Book reviews: 2666
Jan. 26, 2010
I've been a big fan of SF and fantasy novels for a long time. I also read a lot. Apparently about 20 years of this is about all it takes to read most of the above average science fiction and good fantasy novels. I've read nearly every in-print Hugo and Nebula winning novel. I've read everything decent by my favorite authors and the most acclaimed works of almost everyone I've heard of. I'm also a little snobbish at this point so I won't read stuff like fantasy epics that go on far longer than the story can support, crappy prequels ghost-written by the children of dead authors, or novelizations of material from other media. Given these constraints, and because I've largely exhausted the back catalog, I find that there aren't enough SF or fantasy novels published in a year to occupy me. Therefore, I've decided it is worth branching out into modern non-genre literature. I've long been a fan of Umberto Eco and Jorge Borges so it wasn't as if I was a total stranger to the place.
My first experiment in this came last year. An economics blog that I read recommended Roberto Bolaño's 2666 as the best book of 2008. In retrospect this was probably not the best introduction to Bolaño since it is his masterpiece, written literally on his death bed. However, it still held me in total fascination. The book is broken into 5 parts, all converging on the fictional city of Santa Teresa, Mexico, where an unusual number of women are being mysteriously murdered. The murders are based on real events in Juarez, Mexico. The first part is somewhat reminiscent of Umberto Eco, concerning an international group of scholars studying the work of fictional German author Benno von Archimboldi. The second part is a dadaist or absurdist section with references to Duchamp and the progression of madness, both in the subject Amalfitano and his absent wife. The third part resembles a noir novel or perhaps a Hemingway story, but also references 20th century African-American lit. Part 4 is the largest and a covers the murders in Santa Teresa in journalistic detail and also covers the efforts, or lack thereof, of the police force to investigate the killings. Finally, part 5 is a Bildungsroman on the great German novelist Archimboldi. Each section serves to illustrate a different 20th century literary genre. I see the structure of the novel as a summing-up of the 20th century's contribution to literature.
The novel covers a lot of ground. In parts, especially part 2 and part 4, it was somewhat tedious but I think that was the point. Part 2 was largely stream of consciousness punctuated with letters from a woman going mad. Part 4 was repetitious in its accounts of the murders, but that served to underline the tragedy. When each life taken is recounted in detail, statistics become personal. There is also something about the way each character is built up in this section and then discarded. You often wish he could have kept that person around a little longer, but now they are gone. The author toys with the reader this way, almost killing them himself.
2666 was challenging for me. I'm sure as an unpracticed reader of this kind of fiction I missed a lot of the insights. After I read some more of Bolaño's work (I'm especially interested in The Savage Detectives) I will need to reflect on it some more and see if that helps me understand it. However, even to me it came across as a powerful reflection on death, literature, and an author's place in both. Forgive me for quoting the same passage found in other reviews, but it is quite representative of at least one of themes:
What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choses the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
I hope that Bolaño was satisfied in the "real combat," and victory, of 2666.