People throw around the word 'masterpiece' when describing literature all too often. Every time a major author puts out a book, someone is saying it's a 'tour de force,' or a 'masterpiece,' or some other hyperbolic descriptor that should inspire the book patron to plunk down her money. It's rare, however, to come across a book that actually earns (or even approaches) these accolades.
Roberto Bolaño's '2666' is one of the only exceptions to this trend that I've come across over the course of the last decade. It is also not a reading project to be taken lightly. Coming in at 900 pages, '2666' is a complicated, non-linear story that spans approximately 75 years, multiple continents, and about 10 different principle characters whose paths rarely, if ever, actually cross. Despite these complications and tangential narratives, I found this book incredibly satisfying, cerebral and compulsively readable - one of the truly rare reads where even 900 pages were not enough.
'2666' is said to have a 'physical center,' more than a moral center, and if this is the case then that center is certainly the fictional city of Santa Teresa in Mexico, just off the Arizona border. While the book is divided into 5 separate sections (and 5 separate story lines), all roads lead to Santa Teresa, a city in the Sonora desert where a vicious series of unsolved serial killings are unfolding. The full description of these killings and the investigation surrounding them does not take place until nearly 1/3 of the novel has gone by, but they are referred to in significant and tantalizing ways throughout. When we get to the heart of this story line, '2666' really takes off.
Everything I've read about '2666' states that Santa Teresa is a fictional representation of Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city directly across the border from El Paso, Texas, where a similar series of murders are still unsolved - brutal, unexplained killings of mostly young, lower class women, many of them whores or children. The book does not offer to solve these crimes or definitively explain them (the narrative alludes to the drug trade, the snuff film trade, the Mexican underworld and sex trade as the primary ports of interest here), but rather we get an examination of the environment surrounding the murders, the ineptitude of the police and government investigators, brutal passages of description in which paths diverge, cross, and go their separate ways. We meet a clairvoyant woman who claims to see the murders in her mind's eye, a German suspect who is wrongly accused of the crimes and imprisoned indefinitely, the American sheriff who crosses the border investigating the disappearance of one of his own, etcetera and so forth. At the end we are left with a haunting narrative that suggests that not only will these murders go on and on, but that they have effectively served to define the landscape of the city and the country in which they are happening.
As I said, however, there are many other narratives weaving their way throughout this book, which take us all over the world and back. We have four European academics in search of a reclusive German writer under consideration for the Nobel prize (they travel to Santa Teresa to find him), a widowed professor in Santa Teresa slowly losing his mind with worry over his young daughter's safety, an American writer on his first trip to Mexico to cover a boxing match (he winds up fascinated with the murders in Santa Teresa and looking to stay on to cover them), and finally a long chapter explaining the biography of the aforementioned German writer himself.
These stories take us to the Third Reich in Germany, the Eastern Front in WWII, Madrid, Venice, London, and New York, not to mention quite a bit of time spent in Santa Teresa and the surrounding Mexican desert.
If this sounds complicated, I won't lie - it is. But it's a pleasure to read, and I was engrossed from the very first page. Bolaño, who died before this book was published at the age of 50, is a monster talent (his book 'The Savage Detectives' is also excellent), with reserves of style rarely seen in writers of this century. I would compare him to Gabriel Garcia Marquez but with more brutality, and probably more compassion.
Reading '2666' won't leave you with a lot of closure, but it does answer all but the major questions it poses, and in it Bolaño creates a visceral, complex, and absorbing world that, if you're anything like me, you will be very hesitant to leave...
jD
