Actually 5 different stories that are somewhat linked. At times it's as scanning the headlines of a newspaper, especially in the part about the murders. Not the masterwork that some reviews seem to indicate. ( )

I bought this book as soon as it came out with huge expectations and boundless excitement. Within the first few hundred pages my expectations came crashing down around me. What the hell? Pointless and rambling with fits of interesting narrative and characters that almost threaten to go somewhere but then abruptly fall off. I just couldn't make it through. It sits, dusty on my shelf, as one of the few books that I have ever begun and not finished. Perhaps one day I will try again. Those of you who loved this: you see something that I just cannot. ( )

Running to almost 900 pages, this is a posthumous novel in 5 parts (a sixth part was reported to be discovered among the author’s papers). Bolaño goes for the brute force method of writing, highly and consciously artistic. ( )

Thoughts on Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano

The Part About Amalfitano is by far the shortest book of the five that make up 2666, so I feel a bit disconcerted to be writing up reading notes again so soon after the first batch (I'm writing this on May 19). Amalfitano does, though, provide some new food for thought: it goes in new directions with the themes established in The Part About the Critics, and piqued my interest even more for what is to come.

Primarily, I think, The Part About Amalfitano transforms that feeling of vague unease introduced in The Part About the Critics into something interior rather than exterior. In Book 1, the critics have the feeling that "something is wrong" - something more or less out there, whether "out there" means "in Santa Teresa," or "in Mexico," or "on the streets of the world." Only Norton has some sense that the "something wrong" could dwell within her, too. But for Amalfitano (the Chilean professor, incidentally, of whom the three Europeans were so dismissive in Part 1), that same something is decidedly wrong in here, rather than out there. In here: in the town where he works, in the house where he lives, inside his own brain.

The Part About Amalfitano is obsessed with madness and forgetting, from Amalfitano's memories of his wife Lola (disappeared on a wild quest after a poet, now institutionalized, with whom she may or may not have had sex years before), to his own evolving relationships with a mysterious geometry treatise and a disembodied voice. Whereas the Critics of the first book fight their battles in cafés, conferences and capitals, Amalfitano and Lola fight theirs within their own heads. Lola's story raises all the old questions of how to define madness, and how we deal with an institutionalized person who seems saner than his visitors, but Amalfitano's own story is, to me, even more compelling. Bolaño's stellar sense of the bizarre and hilarious is showcased to perfection, as in this passage, which find Amalfitano obsessing, Beckett-like, on a mysterious, privately-published geometry book that he (totally uninterested in geometry) has discovered in one of his boxes.

I probably picked it up at Laie, he thought, or maybe at La Central, the time I stopped in to buy some philosophy book and the clerk was excited because Pere Gimferrer, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, and Juan Villoro were all there, arguing about whether it was a good idea to fly, and plane accidents, and which was more dangerous, taking off or landing, and she mistakenly put this book in my bag. La Central, that makes sense. But if that was the way it heppened I'd have discovered the book when i got home and opened the bag or package or whatever it was, unless, of course, something terrible or upsetting happened to me on the walk home that eliminated any desire or curiosity I had to examine my new book or books. It's even possible that I might have opened the package like a zombie and left the new book on the night table and Dieste's book on the bookshelf, shaken by something I'd just seen on the street, maybe a car accident, maybe a mugging, maybe a suicide in the subway, although if I had seen something like that, thought Amalfitano, I would surely remember it now or at least retain a vague memory of it. I wouldn't remember the Testamento geométrico, but I would remember whatever made me forget the Testamento geométrico. And as if this wasn't enough, the biggest problem wasn't really where the book had come from but how it had ended up in Santa Teresa in one of Amalfitano's boxes of books, books he had chosen in Barcelona before he left. At what point of utter obliviousness had he put it in there? How could he have packed a book without noticing what he was doing? Had he planned to read it when he got to the north of Mexico? Had he planned to use it as the starting point for a desultory study of geometry? And if that was his plan, why had he forgotten the moment he arrived in this city rising up in the middle of nowhere? Had the book disappeared from his memory while he and his daughter were flying east to west? Or had it disappeared from his memory as he was waiting for his boxes of books to arrive, once he was in Santa Teresa? Had Dieste's book vanished as a side effect of jet lag?

