2666

2666: A Novel

File:2666.jpg The cover of the Farrar, Straus, and Giroux English translation is Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele
Author	Roberto Bolaño
Original title	2666
Translator	Natasha Wimmer
Language	Spanish
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona
Publication date	2004
Publication place	Spain
Published in English	November 11, 2008 (US) January 9, 2009 (UK)
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 978-8433968678 (1st edition in Spanish)

2666 (2004) is the last novel by Chilean-born novelist Roberto Bolaño. After many years of illness while writing the novel, he died of hepatic failure shortly after presenting the first draft to his publisher. It was first published about a year later in 2004 in Spain. Over 1100 pages long in its Spanish edition, and almost 900 in its English translation, it is divided in five parts, four and a half of which were finished by Bolaño before he died.

Focused on the unsolved and still ongoing serial murders of Ciudad Juárez (Santa Teresa in the novel), the apocalyptic 2666 depicts the horror of the 20th century through a wide cast of characters, including the secretive, reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi.

In 2007 the novel was adapted into a stage play by Catalan director Àlex Rigola, which premiered in Bolaño's adopted hometown of Blanes and was the main attraction of Barcelona's Festival Grec that year.

An English-language translation by Natasha Wimmer was published in the US on November 11, 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the UK on January 9, 2009 by Picador.

Plot summary

The title of 2666 is typical of the book's mysterious qualities. This was the title of the manuscript rescued from Bolaño's desk after his passing, the book having been the primary effort of the last five years of his life. There is no reference in the novel to this number, although it makes appearances in more than one of the author's other works. Henry Hitchings has noted that "The novel’s cryptic title is one of its many grim jokes; there is no reference to this figure in its 900 pages. However, in another of his novels, Amulet, a road in Mexico City is identified as looking like 'a cemetery in the year 2666'. Why this particular date? Perhaps it’s because the biblical exodus from Egypt, a vital moment of spiritual redemption, was supposed to have taken place 2,666 years after the Creation."

The novel's five "parts" are as follows: The Part about the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi - all linked by varying degrees of concern with the unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez (Santa Teresa in the novel).

The Part about the Critics describes a group of four European literary critics who have forged their careers around the elusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. Their search for Achimboldi ultimately leads them to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora.

The Part about Amalfitano concentrates on Oscar Amalfitano, a mentally unstable professor of philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa, who fears his daughter will be caught up in the violence of the city.

The Part about Fate follows Oscar Fate, an American journalist for a black interest magazine, who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match (despite knowing very little about boxing) but becomes interested in the murders.

The Part about the Crimes chronicles in rather flat prose the murders of dozens of women in Santa Teresa from 1993 to 1997. It also depicts the police force in their fruitless attempts to solve the crimes.

The Part about Archimboldi reveals that the mysterious writer is in fact Hans Reiter, born in 1920 in Prussia. This section explains how a provincial German soldier on the Eastern Front became an author in contention for the Nobel Prize.

Themes

The novel is substantially concerned with violence and death. According to Levi Stahl, it "is another iteration of Bolaño’s increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes", and within the novel "There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book’s title, a date that is referred to in passing in The Savage Detectives as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."

Critical reception

Critical reception has been almost unanimously positive.

Jonathan Lethem in the New York Times Book Review:

"2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it. (...) As in Arcimboldo's paintings, the individual elements of 2666 are easily catalogued, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. (...) "

• It would later that year make the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008" as chosen by the papers editors.

Amaia Gabantxo in the Times Literary Supplement:

"(A)n exceptionally exciting literary labyrinth. (...) What strikes one first about it is the stylistic richness: rich, elegant yet slangy language that is immediately recognizable as Bolano's own mixture of Chilean, Mexican and European Spanish. Then there is 2666's resistance to categorization. At times it is reminiscent of James Ellroy: gritty and scurrilous. At other moments it seems as though the Alexandria Quartet had been transposed to Mexico and populated by ragged versions of Durrell's characters. There's also a similarity with W. G. Sebald's work (.....) There are no defining moments in 2666. Mysteries are never resolved. Anecdotes are all there is. Freak or banal events happen simultaneously, inform each other and poignantly keep the wheel turning. There is no logical end to a Bolano book."

Ben Ehrenreich in the The Los Angeles Times:

"This is no ordinary whodunit, but it is a murder mystery. Santa Teresa is not just a hell. It's a mirror also -- "the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant, useless metamorphosis." (...) He wrote 2666 in a race against death. His ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void. So his reach extends beyond northern Mexico in the 1990s to Weimar Berlin and Stalin's Moscow, to Dracula's castle and the bottom of the sea."

Adam Kirsch in Slate:

"2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve."

Francisco Goldman in New York Review of Books:

"The multiple story lines of 2666 are borne along by narrators who seem also to represent various of its literary influences, from European avant-garde to critical theory to pulp fiction, and who converge on the [fictional] city of Santa Teresa as if propelled toward some final unifying epiphany. It seems appropriate that 2666's abrupt end leaves us just short of whatever that epiphany might have been.."

Online book review site The Complete Review gave it an "A+", normally reserved for a small handful of books, saying:

"Forty years after García Márquez shifted the foundations with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Bolaño has moved them again. 2666 is, simply put, epochal. No question, the first great book of the twenty-first century."

Sam Sacks in Open Letter Monthly is critical of its instant canonization as a masterpiece, saying it fails as a work of art, and is more a personal testament about death by an author about to die:

"2666 [is] a vast, visionary, physically crippling book that is even harder to recommend than it is to read... 2666 has no lights, and the result is that the unrelieved darkness overwhelms the senses and thereby renders itself uninterpretable. A vast pain is communicated, a blank-minded recognition of death, but nothing else. It had somehow become axiomatic that this novel was a masterpiece before it had even arrived in bookstores, and critics have uniformly trotted out a line from it in which a character touts books “that struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all.” There is no doubt that in writing 2666 Bolaño was struggling mightily and bravely with that which is most terrifying. But his struggle was intensely personal—it was not artistic. The bleakness of Bolaño’s vision radiates out, but so little understanding comes with it. The brutal truth is this: masterpieces are written at the height of an artist’s power. For all its size and sprawl, 2666 was written in a period of surpassing vulnerability."

Henry Hitchings in Financial Times:

"2666 ... is a summative work – a grand recapitulation of the author’s main concerns and motifs. As before, Bolaño is preoccupied with parallel lives and secret histories. Largely written after 9/11, the novel manifests a new emphasis on the dangerousness of the modern world... 2666 is an excruciatingly challenging novel, in which Bolaño redraws the boundaries of fiction. It is not unique in blurring the margins between realism and fantasy, between documentary and invention. But it is bold in a way that few works really are – it kicks away the divide between playfulness and seriousness. And it reminds us that literature at its best inhabits what Bolaño, with a customary wink at his own pomposity, called “the territory of risk” – it takes us to places we might not wish to go."

External links

• 2666, at Complete Review. Includes links to many reviews.
• "A Few Great Things About Bolano's 2666 That Won't Make the Reviews", by Zach Baron, The Village Voice, Nov. 12, 2008.
• Roberto Bolaño's "2666", by Francisco Goldman
• Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño's 2666, by Natasha Wimmer (the novels English translator)
• "The many deaths of Roberto Bolaño", by Michael Saler in Times Literary Supplement, January 7, 2009.
• "Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolano's 2666", by Marcela Valdes in The Nation, November 19. 2008. Discusses links between the real-life killings in Ciudad Juárez and the plot of 2666.