2666

This is such an immense book. Robert Bolaño, wrote this before he passed away, so it was published posthumously. Overall, the book is centered around the magnetic pull of Santa Teresa, Mexico, where dark and serious murders are occurring. There’s a whole ‘mystery’ across the board, but this isn’t a novel about solving the mystery, its a novel about how we avoid confronting the senseless horrors and when we turn to our comforts, those senseless things don’t stop.

“No one pays attention to these murders, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”

The book is split into five parts, each distinct and self-contained. While reading you will find echoes of each across the parts:

1. The Part About the Critics: Four eccentric European literary critics, bound by their shared obsession with a mysterious, invisible German author named Archimboldi, travel across the globe and eventually to Mexico in search of him.

2. The Part About Amalfitano: A disillusioned, mentally fragile Chilean philosophy professor living in Barcelona struggles to protect his teenage daughter from the encroaching, terrifying madness he feels radiating from the desert city of Santa Teresa.

3. The Part About Fate: An African American sportswriter travels to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match but is slowly drawn into the horrific, systemic reality of the town’s hundreds of murdered and disappeared women.

4. The Part About the Crimes: A grueling, near-clinical documentary chronicle details the brutal rapes and murders of over 300 women in Santa Teresa and the police’s tragic failure to solve the crimes.

5. The Part About Archimboldi: The narrative shifts back to pre-WWII Europe, following the life of Hans Reiter, tracing his journey from a German soldier to an acclaimed reclusive writer as his life eventually collides with Santa Teresa.

Throughout the narratives, Bolaño sprinkles sequences that stir your brain. From dreamlike experiences characters go on, to commentary on society, and question of how the crimes in Santa Teresa could even be occurring and the whole failure of investigations around it.

One sequence I still remember was in Part 1, the writers visit Mexico and stay in separate hotel rooms, one of the writers experiences dread from a place outside her self and the room:

“The woman in the mirror was looking at her, but she wasn’t her. Liz Norton tried to find the place where the woman was standing. It had to be a place in the room, a point from which she was projected or reflected, but she couldn’t find it. Then she realized that the woman was looking at her with a look that meant: get out of here, go, leave this room, leave this hotel, leave this city.”

During the course of all the events in the novel, Bolaño loves to bring up metaphors, point out societal tendencies, commentary on the nature of something, people’s cynicism, etc.. Some quotes to illustrate:

“Iron, on the other hand, is the favorite metal of the god of war, and King Solomon forbade its use in the construction of the Temple because iron meant swords and swords meant spilled blood and destruction. Iron is the metal of the end of the world.”

“Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn’t read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don’t believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.”

“Every man has his own idea of freedom, and usually it’s an idea that excludes the freedom of others.”

In Part 3, Bolaño has the African American sportswriter give a eye opening take on the upper class of Northern Mexico that goes into a cynical critique of how the elite retain their power through both bringing American ideas with them by sending their children to school to Ivy League/elite colleges, and blend genetics with ‘whiter’ and ‘taller’ traits. The quote:

“The Mexican political class, the leaders, the upper class, send their children to study in the United States, to the great universities of the North, where they learn all the tricks and also pick up a style, a certain way of looking at things. And then they come back and marry girls from good families, or they stay up there and marry Americans, and the children they have are whiter. And their children’s children are even whiter, and taller, always taller, until the ruling class doesn’t look Mexican at all anymore, they look like people from Connecticut or Massachusetts, while the rest of the country stays exactly the same, short and dark and forgotten.”

I think I enjoyed reading Part 1 the most, each part was disturbing in its own way, of course Part 4 probably the most disturbing in an obvious way. Everything is connected, and everything is masterfully written from different points of views.

2666 is certainly not light reading, and it will consume all of your reading time budget. It’s rich in style but very long, over 900 pages. The translation from Spanish is done well, and its not difficult to read in that sense, but it can be difficult to read Part 4 in particular. I highly highly recommend reading it, and be prepared for a novel woven a little differently.

One last quote from Bolaño on the act of writing:

“Even reading is comfortable compared to writing. A reader is very rarely in danger of making a fool of himself, whereas a writer makes a fool of himself all the time.”

I hope to read his book The Savage Detectives soon.