"An Oasis of horror amidst an ocean of tedium"

There is nothing unfinished about 2666. Upon Bolaño's death, the first four parts were already finished and the last was only being reviewed. Furthermore, the parts are much better read as a single piece.

2666 is a book that challenges definitions due to its radical approach to the genre. The bulk of its narrative does not contain any of the traditional elements of familiarity inherent to romances prior to it: there is no hero's journey, no central conflict permeating all of its parts, and most of it does not seem to lead to any sort of catharsis. This book abandons any sort of pathos in favor of the display of several disparate ethos that can be interpreted in more than one way. For instance, the part on the crimes is deeply political, having been based on real occurrences on the real Ciudad Juárez - it is a display of violence that invites the reader to think of the capitalist relationships between first and third-world countries, the communist purge and a passion for horror, all of which are ingrained in the current latin america.

It is this very characteristic that makes readers who do not immediately realize what the book is about disappointed when not finding sufficient answers at the end. 2666 is not about answers. It is not even about questions, in a sense. It simply is. It is a post-modern monument that twists the idea of a romance and delivers answers only where they are pertinent. We can draw a parallel with a human life where one is confined to one's own perspective of the world, filtering information through a peculiar ethos built upon one's culture, given each part of the book happens on a different place with different people. We are shown that seeing the same period through the lenses of individuals from three different continents does not suffice to build a complete picture of the world as experienced by the author. Some parts are clarified, others wait on the future for a resolution. A resolution on the year 2666 where all of the involved parties are already dead?

But six centuries from now, not only would it not matter, but it would not be possible to come to a complete panorama of the story. Because one could also interpret 2666 as an attempt to communicate the human condition of never truly knowing the world we live in. But a world in which one can still find meaning - again, it is about the path, not the ending. Not walking in a particular path, but simply being in a path at all. That's how the book should be read. Every path is filled with coincidences and seemingly random encounters, ruled by the logic of chances, filled with human values from which one can apprehend - morals, culture, values. It is a path filled with meditations and emblematic moments, and also with the most prosaic of daily life.

It is hard to see at first how Bolaño would write so many descriptions of seemingly banal activities while considering himself a poet first and foremost, but when the reader is accustomed to his style, it all flows very mellifluously. The dry style gives way to the possibility of either searching for a real meaning or accepting it how it is. Just like how the story itself is left open at various ends, waiting for a closure that never happens. And so the final stroke of genius lies on the last part, that elucidates part of the earlier Sonora narratives while still keeping the sense of incompleteness that permeates the rest of the book.

"No one pays attention to these murders, but within them hides the secret to the world." ( )

Extremely graphic descriptions of brutality towards women for 300 pages of this 800 page book, serving absolutely no purpose. The author is a skilled writer, but even forgetting the violence towards women, I'm still left wondering what the point of this story was. ( )

"play and delusion are the blindfold and spur of minor writers"

Intelligence: above average
Character: cryptodidactic
Scholarship: ossified
Storytelling ability: epistolary
Prosody: reportage
German usage: chaotic.

On Cryptodidactic Character:

I continue to draw inspiration from the clarity of Martin Paul Eve’s review of the text: “2666, being composed of several, anachronistic, practically autonomous sub-books and without a clear arc of narrative progress, can be seen as a novel that instead seeks to effect change through subjectification processes [...] an ‘experience book’ as Timothy O'Leary might term it." Martin's evaluation of the character of the work is also on target: “Such a conjunction of process and subjectification has an internalizing pedagogical function one might term ‘cryptodidacticism’ in the sense that "the reader believes himself or herself to be an autodidact, even though, in fact, the text presupposed its particular teachings in advance." The term, 'cryptodidactic' is not meant in the pejorative sense. The constituting premise of the so-called “modern epic” genre (and most literature) is the promise of a ‘remuneration’ after fording the “river of voices” (Bolaño's phrase). Put another way, within Martin Paul Eve’s framework of “investing intellectual capital,” one must investigate whether 2666 produces returns. Though limited by (intentional?) weak scholarship and (intentional?) numbing prose, 2666 is rescued from complete loss by the rare moment of humor.

