2666

"I have read this once and I keep dipping back into it because it is endlessly fascinating. Roberto Bolaño is a writer who has found a really important way of dealing with the horrors that the 1970s and subsequent decades have inflicted on Latin America. If you look at Borges, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, in a sense they grew up in times of optimism, of high modernism, with the hope, at least initially, that change might be possible. Whereas someone like Bolaño was a young man at the time of the Chilean coup in 1973. He drifted around and went into exile in Mexico and then moved to Spain, a witness to the end of the dream. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He started publishing from the mid-1990s and in an extraordinary surge of creativity produced a number of short novels and stories, a splendid novel called The Savage Detective s and finally, as he was dying, he wrote this novel 2666 . It is really five novels in one, telling a number of different but interlocking stories involving literary critics, exiled writers and lost authors, all involved in different forms of detection. All of their investigations lead them, and the reader, closer to what is going on in a place called Santa Teresa – which is really Ciudad Juárez, in Mexico, the heart of darkness and site of the violent killing of hundreds of women. It is a forensic account of violent death and an extraordinary exploration of evil and horror, but also a compassionate depiction of everyday lives. Bolaño is both a very literary and a very anti-literary writer. He offers a new voice – sardonic, defiant and at times lyrical. There is something of Bolaño mania among critics today but, for once, all the hype is very justified."

"It’s one of the most incredible reading experiences I’ve ever had. Recently I was writing a piece about his most recent book—there have been all these posthumous releases, scraped from his hard drive which probably shouldn’t have been published, but that’s another conversation—and was like, ‘I’ll just dip into 2666 to remind myself, because it’s been eight years since I read it.’ I wound up reading the whole thing again. Well, it was during lockdown, so I had the time. It’s 900 pages long. But it’s really thrilling. And not just in subject matter—although some parts are very grim, it centres on this huge wave of femicide that struck Ciudad Juárez, a city in northern Mexico that borders the US. In his version the city’s called Santa Teresa. There were 400 unexplained killings of women there throughout the 1990s, leading up to him writing this book. In the book, there are 109 murders and a suicide described in very methodical clinical prose. That’s a 350-page section of the book, and it’s hard to read. It will affect you for days and weeks, and you never really forget it. Which is as it should be, because you’re made to fully confront, and feel, the horrible bleakness of the situation. There are five distinct sections; each one has got a different cast of characters and a different tone, and they all centre on these murders. But I’d forgotten how funny parts of the book are. It comments on its own construction in a sort of metafictional way. It talks about “a chaotic assemblage of dark cubes stacked one on top of the other”, and numerous other references which feel like the book unconsciously describing itself. The first part is about four academics who are obsessed with this German writer with an Italian name – Benno von Archimboldi. They’ve made careers by studying and writing papers about him. He’s still alive and is whispered about in terms of getting the Nobel Prize, but no one knows where he is. They get tipped off that he’s been seen in Santa Teresa so they go off on a hunt for him, and things rapidly go south. So the first 100 pages is sort of a social comedy: Bolaño sort of makes fun of the academics and their sexual peccadilloes, and it’s really enjoyable, but the tone shifts when they’re in Santa Teresa and they meet a professor of philosophy, who becomes the main character in the second part. “It’s one of the most incredible reading experiences I’ve ever had” So there’s a mystery at the heart of it, or several mysteries. First of all, you’re wondering if they’re going to find this Archimboldi they’re all obsessed with. You, the reader, actually meet him in the final section of the book—‘The Part About Archimboldi’—which is about 100 pages long and covers his entire life from 1920s Germany through an extended period on the Eastern Front in World War Two, where he finds a Red Guard’s memoir that forms a book within the book. It covers his whole literary career and explains what eventually leads him to Santa Teresa in the modern day. Bolaño loves creating works of art that only exist in his books. He gives Archimboldi a whole backstory—his real name’s Hans Reiter, another name joke I guess—and a whole bibliography and they’re books you really want to read: The Endless Rose, Rivers of Europe, The Leather Mask. He makes them sound incredible. I’m writing a novel about a playwright at the centre of it, and I need his plays to be like that—plays that, when you read about them, people wish they could see then. Bolaño does this so well across all his work. 2666 is a vast book and there are so many ways to talk about it. Primarily people talk about it as being incredibly grim and that it’s some sort of badge of literary machismo to read it. I hate that attitude and I think it puts off a lot of readers who’d really love it. I guess that reputation comes from the ‘Part About the Crimes’ section, which dominates discussions of the book and in fact dominated my memory of the book until I read it again. When I did, I rediscovered not just how amazing the book is, but how varied—it has so much humour and outrage and, yes, horror, but so many things you don’t find anywhere else. In the World War II section Hans even stays at a castle in Transylvania that appears to be Dracula’s castle. Bolaño crunches all these genres together and throws them into the mix. Like: who cares? What’s literary fiction and what’s thriller? What’s this, what’s that? He blends it all and makes it feel really urgent and important. It operates on every level. For the length of time you’re reading it, it feels like the most important thing in the world."