Bolano's '2666' a final, epic journey

Late writer's last novel loosely links characters, themes across the world

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published November 27, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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A dystopia allows us to indulge both our fear and our curiosity about the world, depicting a devolution of society, but always in the future, letting us watch from a safe remove.

Roberto Bolano did very little at a safe remove, and his final, epic novel, 2666 (other, earlier works are still to come), takes us across the globe in a world out of balance - our own.

The novel was nearly complete when Bolano died of liver disease in 2003, at the age of 50, and is the culmination of a frenzied burst of writing late in his life. Born in Chile and raised mostly in Mexico City, Bolano was one of a group of renegade Mexican poets in the 1970s (loosely the subject of his much-acclaimed novel The Savage Detectives) before he moved to Spain, where he supported himself through odd jobs before deciding that literature was the way to provide for his family.

His work took awhile to make its way to English translation, with Savage, published in Spanish in 1999, only arriving in this country last year. Translated by the same gifted writer, Natasha Wimmer, 2666 replicates some of the themes of his earlier work but explodes them, digests them and expands them.

The nearly 900-page novel consists of five book-length sections with only a few thematic and plot connections.

The first, called The Part About the Critics, draws the closest parallel to Savage. In it, four European scholars band together in their obsession with a reclusive, nearly unknown German author named Benno von Archimboldi. They are immersed in academia and a consuming love of literature, and on a quest for Archimboldi that takes them, unsuccessfully, to a town on the Mexican-U.S. border called Santa Teresa.

There, they meet another academic, Amalfitano, and his story forms Part Two (The Part About Amalfitano), where it becomes clear that Santa Teresa is a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, the city across from El Paso, Texas, where hundreds of women have been kidnapped and murdered since the early 1990s without solution or resolution.

Amalfitano has a teenage daughter, and the novel's sense of foreboding begins as she starts up a social life and the reader waits for everything to collapse.

It never does, though, because to collapse would be to provide a climax, an artificiality denied us by the author. Rather, his stories crest and dip, taking pages-long diversions into tales of tertiary characters, then ending as though, while the story has not concluded, our peek into it has.

The third section (The Part About Fate) is a brief interlude amid the foreboding, as a black journalist finds himself suddenly sent to Santa Teresa for a boxing match. Bolano, the literary world traveler, sits least easily into the skin of this character, and his story is the least compelling and attached to the work as a whole.

It does return us to Santa Teresa, though, for the longest and most memorable section of the book, The Part About the Crimes. Its weight consists of an unemotional cataloguing of hundreds of women, one by one, discovered murdered and usually raped in the environs of the city, a desert town that has exploded with low-paying factory jobs since NAFTA and where cops and a shadow drug-trafficking government are intertwined in a web of corruption, disinterest and inability.

Bolano's love of mystery, evident in the European academics of Part One, returns here in a noir sort of detective experience but, once again, one without a solution (as in real life, where no unifying reason for the crimes has been found).

His cops aren't unsympathetic, but most are jaded, exhausted and occasionally uninterested in what amounts to the mass murder of women.

That sensation becomes, if not forgivable, understandable under the deluge of deaths piled up, month by month, year by year, with sangfroid, as in: "On January 15 the next dead woman turned up. Her name was Claudia Perez Millan. The body was found on Calle Sahuaritos."

The women are described in clothing, age and appearance, where they worked. Sometimes a husband or lover committed the murder. More often, the paragraph ends: "The case remains unsolved."

The effect is like constantly hitting yourself with a hammer: Sometimes it's immensely painful, then you become numb, then you realize you should be feeling pain, then you feel pain again. It becomes actually more shocking to hear the cops talk about the cases - and in one chilling instance, toss off crude anti-woman jokes - than to hear about the cases themselves. There are dogged, pure-hearted cops, but they accomplish no more than the corrupt.

Bolano depicts women as more than victims. We learn little about the internal lives of the dead, but his living women are sexually and economically independent. A 12-year-old says: "What do we need men for when we have our own jobs and make money and can do what we want?" The women of Santa Teresa, with the female-favoring factory jobs, have more work than the men.

But Bolano doesn't fall for an easy explanation for the murders. In fact, he doesn't offer one at all, just the depiction of a diseased, overnight metropolis of shantytowns and thrown-together suburbs where women's bodies are frequently disposed of in an illegal dump that has arisen because the legal dump can't hold any more trash.

The intensity of that chapter tapers off in the final section, The Part About Archimboldi, in which Bolano explores the biography of his mysterious author Archimboldi. Again, mysticism and practicality take turns in a story that winds through the 20th century and reveals that brutality is never far away.

Bolano doesn't tie his book's five parts together. Instead, readers get another layer of mystery, in which they can piece together the themes he has scattered throughout.

The book itself has its own rhythms, with some passages requiring diligence (the first and last parts have their lagging moments) and others (sometimes in those same parts) carrying readers on a wave.

This is a big work of fiction, a messy, extensive challenge that fulfills Bolano's own slightly veiled reference to his ambitions, to eschew the neat and beautiful for the challenging, if imperfect.

2666

* By Roberto Bolano. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 898 pages, $30.

* Grade: A-

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