Size Matters

Roberto Bolaño's long-winded last novel stares down the face of death.

by Matt Jakubowski

Fiction review

Roberto Bolaño

Last year, the English translation of The Savage Detectives earned late Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño a host of new fans. At 577 pages, it also tired a few of them out.

Even supercritic James Wood called the novel "long," while praising its musical control and precision in his New York Times review.

The good news for Bolaño fans is that the new translation of his curiously titled 2666 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is available Nov. 11. The daunting news is that it's as thick as a Bible.

But those who take on the 912-page novel will not regret it. The stunning talent, humor and inventiveness on display in 2666 is more proof that when Bolaño died in 2003 at age 50, the world lost not just a great Latin American writer, but perhaps one of its greatest writers, period.

One of Bolaño's great strengths in 2666 is that he avoids emotional gimmicks. He writes like an anthropologist: An amusing sex scene or a person's admiration for the beauty of seaweed is described in an objective, controlled voice that seems to appreciate all human behavior. The rigor of this technique allows Bolaño to create a novel that is as intricate and trustworthy as the aluminum and carbon-fiber body of a 747.

His expansive five-part plot revolves around the dark recent history of a Mexican border town, Santa Teresa, based on a real place called Ciudad Juárez, near El Paso, Texas. (Since 1993, more than 450 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez, many of whom have also been kidnapped, raped and mutilated, their bodies dumped in the desert, their killer or killers never found. The women, who hoped to cross the border and escape poverty, were mostly workers at local sweatshops. The police blame the carnage on drug traffickers, serial killers, love gone bad — yet the killings continue today.)

Bolaño places his main characters in Santa Teresa — with the exception of a reclusive German writer named Archimboldi, whose story remains a mystery till the novel's final section — and lets the town's underlying chaos reflect each person's hidden pain and fear.

Three European literary scholars visit Santa Teresa in search of the mysterious Archimboldi and end up drifting apart. A lovesick Chilean professor slowly goes crazy. A reporter from Harlem arrives to cover a boxing match for a black power magazine and discovers that macho heroism runs alongside homicidal impulse. To this point in the novel, Bolaño has written around the murders and what they mean, hinting at how the absence of the dead establishes their lasting presence.

In a narrative turn, Bolaño unveils a harrowing chronicle of four years of killings, standing the reader over the bodies, cataloguing their height, weight, clothing, wounds and state of decomposition, never breaking away from his signature stoic, objective point of view.

Bolaño implies, without preaching, that the killings are a symptom of our times, yet they have historical precedent. A minor character hints at this theme with the comment that Santa Teresa's residents are living "outside of society" like "the ancient Christians in the Roman circus."

It's a throwaway line. But before the focus of the book leaves Santa Teresa, Bolaño has shown that women there are being killed as if for sport, then replaced by other people desperate to find work in the town's factories. So it seems, history is repeating itself, like an echo of mankind's capacity for atrocity.

Bolaño knew he was dying of liver disease when he finished 2666. So, is Archimboldi, the tough old German writer whose fate is shrouded in mystery till the very end, really Bolaño in disguise? Some things are better left unsolved.

(m_jakubowski@citypaper.net)