2666 - The Part about Archimboldi

5. The Part about Archimboldi

(Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4)

I don't remember for sure when I finished 2666. Close to two weeks ago. Why have I waited so long to write about it? Not sure. Maybe because this was my "January project" so it seemed appropriate to finish it at the end of the month.

Anyway, if the part about the critics was my favorite, and the part about the crimes was the "best," I would have to say that this section was the one where I was most likely to get lost in the story, where I thought the least about Bolaño and his intentions. It made the last third of the book a nice juxtaposition to the first two-thirds.

I don't want to say a lot about the section. If you're reading this, and actually ever read 2666, I want you to get to discover it on your own. But it's about Hans Reiter, an unusual youth from a German village who fights in WWII and then sets off on a different path in postwar Germany. I felt that Reiter remained a cipher; I never understood him, which is unusual when you spend so many pages with a character. But I didn't mind that I didn't know him.

I wrote about agency a while back (in relation to Oscar Fate) and think that it's a theme that deserves a lot more attention with regards to the entire novel. Reiter seems sometimes very much an actor who is creating his own destiny, and at other times entirely passive, getting swept along by other currents. (This is true for many of the other recurring characters in this section. In fact, I would read a novel just about Baroness von Zumpe.) I guess this is probably the way life really works. But I felt it particularly strongly in this novel, perhaps because we don't necessarily see it a lot in fiction.

Some - not many, but some - loose ends get tied up in this section. Enough that when the last page came around, I felt satisfied. Which is about all you can ask for.

And I was curious about this quote, by an old man who rents out his typewriter:
"Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty."
True? I doubt it. But intriguing all the same.

It strikes me as cowardly to not attempt some final analysis of the entire work. But I don't think I have it in me. I will simply say this: Bolaño creates an entire world, where several stories that only barely interact can co-exist. For all the strangeness and feelings of unreality I experienced while reading the book, this feels, at its heart, extraordinarily real.

2666 - The Part about the Crimes

4. The Part about the Crimes

(Parts 1, 2, & 3)

Wow. ...just, wow.

Here's the section about the murders of the women in Santa Teresa. It's about 280 pages long, and when it starts with about 10 pages of murders starting in 1993, you wonder if this is what Bolaño has in store for you: an individual accounting of each woman killed in Santa Teresa. If that's all he had done, it would have been tremendous, and a statement, a reminder when you're talking about hundreds and thousands of killings that each one is its own story too. But no, interspersed is the reaction by the authorities and others. So we learn about a few detectives and policemen, an arts reporter from Mexico City who starts covering the murders, and a bunch of other people, including the suspect who gets nabbed as the serial killer, even as the murders continue while he is in prison.

It's along the way that you start to wonder if you missed something and should have been paying more attention during the previous sections. Were there clues left for you? Did you miss it? (Or maybe you aren't wondering, because perhaps you actually caught it, unlike me.) Or are they red herrings?

Also, to revisit a point above. What comes out of reading is the realization that there isn't a single killer or band of killers. It's that somehow, for whatever reason, in Santa Teresa there has arisen a climate in which the killing of women has grown essentially permissible. They become statistics, to paraphrase a great mass murderer. It becomes an indictment of something much larger than it seems.

But typing these thoughts, muddled as they are, I feel that they are sort of trite. They don't do the section justice. Trust me.

And the fun quote of the section, referring to a medical examiner:

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?

2666 - The Part about Fate

3. The Part about Fate

(Parts 1 and 2)

So you might, like me, see the title and think this section is about fate. It might be. It's possible, but I didn't see it. Instead, it's about Oscar Fate, the nom de plume for Quincy Williams, writer at a Harlem black-interest magazine. Fate ends up in Santa Teresa when the magazine's sportswriter dies, leaving no one to cover a big boxing match coming up in the border town. Not being a sportswriter himself, he finds himself drawn to the murders (I haven't mentioned those yet, have I? Oops, well, women are dying. More coming later.) and also to Rosa Amalfitano, who is involved with a guy who is definitely shady, and possibly far more dangerous than the word shady implies.

This is another section that I just sort of let happen to me. I look back, and it I guess I feel like I experienced the section the way I imagine Fate lived through it. Things just sort of happen to and around him. This isn't entirely to deny him agency, but I don't feel like he's very strong. (This is probably where I could make an argument about the name Fate, but honestly, I'm just not in the mood.)

Of all the sections, this is the one I think I'd most like to re-read at the end, the one where I think there are missing pieces and clues that I missed. The one where Bolaño hands out loose ends, and gives you the opportunity to tie them up for yourself, or at least create a few knots somewhere.

