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24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Set of Diamonds in the Rough, Jan 9 2009
I have a hard time imagining that any new novel I read this year will fill me as completely as 2666 did. I encourage you to read the book with interest, but without the expectation of perfection.
In 2666, the monumental novel that has brought so much joy to readers since the 18th and 19th centuries returns in the twenty-first century. Roberto Bolano displays enough breadth of vision to give Dickens something to think about. It's hard to describe this book without giving away details that might spoil your pleasure, but it's clear that everything and everybody are connected. That's also part of the attraction . . . because you want to know what all the connections are.
Bolano's 2666 provides a perspective that we don't get often enough in monumental novels, that of a novelist. In Part 1 "The Part about the Critics" we meet four academics who build careers (and indeed personal lives) around a little-appreciated German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi whom they have never met. The author's name alone will give you a clue that not all is as it seems. This story is by turns wicked satire, patronizing descriptions, tendentious morality tale, and hilariously warped view of the academic part of the literary establishment and its goings on. Only the obvious escapes them in their desire for privacy, comfort, career, and avoidance of loss. Before this part ends though, you'll feel like a strong magnet is pulling you and the characters towards an important appointment, one that will initially resist your understanding.
In Part 2 "The Part about Amalfitano" you will get to know Amalfitano who lives with his daughter Rosa in Santa Teresa, Mexico, a border town south of Tucson where sweat shop factories draw willing young workers from all over Mexico. You might think of Amalfitano as eccentric (after all, he has a book pinned to his clothes line based on something that Duchamp had once recommended), but it eventually turns out that he is a man in close contact with himself and reality. He is an educated man (a professor) from Europe who finds himself in a dusty town where the values are the opposite of any culture that he values. Like many of the characters, he has interesting dreams that help tell the story and enjoys the world of ideas. Some will see him as a stand-in for Don Quixote.
In Part 3 "The Part about Fate" you meet Oscar Fate (born Quincy Williams), an African American who is pulled away from his normal reporting to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa. Fate doesn't have a clue about boxing and knows perhaps less about Mexico. Once there, he meets Guadalupe Roncal, a reporter from Mexico City, who wants to write about the many women who are being sexually attacked and killed in the Santa Teresa area. After the fight, Fate meets Rosa Amalfitano and eventually her father. Fate becomes our eyes into a culture that is terribly dangerous for women. Before the part's end you meet a mysterious blond giant.
In Part 4 "The Part about the Crimes" you will read in nauseating detail about what has been happening to women in and around Santa Teresa. Bolano buries you through repetition into being numb about the horrors, the callousness of those who prey on the women, and the attitudes of the police and other officials in the context of a very male chauvinist culture. By the end of this part, you'll piece together what's going on . . . which is more than the investigators do. I advise you to read this segment when you are in a good mood and in small doses.
In Part 5 "The Part about Archimboldi, you get to look behind the author's legend to meet the man and his family. It's the best part of the book and reminded me a lot of reading what Gunter Grass had to say in Peeling the Onion about emerging as a writer. Bolano adds power by dropping in little stories and events that complete and magnify other parts of the book. I savored this part right up to the final shoe dropping.
Bolano has an amazing ability to pile story on top of story on top of story so that you are seeing the subject (or the world) through an endless series of mirrors that display all dimensions simultaneously. His imagination to do this is immense. Due to his untimely death as he raced to finish this work, I don't think that these complex structures always received the polish they deserved. For instance, there are a few facts of 2666 that are never finished. Clearly, a good editor would have helped Bolano to flesh out such chinks in the reflective surface.
The translation often seems rough. You can tell because other parts are extremely smooth and well developed. It's not clear how much of this is due to the original not being fully polished or the translation being rushed.
To me, a monumental novel has to convey a sense of what the world is really about. You see that in a work like Crime and Punishment. Bolano also shares his worldview through the actions his characters take and their fates. The philosophy is clearly summarized by John Donne in that we are all connected and the loss of any one is a loss to all. Much of the story's development can be seen in the context of Catholic theology with many of the references unavoidable (such as the crucified general). Bolano's view is also that every thing we think or do affects everyone else. Ultimately, he sees us as all tied together because we are attracted to one another (even if the attraction is sometimes a perverse one). Behind all of these connections is a strong force drawing us to right wrongs, even when there seems to be no chance to succeed.
Although you can feel that the book spends too much time on the tawdry, its ultimate message is a very positive and life-affirming one . . . you can make a positive difference, if only you make the effort.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bolaño's bible, Feb 28 2009
It might be best to go into this book with the expectations you'd have for a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. 2666 isn't so much a single narrative or a collection of stories as a big, five-paneled painting full of curious, often horrifying, always entertaining figures united by a meaning that you feel is there, but isn't necessarily available to you. (Or you could say it's like the Bible, a collection of books all connected by a theme that is not necessarily explicitly stated in each.)
Those figures, and the odd little stories Bolaño introduces along the way - an artist who cuts off his hand and makes it part of an installation, a manufacturer of coffee mugs turned London bum, a WWII Romanian general crucified by his soldiers, a Russian science fiction novel involving time travel, a Mexican detective and a hypnotist, among many other things - arrest you like a strange word in a flipped-through dictionary.
