2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
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: 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: Bolano fizzles out
Summary: 3 Stars
The first and second sections of this five sectioned book work independently of each other in a finely written and lyrical manner. The third section meanders in way that one could accept if there had been some aspect of continuity no matter how obscure to the subsequent chapters. As the reader moves on to the fourth and last sections of the book there is an abrupt flow of imagery and narrative. Its almost a list of things Bolano was considering writing about but never got around to. While I don't expect traditional sequential narratives in my reading choices,(loved Cloud Atlas, Kafka on the Shore, History of Love, One Hundred Years of Solitude for example) this book turned into a list of deaths, a never ending police report, if you will. The beginning lyricism and flow of the novel fizzles out by the end a lost train of thought? I am not sure. I think it was over hyped and "intellectuals" will love parsing its most unstructured and sloppily rendered story as something daring and important, when i fact, it was notes of an unfinished work.Book Review: Bolano's Labyrinth
Summary: 5 Stars
Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a vast and sometimes frustrating labyrinth wherein many characters seem to vanish into their own obscure tangents. As a reader I wanted to keep following them, and when in the midst of all the murder I felt abandoned in a world that made no sense and was endlessly recurring. By the end I felt clearly that Bolano was fully intentional in imparting his world. And it is a very stark representation of this world. How is it possible that these murders continue now almost 20 years. One feels indignant and angry. But looking around it seems we become numb to similar or disimilar cases of murder and corruption, of systemic abuse and indifference around the world. And it's our world. As you wander Bolano's labyrinth you can't get lost in narrative and thereby aesthetically leave yourself behind.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.