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.