2666

The three-volume paperback edition of Bolaño's masterpiece is a joy. Each of the volumes fits comfortably into the hand. Each has a quite different cover design, yet all three form an indisputable whole when boxed together. You might say the same about the book itself. At one stage, the author apparently thought of publishing his 900-page magnum opus as five separate novels or novellas, but his heirs decided to issue the book in one volume. This edition is a worthy compromise, respecting the unity of the whole while emphasizing Bolaño's amazing diversity. The cover of the third volume, for instance, which contains the last section, "The Part about Archimboldi," is based on early 19th-century engravings of seaweeds, lucid and mysterious at the same time. And the book it contains is much the same: full of fascinating twists and turns, but sheer delight to read. The life story of a reclusive German novelist who takes the name of Benno von Archimboldi, it is a Bildungsroman with picaresque overtones, following the self-taught writer in love and war, through the rise and fall of the Third Reich and its numbing aftermath, into self-imposed isolation as his fame gradually grows. Although Bolaño is Spanish, and I was reading in English translation (superbly handled by Natasha Wimmer), I had no sense of anything secondhand, but rather that I was reading a German primary source from half a century ago. The first of the paperback volumes has a darkly mysterious cover in the manner of Gustave Moreau. And indeed, each of the three parts that it contains is about a search for some veiled mystery. It opens with a richly humorous parody of academic life, as it traces the meetings and affairs of four academics, all Archimboldi specialists, none of whom have ever seen the master comic. Bolaño pulls out all the stylistic stops in this section; at one point, there is a single unstoppable sentence running unbroken for five pages. But that is the thing about Bolaño; even his least interesting bits have the ability to keep you turning the pages, following him through every twist of style and subject, even as he moves to the rather melancholy life of an Chilean philosophy professor exiled in Mexico in the second part, and the lowlife world of an African-American sports reporter in the third. All of this converges in the middle volume, "The Part About the Crimes," which is based on a ten-year run of rape-murders of women that took place in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in the 1990s. The cover of this section is a series of almost random pencil scratchings, barely forming a pattern, and the book is like that too. Bolaño writes of crime in the furthest way possible from the typical mystery writer. Rather than concentrating on those cases that might lead to the apprehension of a serial killer, he gives the autopsy reports from every single woman murdered during this period, easily-solved cases mixed with the baffling ones, in mind-numbing detail. This 280-page section is the an

Roberto Bolaño was born about the same time as myself; he lived the life I was too chicken to live; wrote books far better than I could imagine; and died the death I have so far been spared. I feel no jealousy, just exhilaration: somebody of my generation made the hard choices and did what needed to be done. The flights of metaphor embedded within unpretentious workaday prose, the angry arrogance, the fury at what we all are and can become. 2666 hurts, a lot. It's also funny, very funny, funnier than almost anything else, but not funny enough to assuage the pain. If you want a novel to distract you from life, do not read 2666. If you want fiction to hurt you, to intensify and clarify the pain of being a member of a murderous species, read 2666.

As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here). Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant). This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did. The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly. I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're rea

According to Mrs. Bubis, wife of publisher Mr. Bubis, one of the only people alive that knew Benno von Archimboldi, "how well anyone could really know of another person's work?" Reading "2666" by Roberto Bolaño, I feel the same way. It has been quite a journey for the English reader with a talent of his kind. From "By Night in Chile" to the chilling "Romantic Dogs," (which I finished a week before this novel) to "2666," one of Bolaño's "longer" works, preceded by the fantastic "Savage Detectives." Much has been written (and will be) concerning this novel (see the great reviews, beginning with the one in the New York Times). In short, and without giving too much away, the story revolves around five intervals, which Bolano wanted to be released separately (in 5 year increments), involving a cast of characters as thick as the book itself. Part 1 (About the Critics) concerns four critics: Jean-Claude Pelletier from France, Manuel Espinoza from Spain, Piero Morini of Italy, and Liz Norton who, through their love of Archimboldi, come together and discuss and revel in the mysterious nature of the man. Part 2 (About Amalfitano) and Part 3 (About Fate) concerns a Chilean college professor, Amalfitano, and his dealings with his daughter and a strange geometry books; and an African-American, Quincy Williams aka Fate, who takes a assignment in Mexico covering a boxing match, which soon gets derailed due to his interest in the murders of the women detailed in the next chapter. Part 4 (About the Crimes) concerns the cornerstone of the novel, the parts tying all these people together: the murders of women, detailed by Bolaño, in the city of Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juárez) in the Sonora Desert in Northern Mexico on the US border. Part 5 (About Archimboldi) gives the final insights into our characters and ends the novel much as we began. With Bolaño, it is the manner of his story-telling that wins him fans as well as enemies. In "2666," he pushes the boundaries that he may have placed on himself before his death in 2003. My favorite passage, in which Liz Norton realizes the genius of Archimboldi, gives you a sense of his style, if you have not read him before. This could also sum up how some readers felt reading Bolaño their first time they tried to pay attention: "It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote." His style is attractive and inviting (although for some the large blocks of text and