What I love about this passage is its double-edged nature: is Amalfitano needlessly belaboring an unimportant detail, as his daughter Rosa seems to think? Or is this ostensibly small incident part of, perhaps even a key to, that intangible "something wrong" which all Bolaño's characters are chasing? And what does it mean that the inquiry into the origins of this innocuous geometry book is spiked with so many catastrophic allusions: plane crashes, car accidents, muggings, suicides? Is Amalfitano onto something in this passage, or are we witnessing his first slide toward madness? In the end, these two options may be just two paths to the same outcome: if Amalfitano is fixating on an unimportant detail, it may indicate that he is going mad. On the other hand, he may be correct in his insistence on the book's significance, and what he thinks it signifies is...that he's going mad. The book catches him in a logical trap, and his delightfully odd solution (or is it an exacerbation?) of transforming the volume into a Duchamp-inspired readymade doesn't dispel his nameless fear.

And speaking of fear. The second book of 2666 includes further allusions to "the crimes": those hundreds of female bodies being discovered all over Santa Teresa, with no end in sight. Interestingly, though, it generally chooses to talk around the murders, rather than addressing them head-on. In one scene, just after Amalfitano has discovered the disquieting geometry book, he calls a professor friend of his and confides that he's a nervous wreck. She assumes that this is because he is worried about the murders:

Professor Pérez soothed him, told him not to worry so much, all you had to do was be careful, there was no point giving in to paranoia. She reminded him that the victims were usually kidnapped in other parts of the city. Amalfitano listened to her talk and all of a sudden he laughed. He told her his nerves were in tatters. Professor Pérez didn't get the joke. Nobody gets anything here, thought Amalfitano angrily.

Even in this relatively explicit passage, there is so much that is ambiguous. Bolaño gives the impression that, despite Pérez's assumptions, the murders are not the actual cause of Amalfitano's frayed nerves. It's plain that Pérez's talk about them, for whatever reason, is either irrelevant or offensive to him: he interrupts her, and then feels angry that she does not understand his "joke" about tattered nerves. We never see Amalfitano, here or elsewhere, thinking explicitly about the crimes, which seems bizarre in itself given that, in the first place, he lives with his teenage daughter, and in the second place, he has long internal monologues about everything from his colleagues, to a volume of crackpot pseudo-history a once sent to him by a friend. On the other hand, the reader could certainly interpret the murders as an unacknowledged influence on his mood, a partial explanation for why he is so on edge, why the appearance of a strange book so unsettles him, why he is sleeping poorly and hearing voices. One could see, in his dearth of thoughts about the murders, a pointed avoidance of the subject rather than a lack of interest. But if Amalfitano's encroaching madness is related to the murders, what is the connection?

Time, perhaps, will tell. Or perhaps not: an outcome I might even prefer. In any case, I'm still heartily enjoying 2666, and I'm eager to move on to the third book, The Part About Fate.

Thoughts on Part 1: The Part About the Critics

I thoroughly enjoyed The Part About the Critics, which is the first book of the five that make up 2666. With all the talk of sex and violence surrounding this novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the humor in these first pages, by Bolaño's light, satiric touch and keen sense of the absurd. (We all know I'm a sucker for absurdism.) More than anything, his style and subject matter reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov: the ridiculousness and insularity of academia, the minute dissections of the reading life, the way that the four protagonists are more than a little silly, yet still sympathetic - Bolaño and Nabokov both handle all these elements masterfully. Bolaño has a firm grasp of the "don't belabor every little joke" principle of humor: his anecdotes are peppered with light, unexplained touches that I found hilarious. In this passage, for example, he writes a brilliant send-up of the self-importance among two opposing camps of scholars studying the enigmatic German author Archimboldi:

The Bremen German literature conference was highly eventful. Pelletier, backed by Morini and Espinoza, went on the attack like Napoleon at Jena, assaulting the unsuspecting German Archimboldi scholars, and the downed flags of Pohl, Schwartz, and Borchmeyer were soon routed to the cafés and taverns of Bremen. The young German professors participating in the event were bewildered at first and then took the side of Pelletier and his friends, albeit cautiously. The audience, consisting mostly of university students who had traveled from Göttingen by train or in vans, was also won over by Pelletier's fiery and uncompromising interpretations, throwing caution to the winds and enthusiastically yielding to the festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival (or penultimate carnival) exegesis upheld by Pelletier and Espinoza. Two days later, Schwartz and his minions counterattacked. They compared Archimboldi to Heinrich Böll. They spoke of suffering. They compared Archimboldi to Günter Grass. They spoke of civic duty. Borchmeyer even compared Archimboldi to Friedrich Dürrenmatt and spoke of humor, which seemed to Morini the height of gall. Then Liz Norton appeared, heaven-sent, and demolished the counterattack like a Desaix, like a Lannes, a blond Amazon who spoke excellent German, if anything too rapidly, and who expounded on Grimmelshausen and Gryphius and many others, including Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus.

