Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published final novel, 2666 is the best new fiction I’ve read for many years, and entirely justifies the extraordinary hype that attended its publication in the US late last year. I think it is a work of genius, but I was undecided about it until I was a good two thirds of the way through its 900 pages. Until then it seemed to be made of only tenuously linked blocks of text, each of which was brilliantly, often thrillingly written, but which did not seem to belong to any kind of whole.
The centre of gravity – and I use that word in both its figurative and literal sense; this is a huge book – is to be found in the fourth section, called The Part About the Crimes which catalogues murder after murder after murder after murder in the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa. All of the victims are women, and nearly all are killed in horrifyingly brutal ways. The writing here is almost completely devoid of overt emotion, but the cumulative effect is of utter horror, of repugnant awe, as crime follows crime. It’s very reminiscent of the ostinato in the first movement of the Leningrad Symphony: barbaric, monotonous, obsessive and increasingly fascinating.
The Santa Teresa story is somehow linked to that of a reclusive German writer called Benno von Archimboldi, who is rumoured to be in contention for the Nobel but who has not been seen in public for years, if at all. Archimboldi is the ghost at the centre of the first part, The Part About the Critics (which reminds me strongly of the carping woodwinds that represent Strauss’s critics in Ein Heldenleben) and dominates the final part which is, appropriately enough, called The Part About Archimboldi where we finally get to understand his extraordinary story in detail. (A small spoiler: notice how Archiboldi’s real name is Reiter – surely a deliberate homophone of the English word ‘writer’.)
Bolaño delights in throwing us off the scent, giving us a little sniff and then bewildering us again. Each part is linked in some elusive and flimsy way to each other, but trying to keep all of the inter-textual references straight in your head as you read is a near impossible task. In some ways, it’s possible to think of 2666 as a series of five loosely related novels, but the experience of reading them separately would greatly diminish the power of them taken together.
As with Bolaño’s astonishing Nazi Literature in the Americas, which I also read recently and will be reviewing shortly, Archimboldi is given a fascinating fictional body of work. Most writers would kill to be able to make novels out of many of the ideas Bolaño tosses away on page after page. He’s endlessly inventive, witty and urbane.
2666 was Bolaño’s last novel and there seems to be some debate about how complete it was at the time of his death. Clearly without a scholarly apparatus we are unable to make that judgement for ourselves, but it feels very much like an indivisible whole. It’s a labyrinthine, densely packed, bottomless mine of a novel, and one that delights and horrifies on many levels. It’s a genuine masterpiece, and perhaps the greatest novel of the century so far. I recommend it to everyone.
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