2666

Today I finally finished 2666. I listened to it rather than reading it, and at 40 hours it clocks in as the longest one I've listened to.

The fifth part is about the writer Archimboldi, and mostly concerns his early life, from about 1930 through 1948. Even in those years, it's more about the stories of other people that Archimboldi runs across than about his story per se. Even in this digressive novel, this part is particularly digressive. We have the story of a Russian Jewish writer, the story of a Nazi functionary who's responsible for some 500 Jewish prisoners, the story of a Romanian general, not to mention the stories of Archimboldi's father, sister, and so on. It ends up in Santa Teresa, although before Archimboldi actually arrives, placing it chronologically before part 1. It also forces us to reconsider part 1, where it seems that the critics have actually encountered Archimboldi but didn't realize it. Maybe we should also reconsider parts 3 & 4 now that we know who Klaus Haas is. In short, part 5 brings us full circle, but not as directly as Finnegans Wake or Infinite Jest.

I'm not sure what to think of the novel as a whole. It's a sprawling novel, very undisciplined in some ways. I think it's clear that Moby Dick is one of Bolano's models, in which Melville seems to wander all over the place with all his various essays, and yet is focused around a general theme. And Bolano makes it clear in the novel that he'd rather have an ambitious failure than a successful minor work.

So what's the center of this work? I think it's too easy to say that the Santa Teresa murders are the center. Although they figure into every part to some degree, they're not at all central to the outer two parts, which form, so to speak, the first and last impression of the book. The first and last parts are, in their ways, about the difficulty of really knowing other people. And one can also find that theme in the third part, about Fate. But that's too trite a theme forsuch an ambitious work, and feels too shallow.

Ultimately, I don't think the work has one simple center (although Bolano claimed it does, so what do I know...). I think we can consider each part as a sort of center that the other 4 revolve around, and see the novel in a new light under each configuration. For instance, if we take the part about Amalfitano as the center, we're looking at a novel about the effects of living in an area in which tragedy can strike at any moment, even if one has not yet been personally affected. And we can see echoes of this in the part about Archimboldi, with all its people who've been warped by WWII, in part 3, with its depiction of the African American community in Harlem, and so on. On the other hand, if we take the part about the murders as central, then part 1 can be about how the academics have trivialized these terrible events that are outside of their frame of reference (turning the murders into a bit of barroom trivia). And so on.

Unfortunately, I think that, although there's too much to find in one reading, I don't see myself returning to this novel, the way I have to, say, Ulysses, or plan to with Infinite Jest. It just didn't end up resonating with me on that level.