2666 (2004)

Ornate in structure, simple, but not simplistic, in fact, almost raw, but not always straightforward in its language.

In the middle of "About the Murders", I thought, "I'll need to read this again and take notes to make full sense of it." by the end of the book, I still feel that would be beneficial, in a way, but it's definitely not necessary.

This book Is a magnificent testament to Bolano's creativity. I am very happy that I read this book. That's not something I feel often. ( )

i really have to think about this one... ( )

Occasionally a book comes along whose peculiar title is the sole purpose of the purchase. Immediately commencing on the initial pages, it plunges you in a labyrinth of complete brouhaha enmeshing every demented string whilst deciphering normalization of reasoning. And as the book concludes, you emerge with a smile of gratification as you have been just mesmerized by the aura of a genius.

2666 is a metaphysical necropolis of the cavernously hidden trepidation and disparagement that frequently seek the light of retrieval in the arroyo of darkness. Bolano dallied with his liver transplant prospect for the completion of 2666. Sadly, this became his posthumously published work. Boasting about it to be "the fattest novel in the world", Bolano certainly fashioned a laborious mass of 900-pages of surreal inquisition about the "menacing of evil".

Evil is unspectacular and always human. And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Highly inspired on the thesis of Melville’s Moby Dick, this allegorical saga sections into five parts (originally to be published singly).The volume opens into an description of four European lecturers energetic on their exploration for a Pynchon-like German writer Benno von Archimboldi as much as they liked to bed each other. Their search transports them to an immigrant town of Santa Teresa in Mexico. While only two of them (Pelletier & Espinoza) hear about the nightmarish slaughters, their sexual escapades and affluence insulates them from the callous realities. As the narration twists through muddled delirium of murky shadows, the crimes are brought closer to susceptible locals. A Chilean professor Amalfitano who left Spain to acquire a teaching post in the University of Santa Teresa is a nervous wreck. He deludes himself with auditory hallucinations and fears of going deranged with the prediction of his only daughter becoming a victim of the ongoing femicide. As you enter the third segment ('The Part about Fate'), the felonies spill open wrecking the mindset of an American sports reporter - Oscar Fate. His brush with the nightmarish elements of the city peels off his judiciousness making him flee out of town. Finally, 'The Part about Crime' spews out the dreadful venom opening in 1993 with a corpse of a 13-yr old girl and concludes with a dastardly accumulation of 108 corpses by the 1997. The concluding chapter on Archimboldi depicts the convoluted passage as he fights for the Third Reich on the Eastern European front to his early writing career amid the malice and impunity of Holocaust ruins and bringing a rational closure to the double-crossing enigma when he travels to Santa Teresa in his twilight years.

Evil is omnipresent; excavating perished horrors. The underbelly throbbing with utmost mockery of human survival and perversion of power reeks out of Santa Teresa. A fictitious substitute for Ciudad Juárez (factual town in Northern Mexico), Bolano delineates a gruesome picture of violent female homicides that swept the town since 1993. Statistics of the victimology constitutes to nearly 5,000 female corpses with most of the homicide cases remaining unsolved. From ignorance to apprehension to being an active spectator of the gruesome murders, Bolano illustrates the frequency of crime touching the lives of each interlinked protagonists amusingly underplaying the reality.

"About the women who’ve been killed", said Chucho Flores glumly.
"The numbers are up. Every so often the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forget about it and back to work. People have no time for in this shithole".

Resilience to the flourishing corrupted environment is prevalent primarily in the third world cities. When life encumbers from daily struggles for food and shelter amid fighting against the totalitarian implementations, ignorance becomes the greatest mode of defense until panic engulfs one’s genuine emotions.

Bolano encompasses themes of passion, power, corruption, and savagery regaling Archimboldi’s active part in the War brimming with accounts of barbarism, rape, mutilation and treason. In the terrains of Germany when a man kills his wife while the government turns a blind eye, corresponds to the catastrophic finicky state of the Mexican authorities failing to decipher the ongoing femicide. 2666 resurrects ghosts of the past reliving the nightmarish conundrum in the core of human souls sinking to the bed of an ocean where the cerulean abyss becomes a metaphor of lunacy and defeat;anything but tranquil.

Speculation on the devilish date of 2666 which appears nowhere in the book is a contested ambiguity. The closest one can come in decoding the label is in reference to the biblical Exodus from Egypt- a vital moment of spiritual redemption, was supposed to have taken place 2,666 years after the Creation.
"The erection of the Tabernacle(tent of meeting),God's dwelling-place among his people, occurs in the year 2666 after God creates the world, two-thirds of the way through a four thousand year era which culminates in or around 164 BC, the year of the rededication of the Second Temple."

On the contrary, Santa Teresa harshly conflicts the sanctified significance as it resembles a cosmic cemetery of unearthed spirits. Or perhaps, the 'Tabernacle' implies the human body to be a temporary abode of the soul. Either way it is a canopy in which everything has the clarity of water.
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Bolaño's 2666 has received monumental praise. Much of it is justified, but some of it, I think, is exaggerated due to the fact that he died soon after completing the book.

