Fiction
2666 by Roberto Bolaño (Picador)
Roberto Bolaño, author of 2666, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest writers to come out of Latin America in the 20th century.
His novel 2666, written in Spanish, was hailed by the New York Times as ‘a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form”. Published after the death of the Chilean- Spanish writer in 2003, aged 50, the 900- page novel is in five parts.
It’s principally about a ‘disappeared” postwar German writer named Benno von Archimboldi, a writer of rather inaccessible works. The first section, ‘The Part about the Critics”, is about four Archimboldi scholars, each hailing from a different European country. The second part is about a Chilean-born philosopher Oscar Amalfitano, a teacher at a Mexican university, who tags along as the critics look for Archimboldi in Mexico.
Amalfitano is rewarded with a central role in the second section. The third section, ‘The Part about Fate”, is about Oscar Fate, an African-American journalist, who drives to Mexico to write about a boxing match and the killings of women. ‘The Part about the Crimes” is about the murders of women and we eventually get to meet the reclusive author in section five, ‘The Part about Archimboldi”.
At an academic conference in Europe, a delegate mentions that Archimboldi has been seen in Mexico. There is a veritable stampede as the critics fly across the Atlantic to track down and meet the reclusive writer.
In Mexico, a reality that is shielded from the critics (and from most of us as well), scores of women are being raped, killed and hastily thrown into the desert or the dumps at the edges of the slums. The killings occupy the largest part of the book, about 300 pages, and I have not recently read anything more unrelenting, gruelling and sadistic.
A man kills his mother and then jams a piece of wood into her vagina ‘to teach her”. Agents of the state are no better: cops party in the cells by raping prostitutes; a youthful gang that has murdered a scion of a rich family meets its comeuppance in prison when the family in turn hires prison desperadoes to mete out ‘justice”.
The hired hands castrate the gang in full view of prison warders and other inmates. Their ‘assholes are shredded” and their scrotums are slit. Then someone kneels to milk them ‘until their balls dropped, encased in fat, blood and something crystalline”.
When someone says ‘every life, no matter how happy, ends in pain and suffering” you are struck by this statement, which has the textures of a cliché. Yet after the scores and scores of murders you have read (witnessed might be more like it), the clinical and precisely detailed descriptions of which have left a crimson daub on the pages, you can’t help but believe anything else but this truism cloaked as a universal and incontrovertible truth.
2666 is not only about violence. If it were no one would be able to finish it. It’s also about philosophy, literature and literary criticism, culture and artistic creation. And gems about all these subjects are doled out without a trace of pedantry in a conversational style, as if it were the most natural thing to say.
The book was written over several years and the author, a late bloomer, intended it to be published in five parts to secure the livelihoods of the young family he left. The parts feel self-contained and could have worked as stand-alone novels. Yet the beauty of the sprawling book is its unity and coherence.
The unity is largely in the violence, its cyclical nature and its crude footprint on lives — both white and black, men and women. By writing a sprawling tome, Bolaño is fighting a localised image of the world.
Someone in the book says: ‘In a way having an idea of the world is easy, everyone has one, generally an idea restricted to one’s village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one’s eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.”
I read 2666 in about a month and I found I couldn’t read anything else. It’s a virtuoso piece of work in the sense that you are aware of being in the company of a very clever uncle, in fact a genius.
Although periodically Bolaño will tell you stuff that will, literally, make your stomach churn, he also has the avuncular good sense of making sure you don’t puke on your bed.
In the last section of the book, ‘The Part about Archimboldi”, someone talks about literary masterpieces. A character says he found writing novels a pointless exercise, ‘or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece”. Very relevant advice for writers and publishers on this continent.
Going through some of the works of fiction coming out now, one feels they have been hurried, that so much work could have gone into making them more rounded and more accomplished. In fact a character in the novel says minor works of literature are plagiarism.
Plagiarism in the sense that ‘all minor works, all works from the pen of a minor writer, can be nothing but plagiarism of some masterpiece. The small difference is that here we’re talking about sanctioned plagiarism.”
The author’s literary executor has described Bolaño’s mysterious title 2666 as ‘a vanishing point around which the different parts of the novel fall into place”. This happens much sooner than that: when you get to the end of the novel.
After reading 2666, given to me as a present by a friend who had gone to Europe, I wondered aloud what gift I could possibly give her in return.
She helpfully suggested that I send her teenage son to Stanford University, the alma mater of the Google boys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable, for 2666 is a masterpiece, a work of genius.