Lavinia reviewed 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Review of '2666' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
For a whole week I was immersed in Bolaño’s strange, dark and haunted world.
2666, is divided into five connected sections, each could be a novel in its own right (actually, when I finished it, I read that Bolaño had expressed the wish to be published separately, but it was ignored by its executors). It starts with five literary promiscuous academics from different European countries. They are united by their obsession with a German obscure and reclusive novelist called Benno von Archimboldi. Little are known about him. He is old and very tall. He disappeared in his early thirties and only a few people, most of them now dead, have met him. He moves a lot, he have lived in various places and countries. One day the five academics learn that Archimboldi has been spotted in northern Mexico and following the evidence they arrive in Santa Teresa, a provincial, ugly …
For a whole week I was immersed in Bolaño’s strange, dark and haunted world.
2666, is divided into five connected sections, each could be a novel in its own right (actually, when I finished it, I read that Bolaño had expressed the wish to be published separately, but it was ignored by its executors). It starts with five literary promiscuous academics from different European countries. They are united by their obsession with a German obscure and reclusive novelist called Benno von Archimboldi. Little are known about him. He is old and very tall. He disappeared in his early thirties and only a few people, most of them now dead, have met him. He moves a lot, he have lived in various places and countries. One day the five academics learn that Archimboldi has been spotted in northern Mexico and following the evidence they arrive in Santa Teresa, a provincial, ugly city in the borders with the United States.
Santa Teresa becomes the focal point of the novel. The story, becomes darker, violent, more mysterious. There is a real-life epidemic of murders of women, hundreds of them, young, with dark hair, who work in low-income jobs at the numerous maquiladoras across the city.
Often these victims disappear while on their way to school or returning home from work or while they’re out with friends. Their bodies are found weeks or months later in the middle of the desert, or in ditches. Most are strangled; some are shot, others are knifed. Many show signs of rape. Bolaño’s description of crimes is explicit, technical, like clinical reports. In a way, he puts a distance between himself and the very thing he describes, the darkest and the most frightening aspects of human nature.
The part about the crimes (Part 4) had - and I suspect it will continue to have - a profound effect on me. It is based in the phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, which involved the violent deaths of hundreds of women and girls between 1993 and 2003, in the northern Mexican region. Bolaño’s representation is dark, shocking, unsettling, harrowing and brutal. It is extremely upsetting, but you can't stop reading. These things cannot happen, you think, but they are.
There is corruption, violence and decadence. People come and gone. Interconnected, complicated, multi-dimentional characters, from various places. They are haunted, villainous, drifted, aimless. They live in ethically and politically oriented worlds.
The title 2666 is nowhere in the novel. It is only mentioned once in Bolaño’ s novel Amulet. It is a year so far in the future that you can’t even think of it .
"Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968 or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
