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There could be nobody better suited to describe the hilarious, improbable triumph of Robert Bolaño than Bolaño himself, which is a shame because he's dead. At the time of his death, in 2003, Bolaño was a major writer in the Spanish-speaking world but virtually unknown and untranslated in English. Why that should be is not much of a mystery. Bolaño was a difficult, angry, self-reflexive writer who lived an erratic and occasionally unpleasant life. And Americans, as the head of the Swedish Academy has annoyingly but rightly pointed out, don't read much fiction in translation anyway. (See the 100 best albums, movies, TV shows and novels of all time.)
But when the first of Bolaño's major novels, The Savage Detectives, a massive, bizarre epic about a band of avant-garde Mexican poets, was published in the U.S. last year, it instantly became a cult hit among readers and practically a fetish object to critics. Bolaño's second (and last) major novel is titled 2666, and if anything, it is even more massive and more bizarre. It is also a masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year. With its publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this week — adding to an oeuvre that includes several collections of short stories, numerous novellas and minor novels, and a volume of poems due out later this month from New Directions — Bolaño's posthumous conquest of the U.S. will be complete.
Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, the son of a truck driver (and boxer) who moved the family to Mexico City when Bolaño was still a boy. He dropped out of high school to pursue his obsession with poetry full-time. After a brief and not very successful return to Chile — he was imprisoned by Pinochet as a radical, then released when it turned out that he had gone to school with his guards — he fell in with a band of antiestablishment poets called the infrarealistas, who specialized in showing up at the readings of better-known poets and yelling at them.
In 1977 Bolaño moved to Europe and misspent an entire decade there as an itinerant laborer, living the life of a poète maudit and striking up an acquaintance with heroin. But in 1990, finding himself a husband and father, Bolaño decided to kick the smack and take up writing fiction in the hope of supporting his family. His prose turned out to be better than his poetry. In 1998 the publication of The Savage Detectives vaulted him into the first rank of Spanish-language literature, right up there with all those writers he had mocked as an infrarealista. But by then he was already suffering from the liver disease that would kill him at age 50. He had all but completed 2666 when he died.
The 898 pages of 2666 are divided into five parts, and it will give you some idea of the book's tone, rigorously literary and ridiculously informal at the same time, to know that those parts are titled "The Part about Fate," "The Part about the Crimes" and so on, as if they were Friends episodes. (The flawless translation, by Natasha Wimmer, is appropriately loose and relaxed.) Part 1 is called "The Part about the Critics."
It's not a misleading title. The opening act of 2666 is about four literary critics, three men and one woman, all friends, all European, all of whom are authorities on a mysterious German novelist named Archimboldi, whom none of them have ever met. The four friends go to conferences, talk about Archimboldi, gossip, visit one another, sleep with one another. Eventually, they get a tip that Archimboldi has been seen in a backwater town in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa. Three of them make the trip there in search of him.
But the trail has already gone cold. They cannot track him down. They are alone and bewildered in a squalid, industrial Mexican city. During that suspended moment — with the smell of revelation in the air but the actual article nowhere to be found, as if the author had accidentally left it in his other coat — Part 1 ends. Bolaño has not told us what Archimboldi's books are about, or anything about them at all besides their titles.
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We will not meet our cozy critical clique again. From here 2666 tacks abruptly sideways into the mind of a philosophy professor who teaches in Santa Teresa, and who may be slowly going insane, and then again into another genre entirely, a hard-boiled yarn about a journalist sent to Santa Teresa from New York City to cover a boxing match. It only becomes clear in Part 4 — "The Part about the Crimes" — that Bolaño is performing these lateral leaps the better to observe from all sides what the reader only gradually recognizes as the book's true subject: the horrific serial rape and killing of hundreds of women in and around Santa Teresa. Part 4 consists of a ruthlessly precise forensic catalog of those killings, complete with torn nylons and hematomas and vaginal swabs, mingled together with the stories of the detectives who are working the case and of their principal suspect, an enormous German named Klaus Haas. It is a police procedural straight from the precinct of hell. It is also as bravura a display of novelistic mastery, and as devastating a reading experience, as you are likely ever to encounter. By the time the novelist Archimboldi does show up in Part 5, a belated Godot, we are very far past the possibility of anything resembling a redemptive epiphany. The world of 2666 has been irretrievably shattered.
2666 is not a novel that any responsible critic could describe with words like brisk or taut. (Not like all those other brisk, taut 898-page novels.) That's not Bolaño's method. He's addicted to unsolved mysteries and seemingly extraneous details that actually do turn out to be extraneous, and he loves trotting out characters — indelible thumbnail sketches — whom we will never encounter a second time. If three people spend the night at a hotel, you can count on Bolaño to stop the story cold for 10 pages while he describes each of their dreams. He'll do it gorgeously, but still. This habit can be exhausting. Bolaño is often compared to Jorge Luis Borges, but Borges would never have written 2666. He would have written a short story, an exquisite miniature about a crazy graphomane who talks about writing 2666, and then called it a day.
But the relentless gratuitousness of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which builds into something overwhelming that hits you all the harder because you don't see it coming. This is a dangerous book, and you can get lost in it. How can art, Bolaño is asking, a medium of form and meaning, reflect a world that is blessed with neither? That is in fact a cesspool of chance and filth? In Part 2 of 2666 the philosophy professor, whose name is Amalfitano, recreates one of Marcel Duchamp's ready-made artworks: he hangs up a geometry textbook outside his house by a string so that the elements can gradually corrupt and destroy its tidy diagrams. He contemplates the book for hours as random, meaningless, non-Euclidean reality invades it, forcing it to register the presence of a world it cannot describe. It is not one of Bolaño's most successful digressions, but it is an excellent metaphor for 2666 itself: "Images with no handhold," the professor says of those ruined pages, "images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments." This is the novel corrupted, but its corruption is its salvation, because an orderly book, all signal and no noise, would not be a true book.
There is, of course, something incontrovertibly Bolañoesque about 2666 itself: an enigmatic, unfinished novel, translated from another language, orphaned by its author. The world, whose number Bolaño indisputably had (was it 2666? We never learn), has subtracted Bolaño from the picture, and we must read his work in his absence. But in a tragic, paradoxical way, his death completes the book: it touches 2666 with the disorder and rootlessness that is its subject. And what more could Bolaño have told us anyway? With what final wisdom could he have supplied us? Gazing at his ruined geometry book, Amalfitano fantasizes about meeting a 19th century philosopher on his deathbed and asking him for advice. "What would his response have been?" Amalfitano wonders. "Be happy. Live in the moment. Be good. Or rather: Who are you? What are you doing here? Go away."
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- Lev Grossman