2666

I kind of feel like I've never read a book before this one. It's a sprawling, complex mess of people, concepts, plotlines so thin they appear dotted or dashed. It's centered, primarily, around Archimboldi and the killings in Santa Theresa, but in the end I'm not confident in that assertion. 

The note on the text says that Bolano's notes refer to a "hidden center" to the text, where we can assume the physical center is as noted above but there's something else that it really swirls around. 

Throughout the book I've considered how the critics expect to find Archimboldi, how the police expect to find a serial killer, how a professor in a middle-class neighbourhood can relate to the troubles, how a foreign reporter through sheer serendipity (or, rather, fate) can find himself closer to the truth of the killings than anyone else in nine hundred pages of searching. I've considered the roles of the writers, the critics, the audience, the editors and researchers and analysts, in how literature is built and understood. I've considered whether, in the end, it's all about family or something. 

But at no point do I feel like I understand 2666 and what lies at the center. I've always intellectually known that you need to read a book multiple times to really understand it, but this is the first time that I feel the need to revisit a book again, and likely again and again, before I'll really have a concept of what I just read.