The Polyphonic Sprawl

For those of you who hope to learn what it’s like to read Roberto
Bolaño’s final, posthumously published, 900-page novel by
reading its reviews—I’m sorry, you’re out of luck. It can’t be done. 2666 is an epic without a center, where all
the action can’t shake the feeling of stasis, and the thundering
cascades of detail may or may not be clues of things to come. (The
geometry book hanging from a backyard clothesline on page 134 is. The
recipe for a cheese sandwich with pickled onions on page 816 is not.)
When it’s going full steam, 2666 is as dense and confusing as a
fever dream.

And, like a fever dream, it presents mysteries and tensions that are
never resolved. Its plot is an absence—a long, narrow borehole
filled with cobwebs of digressions. The strands go on for miles and
miles, tracing the outline of the plot, but never filling in the
central details. 2666, for all its physical heft, is a study in
evasions, leaving us nothing we can grip in our teeth—only a
cool, eerie atmosphere.

2666 has one constant: The characters—whether they come
from Paris, Chile, or Harlem—all eventually have to navigate the
eddies of poverty and violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s a
harsh, dry land of narcos and factory workers, turkey buzzards and
grubby cafes, tough guys (boxers, reporters, detectives) and tougher
broads (politicians, lawyers, whores), and the occasional anxious and
abstracted college professor. A land where, Bolaño writes, “the
sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

Bolaño finished 2666 against the deadline of his own
death. His liver was rotting from hepatitis C, which he contracted from
a dirty needle while he was a young heroin addict, Trotskyite, and
vagabond who had fled his native Chile after being jailed by the
Pinochet regime. Trying to secure a legacy for his heirs, he instructed
his publisher to divide the novel into five parts and publish one part
each year, thinking a serial would bring in more money. His heirs
rebelled and published 2666 as a single novel in five chapters
(spoiler alert—if a novel as sprawling and polyphonic as
2666 can be spoiled):

(1) A trio of European literary critics (who are also in a love
triangle) travel to Mexico to search for an elusive German writer named
Archimboldi. (2) A Latin American philosophy professor drifts through
his days in a fog and learns he is the descendant of clairvoyant
Indians. (3) A journalist from Harlem travels to Santa Theresa (a
thinly fictionalized Ciudad Juarez) to cover a boxing match. There he
learns about the hundreds of young women who have been raped and
murdered in recent years, meets the prime suspect, and flees to the
U.S., afraid of the cops. (4) A catalog of the murders, and the
detectives and journalists trying (or not trying) to solve them. Easily
the most horrifying and riveting section, it has the flinty emotional
content and casual gore of a mystery novel, and a cooler, more detached
tone than the other chapters. This chapter is loosely based on the true
and unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in Ciudad Juarez, whose
bodies are almost always found in the same way (dumped or barely buried
on the outskirts of town) and in the same wrecked condition. By the end
of this section, you will have read the phrase “she had been vaginally
and anally raped” so many times, you will become queasy, then numb,
then queasy again. (5) The life and times of a German boy who loves to
swim in the ocean, fights in the Nazi army, and grows up to be an
elusive, peripatetic novelist named Archimboldi.

Then there are the digressions, the iridescent snail-trails of
Bolaño’s fecund brain: the origin of snuff films, a Hungarian
general with an enormous penis, an old Black Panther turned barbecue
chef, ventriloquists and seers, literary theory, talking rats, Latin
American literature, the private lives of medical examiners, how
Mexicans think about the U.S. (“There’s no place on earth with more
dumb girls per square foot than a college in California”), academia,
feminism, geometry, jealousy, drugs, Marcel Duchamp, machismo, sexual
angst, and writers. Whatever he is writing about, Bolaño is
always writing about sexual angst and writers.

Bolaño was clever (and self-absorbed) enough to leave clues
to how he wanted readers to think about his novel. Several real-life
critics have already cited this passage, in which Amalfitano—the
abstracted philosophy professor—is talking to a pharmacist who
prefers “The Metamorphosis” to The Trial and “Bartleby” to
Moby Dick:

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.

In this trick of literary judo, Bolaño dares us to complain
that 2666 is too messy, bloated, and unresolved—if we do,
we are timid pharmacists and he is Herman Melville. 2666 is
messy, bloated, and unresolved (and Bolaño is a kind of
Latin American Melville) but it is also rich with stories that cow us
and spur us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and the stench of dead
women discovered in the Mexican desert. He wants us to lose ourselves
in his daisy chains of inferences and unresolved tensions, to keep us
curious, anxious, and reading.

The title is mysterious: There is no 2666 in 2666. The prose
is also mysterious—flat and journalistic (more so than his other
books, which have been celebrated for their Byzantine sentences), but
elegant and poetic: “The University of Santa Theresa was like a
cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an
empty dance club.” Despite the aforementioned talking rat, he is not a
magical realist. Closer to Mario Vargas Llosa than Gabriel
García Márquez, Bolaño is a hypnotist—the
recurring motifs, the unsolved mysteries (just what does the
peripatetic German writer have to do with the Santa Theresa murders?),
and his mania for details that may or may not be significant: “The
service station was brightly lit and almost empty. Behind the counter,
a fifteen-year-old girl was reading a magazine. It looked to Fate as if
she had a very small head.” Does the size of the girl’s head have
anything to do with anything? It does not.

With 2666, Bolaño joins that cabal of
writers—Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William
Blake—who suck critics, college students, and other literary
cryptographers down a hermeneutic rabbit hole. Toward the end of
2666, the peripatetic German novelist is enduring a fellow WWII
vet’s rambling war memories and thinks to himself:

This man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular
ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve
been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common
knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore,
has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief
interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

Once again, Bolaño is telling us how to think about his
writing. Once again, he is right.

This article has been updated since its original publication.