Book cover for 2666

2666

Author:

Translated by:

Rating: ★★★★★


Language: en-US

Genre: Modern Literature

Themes: Spanish Literature

Format: eBook

Finished: January 30, 2024

ISBN: 9781629631172

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2008

Edition: First English

Pages: 898

About The Book

An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.”

My Thoughts

Roberto Bolaño was the bad boy of Spanish-language literature until his death in Spain in 2003 at the age of 50. A Chilean exile poet, Bolaño had previously lived in Mexico and France before his stay in Spain. A stay which led to a remarkable output of fiction in a very short time.

2666, a title that is an enigma, is a story in 5 parts. Five brutal, uncompromising parts. Relentlessly grim (part 2 is essentially a catalog of hundreds of unsolved murders in Cuidad Juárez, named Santa Theresa in the novel) and told primarily through asides and reminescences that cover everything from modern German literature to Russian science fiction, the Black Panthers to the history of Chile, Dracula’s castle to Swiss insane asylums, the Aztecs to Romania and Prussia in World War II, 2666 is one of the bleakest books I have ever read.

What begins as the somewhat prosaic story of the office sexual politics of four literary critics in Europe who are obsessed with a reclusive writer named Archimboldi quickly turns into an indictment of feral desire that then becomes a damning indictment of machismo, gangsterism, casual homophobia, the tyranny of masculinity, and unfettered capital. Throughout, the hunger for money, sex, revenge, and personal validation trumps all; art, literature, love, sex, honesty, fun.

It took me a long time, almost six weeks, to get through the sprawling wound that is 2666. Much because as I said before, the center of the novel is a meticulously rendered 300 page sex-crime forensic report. It really doesn’t help that most of the material in this section is taken directly from Mexico City reporter Sergio Gonzalez’s actual investigations in Juárez.If you have the stomach for it, Gonzalez book The Femicide Machine is the true story behind The Part About The Crimes. In the words of the publisher it describes “…the anarchic confluence of global capital with corrupt national politics and displaced, transient labor…” That said, it is also the most captivating and important part of the book. It is, without being effusive, brilliant.

The final section of the novel, The Part About Archimboldi, we return to the reclusive writer, but he too, is not what he seems. Actually named Hans Reiter, we follow his life from his birth in Prussia in 1920 through his time in the Nazi army, to his eventual shortlisting for a Nobel prize in literature. The way in which all of the various threads of the previous four parts are brought together at then end is very satisfying.

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