On Ossified Scholarship:

Bolaño's European pastoral is competent, though derives its internal movement from an exterior source of catastrophe. There are two senses of “scholarship” worth investigating in 2666, the first kind being that employed in the construction of the text, and the second in the portrayal of “scholarship” within it. Both are ossified. On the spectrum from Flannery O’Connor, “I simply make it up,” to David Foster Wallace’s “technical writing,” Bolaño's loose descriptions and hagiography have greater affinity with the former. Compared to “The Part About the Crimes,” other ‘sub-books’ are as light as air; they appear as framing device in elliptic rotation around the center of mass of the novel. These sections are more fairy tale than facticity, as if, from the perspective of probationary existence, there is no point in learning any more from the particularity of a lived experience. Contrast this scholarship with that of Sebald, whose fictionalized accounts at least appear to have the weight of fact as ballast. Likewise, Bolaño's critique of the modern critic’s bone-headedness produces the most vociferous condemnations in the text. 2666’s university establishment (whose chancellor is literal twin of the police force) practices a fruitless scholarship, as if one were trying to milk the stone(/bone). That collection of unnamed, stupid young critics who turn up to the so-called literary gatherings already full of their own bad ideas is Bolaño's hateful vision of the future-present. Moreover, the older Critics’ adoration of Archimboldi is almost entirely without content, and functions as narrative scaffold and launching pad for a series of entanglements of human relations. No comment on what is particularly unprecedented/impressive in Archimboldi’s novels (probably a wise omission in retrospect). When a text has nothing left to give, one has to meet the author. A similar empty-skulled impulse drives the Critics’ pursuit of the author Archimboldi, the only possible result of which is another article in a literary journal. Travel to Mexico for a tryst. The use-value of scholarship is seduction (in both senses). This is an ossified view of scholarship, which perhaps explains why 2666 cannot escape this same quality in its construction (Contrast with Martin’s interpretation: “keep writing”).

On Epistolary Storytelling:

The narrative form of the ‘sub-books’ is a series of exposition (usually well-done) and rising action (competent), as one might expect from reading a series of exchanged letters (one is lucky to have discovered anything at all). The narrative itself includes, with surprising frequency, multifarious ‘found letters’. New characters are constantly being introduced, and we always appears to be in the ‘middle’. As if real life is circulating behind the scenes, and the narrative entirely reconstructed from epistolary objects (whose writers necessarily must have lived to complete the composition – explains why a person can never be killed in the first person in the text for then how would they write about it). At moments of intrusions of incommensurable violence into the epistolary novel (Archimboldi’s strangulation of the war-criminal, the Critics beating of the cab driver), so-called “real-life” adumbrates behind the paper-thin narrative.

On Reportage as a quality of Prose:

The prose in “The Part About the Crimes,” is remarkable for occupying an unusual middle space. In Bolaño's account of the series of murders, the prose lies somewhere between medical examiner report, police note, and newspaper article. Bolaño includes a certain amount of specific information: the location of body, clothing worn, cause of death, violence/sexual acts committed upon the body, likely perpetrator, and often less than all this. The curious quality of these descriptions is they are far less detailed than a technical medical examination, contain none of the personal details or narrative of events of a newspaper article, and none of the extensive inventories of a police note. This low level of technical detail occurs only in a VERBAL or distantly-recalled account of someone who has just learned the details of the case but has forgotten all of the specific information. (Bolaño is doing a good impression of someone who knows nothing at all and is merely writing some prose (coincidental having the exact same effect of utter ineptness (has anyone tried writing badly intentionally?)). In reportage, which is already the third-hand account of an event (victim --> examiner --> reportage) the experience of violence is categorically excluded. Other reviewers remark the constant refrain of “both vaginally and anally raped” which produces simultaneously a numbing effect (because it is repeated so frequently in absence of more detailed descriptions of events) and ‘shakes one awake’ from the narrative to consider the experience of the individual subjected to this mistreatment. Though it would appear equally likely that one might come out the other side of it thinking that none of these events are real. Sometimes the perpetrators are captured , usually they are the ones we first suspect, sometimes there are no leads and the investigation dries up. There does not appear to be a conspiracy. The officers do not appear to be particularly incompetent or corrupt in the individual case. (the tension between the Narcos and the police establishment however… or the tension between the university and the police … or the tension with Europe and the “new world” … or the tension between the blond Klaus Haas and the eponymous Austerlitz of Sebald’s novel …)

On Chaotic German Usage:

“Supremely Ignoring” "...in the slightest." "friends of friends of friends get around and do you favors"
To his infinite benefit, Bolaño is occasionally funny.

drying the tears that ran down his cheeks with his coat sleeve, and then the doctor was moved and he stepped forward and put a hand on Reiter's shoulder and said that he too had a leather coat like this, like Reiter's, except that his was from Mason & Cooper and Reiter's was from Hahn & Forster,

He meets a jazz musician who tells him about chickens that talk and probably think.
"The worst of it," the musician says to him, "is that the governments of the planet know it and that's why so many people raise chickens."
The boy objects that the chickens are raised to be eaten. The musician says that's what the chickens want.

  ( )

I enjoyed the first few sections of the book immensely. The long fourth section is grisly and hard to read. I felt uncomfortable and stressed every time I spent an hour reading it, and I stopped. I'd like to skip to the end of that section, then finish. I'm not sure how to rate a book I couldn't finish, but wanted to. ( )

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