2666 Again

Some Notes on 2666

And after it there came so long a train

Of people, that I ne’er would have believed

That ever Death so many had undone.

Over on Twitter, Erik Hane asked why everyone seems to be reading Bolano’s final novel, 2666, and this seemed like a good chance to try and offer a theory. Firstly, what is Roberto Bolano’s 2666? The structural form the novel takes is not like much else in contemporary literature, which tends towards neat resolution and identifiable narrative beats — beginning, middle and end. Usually one expects a discrete and dependable narrative point of view with a certain degree of interiority and an expected amount of insight into psychology. Bolano’s book is not like this and so it becomes one of the works of literature which necessitate a rethinking of not just what the novel is, but what the novel can DO. For those who haven’t read it, the book is a series of five interconnected novellas, rife with digressions, shaggy dog stories, red herrings and diversions. To put it as crudely as possible, it is “about ” two things: first a mysterious German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi and secondly, the murder of hundreds upon hundreds upon hundred of women in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa. Structurally, the five pieces overlap with various degrees of interconnection and with the repetition of various themes, motifs and ideas. 

The first section of the book — “the part about the critics’ ‘ — follows four European academics with an interest in the work of the reclusive and little-read author Benno von Archimboldi. Born in 1920, this minor German author slowly picks up critical interest and is, at one point, mentioned as a possible contender for the Nobel Prize. The four academics (“an Italian, a Spaniard, an Englishwoman and a Frenchman all walk into a bar…”) fall into friendships at sparsely attended conferences on German literature, make intellectual alliances and spend a good deal of time bed-hopping. Yet, what could easily be a campus novel satire of academia becomes something else. There is an inchoate violence just bubbling under the surface — exemplified in a shocking, brutal moment midway through the first part involving a Pakistani taxi driver in London. The group fractures and starts to fall apart, all haunted by the absent signifier of the author that grounds their shared intellectual life. These academics are essentially somewhat ridiculous figures, incapable of grasping the nature of the facts in front of them, because the true nature of history is concealed through the precise operation of ideological institutions like the truth seeking academic. Why do they all want to find Archimboldi? Do they really want to? Because — if they were successful — wouldn’t that cause the end of all these conferences and papers and friendships? Isn’t to get what you want, in the end, a kind of self-destruction? 

The group follows some leads and arrives in the city of Santa Teresa, wherein more violence awaits. Book Two follows Amalfitano — a Chilean philosophy professor who has washed up in the town and meets the critics from the previous section. Moved there with a young daughter, Amalfitano is paranoid and neurotic, picking up on some terrible psychic signals that make him terrified, expectant of a violence that is just out of reach. He gains a habit of scrawling geometric sigils in his notebooks, scanning the world for auguries and secret information. Sometimes he’s read as someone going mad, but I don’t think this is entirely correct. Rather, his diagrams are attempts to impose some order. He is trying to organize knowledge, or leverage a kind of philosophical tradition by which his life and our shared social existence might start to make just a little bit of sense. He is aware of the murders and becomes increasingly frightened that his teenage daughter Rosa will end up as one of the victims. Where is all this going, the reader might ask — a question being deliberately provoked by the novel. Towards the end of the second section, the philosopher strikes up a conversation about reading with a young pharmacist: 

Who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. 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 choose 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 and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Do you want to keep going, asks the book? Are you willing to try and engage with the great work — the work of blood and mortal wounds? The third part introduces the reader to a grieving journalist. Oscar Fate works as a correspondent for a Harlam magazine and is dealing with the recent loss of his mother. The first assignment we see him take on is to cover the speeches of a formerly incarcerated Black Panther leader. A little later, he’s sent to Santa Teresa to cover a local prize fight. There, he falls in with some of the local life and is introduced to the murders. And then more murders. And more still. He can’t get his editor to take the story — why would they care? Eventually, there is a suspect arrested — a blond haired German named Klaus Haas. Fate runs into Rosa, Amalfitano’s daughter and the two escape. From there comes the longest section of the book. “The Part About the Crimes” — the point to which everything has been building thus far: 

The fourth section is an exhaustive litany of death — crimes scene upon crime scene, meticulously detailed with the victims names, age, occupation and how they were found. The violence is absolutey gut-churning but written about in calm, dispassionate tone of an autopsy report. Beyond the sheer scale of the death, the subtextual horror is that what the reader is forced to see is really only a fraction of the women and girls who have gone missing and then turned up dead in Santa Teresa — or worse, never turned up at all. The novel makes the point that many of the dead are involved in the Maquiladora — the factories that have sprung up in the wake of NAFTA to take advantage of cheap Mexican and Central American labor. Young women, able to be put to work for next to nothing, are easily replaced and never missed if one day they just don’t turn up for their shift — until sun bleached bones are found somewhere in the Sonoran desert. 

