THIS IS THE fifth Bolaño novel I have read, and the first I would hesitate to recommend. I started it two years ago and just finished it, mainly because Part 4 was a labor for me.
Four of the five parts of 2666 are swift reads embodying Bolaño's characteristic virtues.
In "The Part about the Critics," we meet three scholar-devotees (one French, one Italian, one Spanish) of the legendary and reclusive German author Benno von Archimboldi. The three of them perform a tangled but comical erotic minuet around a fourth scholar-devotee, an American woman, before showing up at a conference in Santa Teresa, Mexico, where, it is rumored, Archimboldi himself may appear.
In "The Part about Amalfitano," we meet one of the organizers of the conference, an Italian academic who has landed in Santa Teresa. His chief concern at the moment, though, is his teenaged daughter Rosa, who is hanging out with dubious new acquaintances.
The the third section, "The Part about Fate," is not about fate in the abstract sense, but about Oscar Fate, an American journalist. He has been sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, in the course of which assignment he accidentally stumbles across some of the town's organized crime underworld and helps get Rosa Amalfitano disentangled from it.
In the fifth section, "The Part about Archimboldi," we get the story of the legendary and reclusive German novelist to whom the critics of the first section have devoted their careers, a veteran of the Eastern Front who has detached himself from his past and from society in general to devote himself to his writing. Near the end of the section--that is, near the end of the book--we learn why he has agreed to travel to Santa Teresa.
Throughout these sections, we get the usual pleasures of the Bolañesque: deft portraiture of specialized sub-cultures (the depiction of the academics in Part 1 rivals those of the young poets' coterie in Savage Detectives and the Catholic reactionaries in By Night in Chile); skillful, knowing deployment of noir conventions (esp. in Part 3); wizardry in folding backstories into the main story (esp. in Part 5).
My problem is basically with Part 4, "The Part about the Crimes." Santa Teresa is largely based on Juarez during the years when scores of young women were being murdered. Part 4--all 280 pages of it--is about those murders. Roughly every other page, the novel describes the finding of another dead young woman, usually with explicit detail. I don't want to try counting them, but there must be at least a hundred such passages. The efforts of journalists, politicians, police, and outside "experts" to solve the murders get some attention, Part 4 is mainly a catalog of violation, mutilation, and murder. It's a gallery of horrors.
How does all this fit together, if it does? I wonder how finished it really is--it was published posthumously, written while Bolaño knew he was dying. Perhaps something about a core of misogyny in authoritarianism was supposed to hold the book together? But Part 4 was a long trek through the desert that I'm not sure was worth the effort.
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