“2666” by Roberto Bolaño

The proverb, “Evil thoughts spring from the heart,” is presented in the preface to the epic novel, Don Quixote. In Roberto Bolaño’s ambitious novel 2666, we see the myriad embodiments of evil conjured and unleashed, sometimes subtly disguised as just a glitch of the human condition, barely perceptible and not easily named, and at other times with fury from the blackest hearts of men, politicians, criminals and countries working together as one monstrosity. 2666 is a long and divergent journey, one of such great distance and with so many intersections that at the end of it all, which is really no end at all, the reader must think hard to remember the first leg of the quest. In fact it would be necessary to look back to prior works to find its first stirrings. In Amulet we find mention of the ominous date—the cryptic title, which is never again mentioned in the body of 2666, making for the first mystery in a novel filled with difficult questions. The Savage Detectives, the novel for which Chilean born Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1999, ends in Santa Teresa, the same city around which the narrative of 2666 revolves. Furthermore, in the afterword, we are told to consider 2666 as being written by one of the protagonists of The Savage Detectives, Arturo Belano, largely considered to be Bolaño’s alter ego. 2666 is a book to read in a state of urgency and anxiety, in much the same way we can imagine it being written: Bolaño was in a race against time and ultimately succumbed to liver failure in 2003 at the age of 50, with the novel almost complete.

The book is divided into five parts, entitled very simply: “The Part About the Critics,” “The Part About Amalfitano,” “The Part About Fate,” “The Part About the Crimes,” and “The Part About Archimboldi.” Five parts propelled by chance encounters, randomness and collisions between characters—all related, but not interdependent. The trajectory of the narrative is ambitious and at times elliptical, traversing Europe and the United States until, at the centre of it, the reader drops off into the abyss of the lawless border city of Santa Teresa, emerging, just barely, the journey only half over, before returning to the past and falling again into another abyss, that of WWII.

The story begins with four European professors of literature, who, joined by their passion for an enigmatic German novelist, embark on a journey to find him. Their search, guided largely by rumour, intuition and chance, brings three of the professors to the northern Mexican industrial city of Santa Teresa (a fictionalized Ciudad Juárez), the site of the continuing serial murders of hundreds of women and girls. Before the feminicidios are explored at length, the story stretches out laterally, one section dedicated to an extremely nervous Chilean professor of philosophy living in Santa Teresa, and another to a New York reporter covering a boxing match on assignment in this same city. These sections edge us closer and closer to the city’s black heart.

The last part is dedicated to the enigmatic author Benno von Archimboldi and is composed of stories exploding like gunshot out of other stories. It traces his transient life, beginning as an awkward boy more comfortable in the ocean than on land, his penchant for classifying seaweed like some juvenile taxonomist, his time served on the Eastern Front in WWII, and the development of his literary life. The character of Archimboldi traverses the entire book, but at times disappears like a shadow at high noon in a sun so hot that it obliterates.

Throughout the apocalyptic adventure that is not without points of humour, nor tenderness, Bolaño guides us into dangerous places of life and of literature, where in the “Part About the Crimes,” the two become indivisible. In this section, using the clinical language of a forensic report, Bolaño recounts the murders of hundreds of women and girls, many of whom were also raped and tortured—crimes that began in 1993 and continue today in an atmosphere of impunity in the state of Chihuahua, occurring mostly in and around the industrial city of Ciudad Juárez.

As in all of Bolaño’s work, literary references are prolific and writers are embedded throughout the story; however, in 2666 visual art plays a role of almost equal significance. As Marcela Valdes states in her excellent essay published in The Nation, November, 2008, entitled, “Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666”: “The great subject of his oeuvre is the relationship between art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state.”

Along with fictional artists, Bolaño makes mention of George Grosz, Berthe Morisot, Marcel Duchamp, Gustave Courbet, Gustave Moreau (whose Jupiter and Semele is the cover image on the English edition of 2666) and perhaps most notably Guiseppe Arcimboldo, from whom the mystery protagonist creates his pseudonym and whose bizarre style of juxtaposed parts forming a greater whole perhaps provides a key for reading Bolaño’s work.

In “The Part About Amalfitano,” Bolaño gives a nod to Surrealism as Amalfitano, in homage to Marcel Duchamp, creates a readymade by hanging a geometry treatise by Dieste on his clothesline. He explains the hanging of the book to his teenage daughter: “ … I hung it out there just because, to see how it survives the assault of nature, to see how it survives this desert climate.” It is the quiet presence of the readymade, which Amalfitano visits daily, observing the book’s resistance to the elements, perhaps even with envy in comparison to his own diminishing strength, that keeps him from a complete loss of sanity, anxious that his daughter might also fall victim to murder. There is something incredible in this simple gesture—that there is still a place for elegance amidst the horror.

If, in the first section of the book, Europe is presented as a place of abstraction, a place of ideas, discussion, expansion, art and possibility, then Santa Teresa in part four is represented as something more visceral—a place of heat, blood, guns, and maquiladoras looming monstrous on the city’s edge. A place of realism, save for the fear, save for the death that are only abstractions in some future or past tense.

With the arrival of the literati in Santa Teresa in search of their hero, we have logic—a belief in justice, resolution, education and privilege—mocked by the monstrosity of irony, poverty, abuse and chaos, under the guise of progress. We have the tourists of Europe on an accidental visit to hell on earth, a collision between Old World and New.

Reaching the end of this modern epic doesn’t feel like coming to a conclusive finale (and this after almost 900 pages), but rather a place where you would regroup before the adventure continues. This closing is not a drop into empty space but rather a gentle nudge, accepted with some resistance, into another world not of Bolaño’s creation, still full of randomness and violence and lacking the genius, the painter of words— that savage detective—to tame it for us. ❚

2666, Roberto Bolaño, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, hardcover, 912 pp, $30.

Tracy Valcourt writes and studies in Montreal.