I found parts of the book incredibly interesting, but other parts felt disjointed and I found them difficult to get through. I guess my main complaint is that this did not feel like one cohesive work. The introduction states that Bolaño wanted it to be published as 5 separate books, but after his death, his family and publisher decided to publish it as one final work. As some other reviews mention, it doesn't feel like 2666 was complete at the time of Bolaño's death, and if that is truly the case, then perhaps bringing cohesion and tying all five parts together was one of the final steps that Bolaño did not reach. ( )

I read this awhile ago in November-December time and I was hoping that a little time would give me some perspective.


So many people have said this novel was this mind blowing masterpiece and it almost seems like people can really get caught up in the collective consciousness of something and all decide about when things are worthwhile and it elevates a work of art, whether it's literature, music, or a painting or photograph. I've never thought the Grant Wood painting American Gothic was all that great, for example, and I've seen it in real life many times. Neither do I think several Grammy winning musicians are worth listening to.

I have a feeling that there are people out there who really do genuinely feel this novel is brilliant but just because the book is 900 pages long doesn't automatically make it a masterpiece. Actually, for me it sets the bar higher. There better be a reason why I'm going to plow through all of those pages when I could read several books in that same amount of time.

Bolano deeply offended me with the idea that a reader should suffer through over 275 pages that focused on various brutal accounts of the tortures, rapes, and subsequent murders of women in Mexico of all ages. One must have the thickest head in existence to not get his point during the reading of the fourth book/section "The Book About the Crimes" after the first 15 pages. He didn't need to go further but he did. What kind of a sadist does this to his readers? Clearly, one who has an inflated sense of his own greatness and a deflated opinion of those who might be so honored to read his words. He shouldn't assume so much. Dear Bolano, if you were still alive, I'd ask for that time in my life back. The ridiculously long winded means weren't justified by the ends and just because you write overly redundantly about a long expanse of time for events occurring in several places doesn't make your story epic. Bolano, you failed me and hurt me. Your praise for this novel is unearned.

Moving along, let me sum...this was originally supposed to be released as five separate books but it was decidedly put together as a whole. The first book, The Part About the Critics has the most predictable mediocre plot I could possibly think of. It's about three male scholars of a fictitious German writer who all fall for the same female scholar of this fictitious person. The characters are flaky and unlikable at best. The entire time I read, I thought to myself "I don't even care about this obscure German author they are supposed to be studying instead of having 10 hour long intimate encounters. He was probably a Nazi anyway."

Book or Section 2 is about Almalfitano and the search for this fictitious obscure author, Archimboldi, in Mexico. This was a little more interesting and this part alone I would gladly give 4 stars to. Bolano has the capacity for deep philosophical thoughts..he just usually ruins it in unnecessary detail. The original characters grow a little more here and it sets the groundwork further.

Book or Section 3 focuses on setting the groundwork for the crimes and the journalists that become involved. Everyone in Mexico is discussing the crimes that appear as the focus of the next book and I couldn't help but wonder if Bolano suffered from Asperger's type of Autism where his limited area of interest was criminal accounts of violence against women.

I've covered the main reason why I hate this novel as a whole and that's the abuse I suffered over the words from the fourth section about the crimes. It is brutally excessive and made me extremely angry, not at the perpetrators so much as Bolano himself. I felt as if he was sadistically attacking me. I do not appreciate feeling punished by an author. I do not read novels for that purpose.

**spoilers**

Then book five comes along to tie everything together, which he does, but it's not as mind blowing as you would necessarily expect and, guess what? That obscure German author the main characters were obsessed with turns out to be A FREAKING NAZI. I literally was like "Wow. Impressive. Didn't even see that coming when I was on page 10. Glad I read through 900 pages."

As I said before, Bolano is at his best a philosopher but the ends don't justify the means. I realize he was working on finishing this novel when he passed but he really could have used an editor or perhaps a team of editors.

I don't get the accolades and I will have my own opinion either way but if you ask me what 900 page novel you should start reading next, I'll never recommend this one, unless I really hate your guts.




Some of the more deeply philosophical insights I actually liked from this novel:

pg. 121 "Literature in Mexico is like a nursery school, a kindergarten, a playground, a kiddie club, if you follow me. The weather is good, it's sunny, you can go out and sit in the park and open a book by Valery, possibly the writer most read by Mexican writers, and then you go over to a friend's house and talk. And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. ...though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear or more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you momentarily forgot it."


pg. 123 "The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible."

pg. 228 "I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history which is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void."

pg. 273 "She had a hoarse, nasal voice and she didn't talk like a New York secretary but like a country person who has just come from the cemetery. This woman has firsthand knowledge of the planet of the dead, thought Fate, and she doesn't know what she's saying anymore."

pg. 339 "He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. Te clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me."

'It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film,' said Fate.

The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide ranging homages.

'Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven't happened yet."

***This next quote is exactly how I feel about 2666 btw:


pg. 722-723 "As if the work (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and the gesture nullified by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of the seeming."

pg. 785 "Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers."

pg. 839 "...girls who delivered long soliloquies that made it possible for them to live another day."

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