Book Review / Tim Krause
Bolaño s Inferno
Roberto Bolano
Roberto Bolaño and Natasha Wimmer. 2666. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 898 pages.
With the translation into English and publication of Roberto Bolaño’s final work and masterpiece, the sprawling antinovel 2666, Anglophone readers can now confirm his status as one of the last great twentieth-century authors, a writer on a par with Kafka, Borges, Pessoa, and Sebald. Like the others, Bolaño is a poet of elegant melancholic dread, of anxiety and despair finely tuned in a sonorous, introspective key. Bolaño is also one of literature’s mad obsessive stylists and experimenters, like Queneau and Perec and Cortázar, a concocter of secret histories like Calvino and Saramago (and, again, Borges), a chronicler of the horrors of twentieth-century Latin America like Fuentes and Vargas Llosa, but he surpasses all of these authors in the unsettling quality of his dark intimations, the omnipresent sense in his fiction of foreboding and doom, of ineluctable fate: our steady reading of his fractured, frightening texts mirrors the compulsions of his characters, all of whom press onwards in their dubious battles against the unknown, unable to break away. Everything in his texts, to use Bolaño’s own words, appears to portend imminent “danger, the moment of revelation, unsolicited and afterward uncomprehended, the kind of revelation that flashes past and leaves us with only the certainty of a void, a void that very quickly escapes even the word that contains it.” All is darkness and death, as dark as the slums of the Mexican city of Santa Teresa (real-life Cuidad Juarez) in which, like Faulkner’s human voice speaking at the end of time, the mirthless laughter of the damned can be heard: “Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.” Bolaño’s works continually place the reader in such border states, confusing us, making us lose our way in his labyrinthine narratives, his tightly woven skein of stories: distillations of the uncanny, they linger in the mind long after reading, remembered like the shadowy, frightful contours of last night’s dream—dreams are a frequent motif in Bolaño—but intimately familiar, like some half-forgotten traumatic memory. Unstable landscapes, cartographies of fear.
Mammoth and intricate, 2666 is made up of five parts that all focus on, to differing degrees, the novel’s two main stories: the life and writings of the German writer Benno von Archimboldi, and the mass murders of hundreds of women—workers, young girls, wives, prostitutes—in Santa Teresa and the Sonora Desert. Each part takes up a strand of the two main narratives: the first, “The Part about the Critics” looks at four friends, scholars devoted to Archimboldi who hunt the reclusive author to Santa Teresa, where they believe he is hiding; the second, “The Part about Amalfitano,” tells the story of a Spanish exile and onetime translator of Archimboldi, who leaves his native Barcelona for the backwater University of Santa Teresa; the third part, “The Part about Fate,” narrates the attempts of Oscar Fate, an African-American journalist, to write a magazine story about an aging Black Panther, only to be sent to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa, where he meets Amalfitano’s troubled daughter, Rosa, and encounters a few of her criminal friends, who may or may not be drug traffickers and murderers.The fourth and longest part, “The Part about the Crimes,” details, body by body, the victims of the unsolved murders, providing—often in single, succinct paragraphs, each like some lost jewel rescued from the crime pages of an old newspaper—a snapshot of the victim’s life, as well as the increasingly futile attempts by the police to identify the murderers and bring them to justice; the fifth and final part, “The Part about Archimboldi,” brings the novel back to its beginning, telling the reclusive author’s story in full, from youth to old age. The five parts of the novel do not so much directly connect as they overlap and echo each other: while characters from one part appear sometimes in the other parts, and while Archimboldi is an elusive presence throughout, the characters and situations keep recapitulating the novel’s main themes—poverty and disease; crime, murder, and death; the isolation and nomadism of modern life; the existential terror behind all human existence, which seems to increase daily as we plummet into an uncertain future; obsession, particularly obsession with literature, language, signs, and meaning—while being quite unconnected in each others’ lives. Even when characters are physically present together, Bolaño takes pains to highlight their separation from each other: the deepening tension and alienation felt by the critics of the first section, for example, who treat Amalfitano as a joke, and who himself barely registers his daughter Rosa’s presence—and so on to the end, a chain of missed chances and halfhearted attempts at communication and connection.
The pleasures of 2666 are as vast as its size, and a quick sketch of the book’s contents can barely suggest its richness. The part that has garnered by far the greatest attention is “The Part about the Crimes”: justified, no doubt, as this central section of the book is certainly the novel’s high-water mark in tone and execution, in which the steady accumulation of murders and bodies—told dispassionately, with a few touches of sardonic humor and ironic commentary, by an all-seeing omniscient narrator—creates an ever-increasing sense of onrushing doom, which the reader experiences vicariously, narcotically, as the pages are turned and the number of unclaimed, often anonymous, corpses keeps growing. The section (bound separately as a single volume in the three-volume paperback edition of the novel) functions both as realistic narrative, with all the trappings of a police procedural and the gritty naturalistic thriller, and as a metaphorical one, as the murders become a symbolic indictment of the excesses of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: unregulated capitalism, embodied both by Santa Teresa’s narcotrafficante and criminal gangs and the maquiladoras, the giant piece-work factories in which the poor men and women work assembling products for consumption in the United States; the endemic political corruption of Mexico and Latin America, fueled by the unregulated free market and huge sums of liquid cash; the poverty of the developing world and the rapid despoliation of the earth and its natural resources, seen crushingly in one of the novel’s most potent symbols, the huge garbage dumps that ring the rapidly growing city, repositories of “the trash of the slum dwellers piled up along with the waste of the maquiladoras.”
