2666

2666, by Roberto Bolano, is a novel of wrong turns, dead ends, and misdirection. Although I'm only 2/3 of the way through, the book is so huge that I wanted to put down some impressions, and certainly the most prominent of those is that this is a book rife with hidden meanings.

The first sign that you're in for rough sailing is the title, 2666. Although it seems to betoken a science fiction novel, there's nothing science fiction-y about the text. In fact, the text doesn't refer to 2666, and I've seen a few guesses on-line as to what it means (the most persuasive is that it refers to a line in one of his other novels).

This theme of hidenness is pervasive through the first part, "The part about the critics". All four critics are obsessed with the German writer Archimboldi, and spend a fair part of the section seeking him out, ending up in Mexico, but he remains elusive, and the section ends without any clearer idea of who he is than when it started. But I was thinking today that the theme plays out in another way. The Italian critic seems to disappear for the last part of the novel, but he's actually central to the relationships between the other three, as we find out at the very end when it turns out that Liz Norton is actually in love with him and left the other two in Mexico to return to him. Of course, we also get the first elusive mentions of the Santa Teresa murders in this section, and they will become the center of the novel as a whole, even though the central characters in this section are essentially oblivious to them.

In the second section, Professor Amalfitano is slowly going mad -- he can't make any sense out of the world, worried that his daughter could be a victim at any time of the random killings in Santa Teresa. Archimboldi and the critics have completely disappeared in this section, and everything revolves around Amalfitano's incipient madness. I think that this section is the most obviously symbolic (at least, so far). Amalfitano hangs a geometry book (the ultimate symbol of an orderly mind) on a clothes line, and the wind and weather (the imperfect real world) tear it apart. But, for all that, I think his worries for his daughter make it the most affecting of the three.

The second section pretty obviously relates to the sense of hidden meanings and senselessness -- Amalfitano is sure that there is some key to understanding the world around him, if only he could find it, but, as the geometry book shows us, nature is blind and random.

The third section, "The part about Fate", is about an African American journalist who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, but ends up wanting to write a story about the murders. But the murders become the negative space around which this section is constructed (as Archimboldi is in the first section). They're constantly alluded to, but we don't learn anything about them. Oscar Fate first hears about them in a restaurant, when he overhears a detective talking about his theory that there's more than one serial killer, but leaves before he registers the significance. People often ask him if he's there to write about the women, but he doesn't understand the reference. When he finally learns of the murders, his editors won't let him write the story. And, finally, when he decides to go ahead and interview the chief suspect anyway, the section jumps right over the actual interview, and we never find out what was said.

Everyone says that the fourth part, about the murders, is the heart of the novel, and I'm finding that to be, if anything, an understatement. It's sort of an anti-police procedural, and it's here that the theme of dead ends really jumped out at me. I'm not quite done with this section, but a few things really stand out.

1. Bolano has fictionalized the real-life murders in Juarez for this story, and he's playing with the duality a bit. On the one hand, I think readers are expected to know about the real events. On the other hand, though, he's done a number of things to make it clear that Santa Teresa is not Juarez, such as moving the town from the Texas border to the Arizona border. I think this is to leave him free to play with details of the killings, and not have readers constantly trying to figure out if he left out something important.

It also leaves him free to occasionally insert things that would be unknowable in a non-fiction work. (Having said that, this section is notably dry and reportorial in voice).

2. Bolano gives us a little bit of a back story for most of the victims. (She wanted to learn about computers, or she was a school-teacher, or whatever). This is a similar technique to what we see in the Iliad, where Homer gives warriors who have been killed in battle a small life story (this one was about to be married, that one's father is a priest, etc). It adds to the pathos, and lessens the feeling that this is just a long list of victims.

3. It's interesting how many victims turn out to be from a killing not related to the serial killer(s). Why does he do this? I think it's to show the general brutalization of women, and maybe of all people. For instance, he has the occasional comment like "there were no killings in Feb, at least none of importance, only a pick-pocket and his friend," which show how cheap life has become.

4. This section is an anti-police procedural. We're told that some clue is significant, only to see it go nowhere. Some policemen try to apply more modern methods, and make some progress, only to see it dissipate. If, as I suspect, Bolano intended readers to know the actual murders he's modeled this book on, then we know that ultimately the quest for the killer is futile, sort of the opposite of a Jack-the-Ripper book in which the author wants to show who he thinks the Ripper actually was.

I hope to write more once I've actually finished this novel.