The poet T.S. Eliot believed that Charles Baudelaire's depictions of ennui, and the horrors of modern life, were like the photographic negatives of a more positive, mystical, and beatific vision. In his essay on Baudelaire Eliot writes "the sense of Evil implies the sense of good" and "such suffering as Baudelaire's implies the possibility of a positive state of beatitude". In past ages the beatific vision was presented directly and in positive terms. Writers celebrated the signs of God's Providence in nature and history. The whole world seemed to sing the praises of God and provide evidence of His Glory. T.S. Eliot was as aware as anyone that the time for such positive visions was over. The modern world that Eliot himself depicts in his poems is a wasteland and the negative vision is all we have left of the mystical after the "death of God". We no longer see the providence of God in the indifference and violence of nature, and even if there is progress in history, something that is doubtful to say the least, the progress comes at the price of a great deal of waste and human suffering. Countless innocent lives are sacrificed to the march of history, some of them are sacrificed nobly on behalf of great causes, but many are simply the victims of the mundane realities of city life and mental illness. There are a number of modern writers who seem to me to present the reader with a negative vision of a God-forsaken world, a kind of modern day mystical vision, or substitute for the old visions of God's grandeur. What the writers I am thinking of have in common is not simply the unflinching portrayal of the darker side of life but the belief that an honest look at the darker side of life is capable of providing some metaphysical insight into the nature of reality. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West , by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel that presents such a vision and, it seems to me, 2666 is another. 2666 does not have a unified narrative structure, but the novel is centered around a series of rapes and murders that take place in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa and, the narrator claims, even though "no one pays attention to these killings...the secret of the world is hidden in them". The brutal and senseless murders that are the focal point of Bolano's novel are the aperture through which the metaphysical nature of reality is revealed, just as, in previous ages, writer's believed they could read the secrets of God's Providence from the interlocking purposes of nature. The novel itself is long, at times frustrating, and composed of five separate, but interrelated, movements. 'The Part About the Critics' tells the story of four literary critics devoted to the work of an obscure German author named Benno von Archimboldi. After hearing a rumor that Archimboldi has been spotted in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa three of the critics set off in pursuit. 'The Part About Amalfitano' follows the story of a philosophy professor, who lives in Santa Teresa with his daughter Rosa, and is slowly losing his mind. 'The Part About Fate' is about a newspaper reporter who is in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match but winds up becoming interested in the murders taking place in the city. 'The Part About the Murders' interweaves the stories of a number of Santa Teresa detectives with endless newspaper like reports of the murders. 'The Part About Archimboldi' moves back in time to tell the life story of the German author Benno von Archimboldi, whose real name is Hans Reiter, including his experiences in World War II as a soldier for the German army. The five parts of the novel are related through what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would have called "family resemblances". Just as the facial resemblances between family members pass from a similar nose here, to a similar chin there, without there being a single facial feature that is common to all members of the same family, so too, the parts of this novel are related through a recurring character here, and a different recurring character or setting there, without there being a single unifying story to tie them all together into a whole. There is no Ur-story or meta-narrative operating in Bolano's world, perhaps another sign of our Godless post-modern condition. The first section is related to the second through the character of Amalfitano, who appears in both, and to the fifth through the character of Archimboldi. The second is related to the third through Rosa, and the fourth section is related to all of the others through the town of Santa Teresa. The fifth is connected to the first through Archimboldi, and the third and fourth through Klaus Haas. If beauty is the perception of form, or integral wholeness, then there is no beauty in Bolano's 2666, but, it seems to me to be another distinguishing characteristic of modern writing to try to find beauty in what is ugly, senseless, and disjointed, and, I think, Bolano is as successful as any other modern writer in doing so. Like a Mandlebrot set, the same fracture that is present in the novel as a whole is also present in the parts, though to a lesser degree. Each individual section is unified by the presence of a dominant story line and cast of characters but Bolano is fond of the digression. He spends pages introducing minor characters, giving their life histories, and then never returns to them again. Along the way we meet a painter who cuts off his own hand and includes it as part of one of his paintings, a mad poet who lives in an insane asylum, and a Romanian Jew who goes to fight for the Bolsheviks, and then, presumably, is killed by the Nazis. Those are just a few of the interesting characters that people Bolano's tome. When, late in the novel, a character says, referring to the writings of Archimboldi, "The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way that the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere", it is pretty clear that this is a self-conscious and self-referential literary gesture on Bolano's part. Bolano is a skilled writer, he is skilled at creating full blooded characters with the stroke of a pen, and skilled at creating interesting back stories that generally hold the