There is some connection with the drug trade, and some of the women are victims of pimps or drug dealers or violent boyfriends but these are not separate issues. The book insists upon the interconnected topography of the violence of neoliberalism, a violence which the majority of people (including the reader) would rather not acknowledge. Along with the economic exploitation comes the systemic corruption — police are uninterested or incompetent and journalists cannot find an editor who will even pay them to tell the story. 

Perhaps the worst thing is that the fourth part shows that life doesn’t stop — the majority of people don’t seem to know what is going on, and if they do know they don’t seem to care. The reader goes through anger, fear, revulsion, even boredom — and what does it say that we can be bored by this exhaustive cataloging of violence and death? The repetition and intensity of the violence suggest a kind of agency — an intentionality — setting up the possibility that we could find a single agent to blame for this, but Bolano provides no such easy answer. In the meantime there are love stories to follow and fun character beats about a kid from the country who comes to the city and becomes a bodyguard for a local drug lord. All the normality, all the mundane joy of life is inextricably woven through with the grim, unending murder of women. 

Then there comes one of the most extraordinary moments in the whole novel. Florita Almada, a local psychic, appears on a local TV talk show. By this point in the novel, the text detailed the death of dozens of women but the local police have been far more concerned with catching a local criminal they’ve nicknamed the Penitent, who has a nasty habit of shitting and pissing in the churches around the city. The reader has sat through hundreds of pages, desperately wondering if anyone is going to do something about these deaths, Alamada begins a kind of monologue narrative, presented in third person but it is recognisably her voice. She goes through her history, her fondness for reading and some of her other autodidactic interests like botany, until a bleak vision takes full form: 

It’s Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. They’re killing my daughters! My daughters! My daughters! she screamed as she threw an imaginary shawl over her head and Reinaldo felt a shiver descend his spine like an elevator, or maybe rise, or both at once. The police do nothing, she said after a few seconds, in a different voice, deeper and more masculine… but what are they watching?… Then, in a little girl’s voice, she said: some are driven away in black cars, but they kill them anywhere. Then she said, in a normal voice: can’t they at least leave the virgins in peace? A moment later, she leaped from her chair, perfectly captured by the cameras of Sonora’s TV Studio 1, and dropped to the floor as if felled by a bullet. Reinaldo and the ventriloquist hurried to her aid, but when they tried to help her up, each taking an arm, Florita roared… don’t touch me, you cold-hearted bastards! Don’t worry about me! Haven’t you understood what I’ve said?

The final section reveals what has happened to the mysterious Archimboldi. It is, of course, a pseudonym for a man called Hans Reiter (get it?) who was born in the 1920s. The novel follows him through his life, love and conscription in the German army of WW2 and his necessary reinvention of himself as the author who escapes to anonymity and eventual literary stability. History is a kind of charnel house, and as much as we would like to think that the violence of Santa Teresa, (which is based on the real-life femicide of Cidad Juarez, where a heartbreaking number of women’s bodies were never even identified) could never happen here and it has nothing to do with the civilisation that we enjoy here, Bolano remorselessly peels back the skin of history to how the full scale of the interconnected nightmare which sees those hundreds of women as eminently disposable. I started by talking of the structure of the novel and I think its closest analogue is Dante’s Inferno. In Canto III Dante spies the endless stream of the dead, some unremembered and the subsequent sections of the poem are about the exploration of those souls’ stories. The Inferno is a series of tightly spiraling circles, down into the pit till you come to the frozen lake of Cocytus, and the nightmare of Satan. In contrast, Bolano’s novel is less a spiral and more a fractal arrangement, providing a topology of evil that is both trans-historic and geographic at the same time. 

With this as context, I’m not surprised that people are returning to 2666 now. Just today the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore collapsed. The UN security council passed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but the bombs keep falling on children desperately hiding and starving in the rubble. If there’s anything that social media has given us it’s the option to see the truly global scale of neoliberalism’s violence, the multitudinous eruptions of horror to which we are all inextricably connected.  What does hell look like in modernity? Bolano’s answer is simple — it looks like Cidad Juarez. Thus the link between the genocide of Europe in the twentieth century finds its corollary in the contemporary genocide of Latin America. You thought you had beaten this kind of Evil — yet look what the violence of neoliberalism has wrought. Nazi Germany connected through history all the way to the maquiladoras — one genocide, to another, flickering from your phone screen to the newspapers, to the pages of this novel. 

Haven’t you understood what I’ve said?