A lot of the arresting details have to do with arcane, and sometimes crackpot, knowledge from books. These arcane details mutate into other forms and start finding their way into the action - the works of a mystic Mexican nun (which include a cookbook) reappear as the city Santa Teresa, Mexico (where the maquiladoras are being murdered). You read on, fascinated by the workings of Bolaño's intuitions, wondering where he's taking you next and how he's going to tie it all together.
A pattern just may emerge, of women as regarded by men: in casual conversations, in the romantic entanglements of a group of academics, in the endemic violence against women portrayed in Part 4, 'The Part About the Crimes'.
The murders are recounted as they would appear in a police report - sober, never exploited for their sensational value - then expanded to take in the actions and reactions of investigators, legislators, health professionals, and even convicts. The chronicle of crimes emphasizes (a) the expendability of the poorest members of the working class, especially the women, (b) the tepid police response - influenced by a cultural devaluation of women - and (c) the slowness of the public reaction. As Bolaño suggests, it's like a dripping tap that no one can be bothered to fix.
The Part About the Crimes is also a technical achievement. It's as if Bolaño set out to outdo Sade (who is namechecked) by replicating his method in 120 Days of Sodom - brutalities repeated so often that they become rituals of depersonalization - but in such a way as to return the victims their status as human beings, and with intertwined sub-narratives that supply a dynamic that the Marquis could never be bothered to include. In other words, the Part About the Crimes is never just a catalogue of horrors, and it's never boring. (The real horror, by the way, is reserved for a depiction of life in a Mexican men's prison.)
As Ignacio Ecchevaría explains in a postscript, at the very end of his life Bolaño decided 2666 should be published as five independent books. The heirs decided otherwise, on the grounds that, although the structure of 2666 is 'open' - which is as much as to say there is no single narrative - the five parts share many motifs and serve a common end. They're right about the shared motifs; I'm still not entirely sure about the common end. Ecchevarîa himself is vague on what that end is.
2666 was not quite finished at Bolaño's death. If the author had lived longer he might have improved the pacing of the fifth part, on the writer Archimboldi: Bolaño's gift for varying the tempo is notably lacking here. It might have been more tightly connected with the other four parts, too, and might not have ended on a dying fall.
Imperfect as it is, I find myself thinking about 2666 weeks after I've finished it, and thinking about it more and more in terms of music and painting. In this connection the book it resembles more than any other is Ulysses, which also breaks down artistic boundaries: though 2666 is less tightly schematized than Ulysses, is never experimental at the level of language, not quite as much of an exercise in pastiche, and doesn't have Joyce's consciously reader-unfriendly passages.
It may not be Bolaño's best book. But I suspect that 2666, like Ulysses, "will keep the professors busy for centuries".
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Indifference to Evil, Sep 4 2009
Bolano, in this major literary work, offers us some incredible insights into the many social, political and metaphysical faces of evil. By the time he is finished with us, we will begin to see the inglorious past, present and future of man's inability to control his violent urges. Structurally, the novel breaks down into a number of smaller chapters that look at how various characters attempt to understand and come to grips with the ugliness of human nature around them. While Bolano seemingly makes it easy for the reader to focus on the eye of the storm - a little flyblown Mexican bordertown near Nogales - where despicable things are happening in spades, he complicates life by introducing a number of different tangents on how violence apparently affects people differently. It is this rich melange of personal views and reactions that makes any attempt to metaphysically appreciate and possibly control our homicidal urges next to impossible. We are who we are because we essentially live to ourselves rather than on behalf of others. The first part of the story covers the actions of some European intellectuals who go in search of a reclusive German author and philosopher who has made it is his life's ambition to understand the human drive to kill. This mission fails because the members of the group get entangled in each other's personal needs to the point of losing track of their original goal: seeking knowledge. Other outsiders, such as a naive journalist in search of the big fight, actually make it to the Ground Zero of this Hell in the little Mexican town of Santa Teresa only to discover that there is something beyond their wildest imaginations: a langorus indifference to violence in its many awful manifestations. If the readers get used to the idea that life is cheap in the Mexican borderlands, Bolano hits then with an extremely sordid and foul section of the novel that deals with the unrelenting actions of a rapist-serial killer on the loose. In this crazy, screwed-up world, those who are afraid flee while those who stay learn to adjust and accept. In the last section of the book, Bolano allows his reader to finally catch up with the eccentric philosopher in Mexico to learn what he knows about the history of violence and mayhem in his own life. His tale is one of those compelling experiences where even those who are opposed to hurting others - the pacifists and the innocents - are not exempt from the terrible toll of its fury. Perhaps, it a was good thing that Bolano finished writing "2666" when - shortly before his death - he did because the force with which he describes the fury of evil is a voice of all-consuming, apocalyptic anger, leaving very little hope that anyone could possibly withstand its onslaught that far into the future. Yes, contrary to what others might say, this novel has a number of common threads that hold it together, and it does challenge us to come to grips with the spread of violence in a modern society given to worshipping individual freedom and greed.
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