Although the overarching joke here is a good one (only academics themselves would be so absurdly self-involved as to liken their conferences to Napoleonic battles; it's like something out of a Christopher Guest film), there are so many tiny, near-irrelevant touches that heighten the humor. It's somehow hilarious that the students have come "by train or in vans." The caution or incaution of the conference audience is equally hilarious, given that all most of them are doing is nodding or shaking their heads, as is the fact that Morini finds the suggestion of humor somehow more offensive than suffering or civic duty.

But more than being funny, the pan-European, colonializing self-importance of the critics (representing the big four European centers of France, Spain, Italy, and England) holds a darker note. In this scene, they've come to a German city to attack and triumph over German scholars, in a discussion of a German author, and they are outraged when their interpretations are challenged. The German scholars, who attempt to locate the work of Archimboldi within a greater context of German literature as a whole, are ridiculed. Instead, the protagonists favor of a glamorous, individualistic interpretation that allows Archimboldi to belong to everyone and no one (but mostly, to the four European critics).

Later, when the four friends descend on a small Mexican border town to search for Archimboldi himself, their cultural arrogance becomes even more obvious: when a Mexican Archimboldi scholar addresses a note "Dear Colleagues," three of them burst into laughter while the fourth finds the note depressingly pathetic. None of them seriously consider that a professor from Latin America could possibly be worthy of their regard, yet they fully expect local cooperation in their obsessive quest to track down a writer who obviously wishes to remain hidden. When their motivation is questioned, indeed, their interrogator is met with blank incomprehension: "Because we're studying his works, said the critics."

But the darkness in this first book is not limited to the cultural imperialism of the four protagonists. Indeed, the Mexican section of The Part About the Critics begins to introduce a more sinister note all around. There is a feeling that something is wrong in Santa Teresa, and Bolaño does a fantastic job of creating, via certain bizarre incidents, that atmosphere of vague but profound unease. The critics learn, for example, of an unexplained war between cabbies and hotel doormen, in which the doormen will beat the cabbies senseless unless the latter pay them off. A group of drunk Americans in the bar seem to be observing something of great interest in the street, but when the critics try to share the view, there is nothing to see. Even the critics' hotel rooms and the landscape outside are vaguely unnerving to them. And then there are the rumors of the hundreds of murdered women that have been turning up in the area, about which none of the Europeans can get much information. Something is definitely rotten, and the critics are tempted to put it all down to the lack of civilization in this backwater Mexican burg. At least one of them, though, has the nagging feeling that this vague "something" has been wrong all along:

These people are crazy, said Espinoza and Pelletier. Bu Norton thought something strange was going on, on the street, on the terrace, in the hotel rooms, even in Mexico City with those unreal taxi drivers and doormen, unreal or at least logically ungraspable, and even in Europe something strange had been happening, something she didn't understand, at the Paris airport where the three of them had met, and maybe before, with Morini and his refusal to accompany them, with that slightly repulsive young man they had met in Toulouse, with Dieter Hellfeld and his sudden news about Archimboldi. And something strange was going on even with Archimboldi and everything Archimboldi had written about, and with Norton, unrecognizable to herself, if only intermittently, who read and made notes on an interpreted Archimboldi's books.

And looking back, the reader does remember examples of the same kind of skewed-ness taking place in Europe. There's the recurrent theme of the painter Edwin Johns, who cut off his painting hand, and a certain academic conference "of which Morini had reason to believe the whole thing was a hoax. And then, of course, there is the deliciously bizarre scene about the mugs. I won't say any more. You'll just have to read it for yourself.

I love this kind of unknowable, semi-surreal wrongness in literature, and have ever since I was a child. So Bolaño's mix of Lynchian unease with absurdist humor is pretty much guaranteed to please. I'll be eager to see what the second book of 2666 holds in store.

This work has gotten tremendous press, and good feedback from LibraryThing members. I found it a disappointment.

The biggest problem in the book is its tone. Bolano uses an omniscient, detached narrative voice. This would be perfect if the author had a sense of humor, but he has none on display. Instead, this style serves to keep you distant from the characters, who seem like cardboard authorial constructs. You never care about them.

The book is long, and some parts really feel it. The book is divided into five parts, and as it becomes clear that they are loosely related, but not building to anything, it becomes a real slog. I think this may be Bolano's point -- something about how we can't know each other or the truth or something "deep" but it really hampers the novel as an artistic work. You should never wonder "why am I reading this?" but you do. ( )