Roberto Bolaño, "2666"

What is literature, and how should we relate to it?

What is life, and how should we relate to it?

Are these the same question, or not? 

Your first response if probably that of course life and fiction are different, but Roberto Bolaño wants you to think a little harder. After all, most of what happens in the world is a long way from you and involves nobody that you know. Consider, for example, the murders of women that took place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the 1990s. There were hundreds. Some of these crimes turned out to have been committed by husbands or lovers, and a few were women who had been mixed up with drug trafficking. But from early on there were rumors of a serial killer, or a series of copycat killers, or perhaps a conspiracy of wealthy men who raped and killed with impunity because they had bribed the police to look away. But whoever did it, at least 200 women seem to have been raped and murdered by strangers, their bodies dumped in the desert, without anyone ever being punished for the crime.

To you, in your comfortable house, what is the meaning of this story? Presumably you cannot do anything about it, any more than you could if it had happened entirely within the pages of a novel. You can only think, and feel; the only place your knowledge of these events could make any change to the world would be within your own head. And maybe a fictional story about the murders of women in an imaginary Mexican city called Santa Teresa might cause the same change in your head as news accounts might, or perhaps an even greater change.

2666, published a year after Bolaño's death in 2003, is a monstrous, perplexing, intentionally incomplete, intentionally chaotic 900-page book that got famous partly because many readers felt it had something urgent to say but none of them could agree on what that something might be. My own take is that Bolaño's main subject was fiction itself: how it is related to reality, and how our minds understand or do not understand the difference between the two. I would not recommend this book, unless you are both captivated by fiction and enjoy thinking about how it works; some of the most glowing reviews of the book come from novelists like Jonathan Lethem. I found it amazing and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

The first section of 2666 gives us four professors who are all experts on a German writer who signs his books Benno von Archimboldi. These academics are obsessed with Archimboldi: they read and reread his books, go to conferences where they present papers about his books, argue with other academics who have different interpretations of the books. They would love to know more about Archimboldi but cannot find out anything about him beyond his birth date, 1920, and the fact that he fought in World War II. So they waste their time traveling to yet more conferences and sleeping with each other. Let me tell you, I would rather read the manual for my old dishwasher than a novel about professors having affairs, so I found this part tough going, and if I had not been intrigued by what I had read about the book I would have stopped. It's all a big tease anyway, because we learn next to nothing about Archimboldi's books. Why are people fascinated by him? What is the source of his power over them? We are never told, so the bare fact of this obsession looms in front of us, confronting us with the question of how it is that people can care so much about stories.

Because of a rumor that Archimboldi has been seen there, three of the professors fly off to a city in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa, obviously modeled on Ciudad Juárez. Nothing happens there, but we are introduced to the city that is one of the main characters in the book. Once we finally get rid of the amorous professors, we hang around Santa Teresa with a different professor and his daughter, another section I didn't enjoy very much. But then we meet an African American reporter named Fate who gets sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match between an obscure Mexican fighter and a seasoned pro from el Norte. Here you see Bolaño's astonishing writing skill on display. He can give you an American black man from a younger generation, pitch perfect voice, believable thoughts, really a great character. 

Then comes the longest section of the book, about the killings. Much of this is written in a dry, factual, police report style. Bodies are found, described, identified or not, a killer charged or not. It goes on for 400 pages, building a sick momentum of bland horror. Then in the midst of one of these endless crime reports we come on a gem of beautiful writing about sunset in the desert, or a wonderful little vignette about the family life of a victim. Considered as a general potrait of human existence, it is horrifying and a little too convincing.

In the last section we finally meet Archimboldi himself. After a glimpse at his childhood we follow him through his war years and into his postwar career as a writer. Still, though, we learn nothing about his books, although by this time it is clear why: if you want to know what sort of writing can fascinate people the way Archimboldi's is supposed to, just consider the book you are reading.

On his way from New York to Santa Teresa, our reporter Fate stops off in Detroit to interview a man who was once in the leadership of the Black Panthers. This is a side project of Fate's, nothing to do with the newspaper he works for, and it is just as it is irrelevent to the rest of this novel. But with Bolaño the answers are as likely to be in an eddy as in the main current. We listen as the old man gives a sort of sermon that carries us far away from the grimy world of working class Detroit:

He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave.

It's perfectly in the character of the old man, but also perfectly Bolaño, and that is a trick very few writers can manage.

Like I said, I don't really recommend this book, unless you feel like immersing yourself in 900 pages of speculation about how a star is like a wave is like a corpse by the side of a road in the Mexican desert is like a mediocare professor's adoration of his favorite writer is like a bombed out city is like a story that goes on for 900 pages without resolving a single thing.