In a literary landscape thick with aesthetes, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003, at 50, was a true outlaw, a culture glutton whose reference points ranged from Heidegger to Keanu Reeves, and an experimentalist keen to try everything more than once.

Bolaño's reputation outside Hispanic countries was slow to materialise, but it has grown quickly. English translations have been a key factor. With the appearance of Natasha Wimmer's nimble rendering of 2666, we have something like a complete set.

2666 was Bolaño's final book; he was still tinkering with the manuscript when he died and it makes for a mighty send-off. Wading through its 900 pages, one never feels that he could have pushed things further but chose to rein himself in; at every turn, he went for it. The result is a wild, ungoverned book, full of surreal inversions and wistful comedy, the source of countless pleasures. Yet it is also a menacing proposition for readers of average intolerance, exhaustingly playful and tauntingly long, founded on dream sequences and digressions, replete with red herrings and wild geese. The book's fever-ishness can be contagious; symptoms include nausea and déjà vu.

Bolaño had asked for 2666 to be published as five separate books, corresponding to the sections into which it is divi-ded, but his executors chose to disobey him. It was a good decision. Though the book has no plot, its individual sections are umbilically tied, “functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole”, to borrow a winking description of a novel within the book. That sweep is vast, taking in dozens of cities and most of the 20th century, and though Bolaño acknowledges his debt to the epic - a bullfighter is said to have been on an “Homeric bender” - this is far more agitated than the books in that tradition. It is an adventure without a thread, an Odyssey without an Odysseus.

Despite its zeal for travel, the book makes persistent pilgrimage to one setting, Santa Teresa, a city on the US-Mexico border ravaged by drug smuggling, sweated labour, prostitution and a serial killer, or possibly serial killers, laying waste the female population.

Yet it remains alluring. A group of European literary scholars go there in search of an elusive German novelist; a magazine reporter from New York is sent there to cover a boxing match; a Chilean philosophy professor moves there for a new job, and a new life. These are only the most prominent of the dozens of characters who visit or live in the city.

Bolaño's writing is abundant, but also consumed with abundance as a theme. The novel's longest section, The Part about the Killings, takes place in Santa Teresa between 1993 and 1998, a period in which hundreds of female visitors and inhabitants are murdered. Paragraph after paragraph gives the details of a new crime, always delivered in an unruffled reportorial tone. Bolaño's use of this device signals his allegiance, or at least openness, to a kind of postmodern scepticism, not only critiquing novelistic orthodoxy, but also questioning the stability of ideas such as truth and reality, meaning and value. The effect of describing so many murders is to strip each one of its gravity and to make murder itself banal, boring even.

Yet Bolaño is sure not to tick all the boxes on the postmodernist agenda; for instance, he shows none of the postmodernist disdain for the Western canon and the legacy of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, 2666 is a book full of other books, and one powered by a sense of possibility and discovery more commonly associated with children of the 18th century than the 20th. It is rootless and ramshackle like Tristram Shandy; it has Diderot's polymathic zeal (one of Bolaño's previous books was a fake encyclopedia, Nazi Literature in the Americas); and its whole approach seems to have been derived from Goethe's notion of “world literature”. The difference is that Goethe conceived “world literature” as a way of thinking about all books, whereas Bolaño, with his mixture of dynamism and overreach, managed to achieve it in a single novel.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
Picador, £20; 912ppm Buy the book

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