2666

Whew! I finally finished the seventh book of the New York Times Top Ten of 2008, 2666, a posthumous novel by Roberto Bolano. It's a doorstop, coming in at 893 pages, and is about, well, it's about almost everything.

The novel consists of five parts, which were envisioned by Bolano as five separate novels, but were published as a whole after his death. They are interconnected, all glancing against a series of murders committed in a fictional Mexican town in the Sonora desert (these are modeled after the true unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in Ciudad Juarez).

Part 1 is about four academics who share a passion for an obscure German writer, strangely named Benno von Archimboldi. The tone of this part is a kind of sexy campus romp, as two of the academics become romantically involved with a third. Three of them end up hearing a rumor that Archimboldi, who is a recluse, was seen in Sonora, so they go there to look for him. (A search for a forgotten writer is also the plot of his book The Savage Detectives, reviewed earlier on this blog).

Part 2 is a short look at a philosophy professor in Santa Teresa, Bolano's stand-in for Juarez. He is slowly losing his grip on things, worried that his daughter will be consumed by the violence of the city, and obsessing about a geometry booking hanging on a clothesline. It is the strangest part of the book.

Part 3 concerns an African-American magazine writer who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. He becomes enmeshed with some marginal people, and after learning about the murders becomes interested in writing about them.

Part 4 is an exhaustive listing of the murdered women, plus the police investigations that follow them. It is a long, numbing section, perhaps the longest police blotter in literary history.

Part 5 returns to Archimboldi, and a bildungsroman that follows him from a boyhood obsessed with the sea floor to a soldier in the German army on the Eastern Front during World War II to his peripatetic life as a novelist.

These bare-boned summaries don't cover the half of it, though. Reading 2666, though it is sterlingly written (with a brilliant translation by Natasha Wimmer) it is a challenge. It is like a tour through a man's imagination, with side-trips by the score. Paging through the book I was reminded of some of these diversions, such as the story of a painter who finishes a painting by adding his severed hand to it; an interview with a former black radical not unlike Bobby Seale; the plot of a 1920s science fiction novel by a Russian writer who is later murdered by Stalinists; the case of a deranged man who vandalizes Mexican churches; and the gruesome castration of gang members in a Mexican prison.

What comes through most of this is an ever present atmosphere of menace. Santa Teresa is a kind of Hell, a place where women are raped, murdered and dumped almost casually, and this horror fans out to other places like tentacles. In some sense 2666 is a horror novel about a presence of evil that moves about but keeps a home base in a forlorn city in the desert.

As I finished the book, I wasn't sure whether I could say I liked it. I appreciated it, to be sure. There are some magnificent turns of phrase. Here's a couple of them: "The voice said: be careful, but it said it as if it were very far away, at the bottom of a ravine revealing glimpses of volcanic rock, rhyolites, andesites, streaks of silver and gold, petrified puddles covered with tiny little eggs, while red-tailed hawks soared above in the sky, which was purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death." Or this delicious simile: "That night Reiter wasn't tired and the full moon filtered through the fabric of the tent like boiling coffee through a sock."

In the closing pages of the book, we finally learn how Archimboldi connects to the murders in Sonora, but it's not a tremendous "a-ha" moment, in fact because the book is so long I had forgotten some of the characters mentioned in the beginning who are resurrected at the end. And no, I have no idea what the number 2666 means, although some posit it is significant because it is the number of years between the creation of man and the exodus of the Jews under Moses. It's an intriguing puzzle, and an intriguing book, but it's a book that requires careful consideration and thought.