(Also, sooooo pleased about the Group Read coming soon, and all the things that will be made clear to me, and the mysteries that will be raised, ones that I completely missed when reading by myself.)

2666 - The Part about Amalfitano

2. The Part about Amalfitano

(read about Part 1 here)

Weighing in at under 70 pages in my paperback volume, this is easily the shortest section of the five. It may also be the one where I had the most trouble staying engaged. In part this is because I was feeling a little sad about leaving my critics. And I kind of wanted them to reappear - to see what was happening to them through the lens of Amalfitano. After all, we had already met him in the last section, as the man assigned to usher the critics through Santa Teresa as they search for Archimboldi.

But here we get Amalfitano on his own, some years (how many????) earlier, mostly soon after he moves to Santa Teresa. This timeline issue made me crazy, and it's probably my own fault. In some sections, I know when I'm at, Bolaño uses dates. In this one, I didn't catch them, nor did I catch clues in other sections that might have tipped me off. What I do know: the critics aren't here yet, but the Juarez-esque murders have already begun, enough to worry Amalfitano. Which reminds me....

Who is Amalfitano? I don't have a good answer to this question either. He is Chilean, a professor, a single father to Rosa, who possesses a Spanish passport. He seems to have a really shaky grasp on sanity. He's also sufficiently unremarkable - for this reader at any rate - that I was left with simply a feeling of "well, that was weird," enough so that I had to flip back through the section just to try to remember what happened.

I made a note while reading of the observation that "madness is contagious," which appears fairly early in the section and seems as good a summation as any. But I also loved this passage, a flashback, where Amalfitano's Italian father marvels at his young son:

His father was silent then, looking at his son with frank admiration and pride, as if asking himself where the hell the kid had come from, and then he was silent for a while longer and afterward said in a low voice, as if telling a secret, that Italians were brave individually. In large numbers, he admitted, they were hopeless. And this, he explained, was precisely what gave a person hope.

2666 - The Part about the Critics

2666 - Roberto Bolaño (Picador, 2009)

The date is a little misleading. Bolaño was by all accounts still working on 2666 when he died in 2003. He instructed his heirs to publish the work in five separate volumes, most likely to maximize income. But, as they explain in a foreword, they chose "to reverse Roberto's decision and publish 2666 first in full, in a single volume, as he would have done had his illness not taken the gravest course." This volume first appeared in 2004, and the English translation in 2008. At that point, from what I remember, Bolaño was huge in the American literary world, and it seemed everyone was reading him and proclaiming him among the best authors of our time. (I, iconoclast as always, said hmph, and read only a short story that appeared in the New Yorker around that time.)

But then Infinite Summer happened and I gained some appreciation for long, unwieldy books, and reading them at the same time as a bunch of other people who had interesting and witty things to say about them online. So when it appeared that the site would tackle 2666 at the start of 2010, I bought my copy. And even when the site appeared to flag, and the group read disappeared, I was ready to go. So go I did. But now, it appears there will be a group read after all. This is (obviously) good news. But I had already started reading. I was more than 100 pages in. I wanted to finish before school started again. So I'll be done before the group read starts, and will "re-read" the novel through the blog.

But I digress. Each of the 5 parts, while circling around the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (supposedly - I am waiting for Part 5 to get there) could conceivably stand alone. And to keep from another "wow, this book is too big to say anything coherent about" wrap-up post, I'm going to write separately on each. So....

1. The Part about the Critics

This may prove to be my favorite section of the whole. Certainly it provided more narrative cohesiveness, and I felt more clearly connected to the characters. Oh, the characters. Well, there are four. Five, if you count Archimboldi. All four are scholars of the reclusive German author: one a Frenchman, another Spanish, a third Italian. The fourth is female, English, a bit younger. So of course they are all in love with her.

In short short short sections, we meet the scholars, learn how Archimboldi affected them, shaped their academic worlds. We follow their interactions, across countries, mostly at academic conferences. We trace some of the scholarly debate over the author, and how the mystery of his identity drives them all a little mad. We watch them navigate minefields of sex and love and friendship. And eventually, three end up in Mexico, following a lead that may eventually guide them to Archimboldi.

Does this oversimplify things? Certainly. And it doesn't even begin to get at the prose style, complex in both vocabulary and ideas. But not uniformly so, and not in a way that you miss the main points. Whether or not you miss lesser points... well, I'm sure you do. I'm sure I did.