reader's attention, but the digressions, after almost 900 pages, get a bit tedious. The murders that are the focal point of the story are narrated in a very matter of fact way. Facts are given about each killing including, the age and name of the victim, their occupation, the manner and approximate time of death. Sometimes Bolano fills in the back story a bit but, for the most part, we are given nothing but the bare facts of the case. By turning to the holocaust in the final section of the novel Bolano sets up a contrast that I think is important between the murders in Santa Teresa and the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. They are both examples of senseless violence but the holocaust has become a part of our grand historical narrative in a way that more everyday murders like those in Santa Teresa have not. We have monuments honoring the victims of the holocaust, history museums to keep their memories alive, and there are first person accounts documenting the horrors of the concentration camps. The stories that Bolano chooses to tell in this novel are stories that are rarely told. We do not have any monuments honoring the dead of Ciudad-Juarez, or any museums keeping their memory alive (the fictional city of Santa Teresa is based on Ciudad-Juarez). Humans have a well documented affinity for narrative which seems to be rooted in our brains and nervous systems. Narrative seems to be one of the primary ways that we make sense of the world and, as senseless and horrific as the holocaust was, we seem to have succeeded in constructing a narrative about the holocaust that is capable of making some sense out of it. Even if the ultimate motivations driving the perpetrators of the holocaust remains a mystery as dark as any mystery in the universe, we at least know who to blame. The murders that Bolano's novel documents fall outside of history because they are deemed too unimportant and, therefore, they are never integrated into our sense making activities. They are also mostly unsolved which makes it difficult to assign blame. The murders remain genuinely senseless and unintegrated. We have no place for them in the stories we tell ourselves. In 2666 Bolano has attempted to make a novel, a form of writing that is tied essentially to narrative, out of something that resists our usual narrative activities. That fact, I think, goes a long way towards explaining the narrative fragmentation of the novel. It also explains why the murders are "the secret of the world" and are able to serve as an aperture, allowing us to see through the arbitrary nature of our standard, everyday cognitive constructs. The murders are just one more ignored hint that the meaning we impose on the world is secondary revision and rationalization through and through. Writers in past ages attempted to see through the seeming chaos of the world to perceive the divine order operating in it, while modern writers, Bolano included, attempt to see past the order that we impose on the world in order to perceive the senseless chaos underneath. Madness is another recurring theme in the novel and it fits with this theme nicely. In our modern Godless world madness is, perhaps, the closest we get to hearing the voice of the divine, or at least the voice of something other than our banal reason. Madness also reveals to us the arbitrary nature of our standard cognitive constructs. Madness breaks through our standard sense making activities and shows us the chaos rumbling beneath our feet. It is also possible that madness is the appropriate response in a mad world where hundreds of brutal murders are considered business as usual. The artists in Bolano's novel almost invariably go mad and they all seem to be conspicuously devoid of any redeeming vision for humanity. It has been a common place among intellectuals to look to artists for salvation from our self-inflicted miseries but, in Bolano's world, the cries of the artists are as senseless as the world that created them. They are poisonous flowers blooming in the desert. 2666 is a well conceived artistic vision but, ultimately, it is equal parts fascinating and frustrating. There are at least three things that are responsible for the reader's frustration. First, the novel builds slowly to a climax in the fourth section. The murders are hinted at in the first three sections and then become the subject of the fourth. The reader is drawn into the mystery and is aching for some kind of resolution, preferably, one that would tie all the pieces of the novel together. The reader feels as if they are being led to a kind of climax for the first 600+ pages of the book, and then, suddenly, after the fourth section, the novel jumps back 70 years, and it never really gets back to where the story left off in the fourth section. The story of Hans Reiter is an interesting story, it would have made a fascinating stand alone novel, but it is marred by the fact that the reader is eager to get back to the killings in Santa Teresa, which take place in the 1990s, but is, instead, stuck back in the 1940s for most of the section. Second, the digressions get tedious for the same reason. All of the side stories that Bolano tells would be fascinating stories on their own, but the reader begins to feel like they are merely distractions from the central mystery. That makes reading the novel a chore at times. Third, there is, ultimately, no real resolution to the mystery. Bolano's novel, like life, leaves the reader face to face with the mystery of existence. That was the right choice on Bolano's part. Any "solution" to the mystery would seem puerile. Even if we were told who the perpetrators of the murders were would that make them any less mysterious? Would knowing who the perpetrators were silence our questions about the nature of evil or the senselessness of violence? Would assigning names to the murderers answer any of our questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life and death? There is no "solution", each local solution merely hides a more general problem, but knowing that fact does not make it any less frustrating. If you can deal with the frustration, and you have time and emotional energy to devote to an ambitious novel, 2666 is worth a read.

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