A hellishly liminal space, toxic and dangerous, but a perfect vantage point to view Santa Teresa—and, with it, the onrushing crises of our new millennium—as police chief Pedro Negrete discovers when investigating the murders:
“Among the volcanic rocks were supermarket bags full of trash. [Negrete] remembered that his son . . . had once told him that plastic bags took hundreds, maybe thousands of years to disintegrate. Not these, he thought, noting the rapid pace of decomposition here. At the top some children went running and vanished down the hill, toward Colonia Estrella. It began to get dark. To the west he saw houses with zinc and cardboard roofs, the streets winding through an anarchic sprawl. To the east he saw the highway that led to the mountains and the desert, the lights of the trucks, the first stars, real stars, stars that crept in with the night from the far side of the mountains. To the north he didn’t see anything, just a vast monotonous plain, as if life ended beyond Santa Teresa, despite what he hoped and believed.”
In these and other passages Bolaño takes us to the antipodes of human experience, the depths of the slums and the beauties of the star-filled night, encircled by the looming nothingness without, the “vast monotonous plain” of nonexistence. Thus Bolaño establishes himself as a true seer of our postmodern condition, for a time of crumbling nation-states, burgeoning lawlessness and armed strife, and environmental catastrophe—a time cursed, among other curses, with a plastic garbage “island” (a monstrous agglomeration of trash) floating in the Pacific roughly north of Hawaii and stretching east to Alaska, unforeseen by Bolaño but a chilling real-world analogue to his vision of the future as a poisoned landscape, as a world of fear and violence, loneliness and death.
But focusing too much on this section, magisterial as it is, would be to ignore the other wonders of 2666, not least its humor, which, like elsewhere in Bolaño’s canon, springs forth from fissures in the hellish landscape. Bolaño is heir to the genres of Menippean satire and the picaresque, a practitioner of what Vladimir Nabokov disparaged in his acid-penned Lectures on Don Quixote as “Spanish fun”: a style riotous and carnivalesque; predicated on the body, its pleasures and pains, and frank (and often obscene) in its depiction of bodily functions such as eating, sex, and the elimination of waste; stylistically heterogeneous and formally innovative; and tonally and ideologically anarchic, critical of both power and the powerless, of both the status quo and of attempts to remedy it. Drawing on the copiousness of Cervantes and Rabelais, Bolaño’s work refuses to answer to any one critical label, and the incessant digressions of 2666 lighten the mood somewhat, rescuing it from the overpowering grimness of the murders. “The Part about Archimboldi,” in particular, despite its detour through Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa and the horrors of the Eastern Front, maintains a clarity and lightness of tone throughout, never once straying into the bathetic hash other writers have recently made of such well-worn material. “The Part about Archimboldi” is a short novel unto itself, at times reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard or Peter Handke, and a sort of victory lap for Bolaño and for the book 2666 itself: a last victorious raid on the European novel and its generic conventions, both a straightfaced parodic imitation and triumphant apotheosis.
Indeed, one of the most satisfying things about 2666 is this totality, its sense of overwhelming scale combined with meticulous detail; satisfying, too, is the book’s totality when viewed against Bolaño’s other works, its role as summation and capstone to a distinguished writing career. From the elegant and darkly suggestive short stories of the splendid collection Last Evenings on Earth (a kind of omnibus drawing from two volumes of Bolaño’s stories), to the fugal monologues of Amulet and By Night in Chile (told, respectively, by the self-styled “Mother of Mexican poetry” and a Catholic priest collaborating with the Pinochet dictatorship), to last year’s breakout success of the wide-ranging odyssey The Savage Detectives (Bolaño’s other great epic novel), English readers have seen a kind of triumphant parade of books from the Chilean author, who died in 2003 of complications from liver failure: a near-Virgilian rota beginning with lyric works—Bolaño began his career as a poet, and a poet’s sensibility toward the lyric, toward compaction and melody, informs even his longest works, mixing, often unstably, with Bolaño’s opposing tendency toward longwindedness—and culminating in the great epic novels.
We must remind ourselves that this is an ephemeral trick of the Anglophone publishing world, and that Bolaño’s reputation abroad has been assured for years: 2666 appeared in Spanish in 2004, and The Savage Detectives in 1998, a nine-year gap that should worry anyone largely confined to one language and the vagaries of its tastes and translation practices. As noted above, one of Bolaño’s key motifs is literature and the disease of the literary: literature as compulsion, as drug, writing as lonely graphomania, reading as a hopeless attempt to compile the perfect bibliography, to read every last work, to understand it all. Bolañomania has wonderfully mirrored these themes, as legions of enraptured readers have breathlessly awaited the appearance of new English translations of Bolaño’s work with the singlemindedness of his own entranced characters, like devotees of a religious sect waiting for the kingdom to break forth from a newly discovered bit of sacred text. Additional translations are forthcoming, but for now we may content ourselves with Bolaño’s masterpiece: 2666 is a shocking, prophetic book, filled with revelations and wonderment, a terrific, unforgettable novel.
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