Roberto Bolaño once said that he would rather have been a detective than a
writer – not a humdrum gumshoe but an avenging angel, “someone able to
return alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of
ghosts”. Like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he was a disillusioned
romantic with a passion for exposing evil and fortifying hope. It is true
that Bolaño would have scoffed at the notion that he was untarnished or
unafraid, but he admired courage, and often displayed it in a short life
spent largely in the mean streets of Latin America and Europe. He viewed art
as a forensic tool, using it to transfix and then transfigure the void he
detected at the heart of existence. As a young Chilean poet in the 1970s, he
challenged dictators, death squads and writers whom he claimed were fellow
travellers or simply frauds. Defeat and loss were ever-present realities for
him; he had memories of friends murdered by the Pinochet regime, and was for
some time aware of his own imminent demise (he died of liver disease at the
age of fifty in 2003). He confronted these and other horrors with a youthful
insouciance tempered by hard-won wisdom. One of the poems collected in The
Romantic Dogs is set in a hospital, and Laura Healy’s idiomatic translation
renders Bolaño’s strategy for survival: “But experience is a hoax. / In the
hospital I’m accompanied only by / My deliberate immaturity / And splendors
glimpsed on another planet / Or in another life”. The young detectives who
wage existential battles in his spare, colloquial poems are rarely given the
opportunity to mature. Despite their best efforts to “keep their eyes open /
In the middle of the dream”, they end up “lost”, “frozen” and “crushed”.
Perhaps they would have had better luck solving the mysteries spurred by the
English translation of his epic novel 2666 (which was published in Spain in
2005 and reviewed in the TLS of September 9 that year). There was an
outburst of what The Economist called “Bolañomania” when the book appeared
in the United States last November: eager buyers queued outside bookshops,
and the American press lavished more attention on this deceased writer and
his translated novel than they normally accord to living authors who write
in English.
But this mystery is relatively simple to solve – even Bolaño’s ill-starred
detectives could crack it. The English translation of 2666 was eagerly
awaited by readers and critics who had been impressed by Bolaño’s previous
autobiographical novel The Savage Detectives, which had been masterfully
translated by Natasha Wimmer in 2007. The author’s exuberant, informal voice
echoed that of several American classics; while he cited Huckleberry Finn as
an inspiration, the book clearly bore the imprint of On the Road and The
Catcher in the Rye. In addition, many of his themes resonated with the
puritan and romantic impulses of the American literary tradition. Bolaño’s
world is open to self-invention and redemption, but also pervaded by
ineradicable evil. It is bracingly egalitarian in its range of cultural
references: The Savage Detectives borrows from the science fiction writer
Theodore Sturgeon as well as from Mark Twain; 2666 references both Herman
Melville and David Lynch; figures in his poems include Anacreon, Juan Ramón
Jiménez, Sam Peckinpah and Godzilla. Readers of all tastes could thus feel
at ease with this disquieting writer, and many sought his other translated
works. In some of them, he planted tantalizing references to the year 2666.
In Amulet (1999), the apocalyptic date is associated with death and willed
amnesia when it is invoked to describe a deserted Mexico City street of the
early 1970s. It was like
a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse
or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried
so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting
everything else.
And at the end of The Savage Detectives, a poet, in refusing to forget crimes,
actually anticipates them, sketching menacing visions of a factory from
“sometime around 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something”. (2666’s most
horrifying crimes occur in a factory city.) To the newly Bolaño-besotted, it
seemed likely that the earlier works were fragments of a larger whole, with
2666 as its capstone. After all, Bolaño himself declared the book to be his
masterpiece and knew it to be his final testament: its narrator insists that
“The words of the diseased . . . carry more weight than those of the healthy
. . . . Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to
bite but really only snap at the air”. (Bolaño-mania may owe something to
his appeal as the James Dean of literature, living fast, dying young, and
leaving a beautiful corpus.)
The ominous title raises a second mystery, for the book is not literally about
the future, let alone the year 2666. In this remarkable and challenging work
Bolaño intends the distant Judgement Day to evoke an apocalypse now. While
the novel’s events span the globe and cover the past century, the plot
converges on the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the
Mexican metropolis of Santa Teresa since the early 1990s. Bolaño based his
fictional locale and scenario on Ciudad Juárez in northern Mexico, where
over 400 women, many of them migrant factory workers, have been murdered or
have disappeared. Few of these cases have been closed: the victims are
mainly those marginalized by globalization, the likely perpetrators those
able to exploit it, including drug lords and corrupt officials. For Bolaño,
the city represents a microcosm of contemporary ills. As a character in the
novel muses, “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the
world is hidden in them”.
If a partial answer to the second mystery – “what is 2666 about?” – concerns
the problem of evil, Bolaño adds to the topic’s complexity by structuring
the novel around five distinct parts that seem only tangentially related.
Certainly 2666 revels in life’s ambiguities. “Behind every indisputable
answer lies an even more complex question”, reflects a pivotal character.
“Complexity, however, makes him laugh.” (Natasha Wimmer once again smoothly
conveys Bolaño’s polyphonic approach – and his humour.) But as in his
previous works, Bolaño embeds clues that help decipher the work’s underlying
structure and central theme. One of these is a geometry book that turns out
to be made up of three books, “each independent, but functionally correlated
by the sweep of the whole”. The five parts of 2666 work in similar fashion;
while each operates autonomously, they contain common references and issues
that become clearer as the novel unfolds. Another clue emerges when a
character is inspired to hang the textbook on a clothesline to see what
happens when abstract theory collides with messy reality, art with the chaos
of existence. This conflict is a fundamental theme in Bolaño’s work. Can
individuals confront evil, from the banal to the malignant, without
retreating into comforting illusion or nihilistic collusion?
Even as the novel exudes the improvisatory nature of lived experience, Bolaño
eases the reader towards the void represented by the murders in Santa
Teresa. Quirky, vibrantly etched characters undergo crises that resonate
with the darkness at the heart of the novel. In Part One, four European
literary critics – three men and a woman – come together to search for a
mysteriously reclusive writer, Benno von Archimboldi. Their quest takes them
to Santa Teresa, where he was last seen, but his importance fades, as the
men find themselves competing for the affections of their female colleague.
The petty displays of machismo and misogyny among the suitors foreshadow the
horrors to come. In Santa Teresa, they meet another “Archimboldian”,
Professor Amalfitano, whose gradual nervous breakdown is the focus of Part
Two. An exile from Chile, Amalfitano feels unmoored in the formless city, is
terrified of losing his daughter to the growing toll of murders, and worries
about his own desires. He tries to find stability in the tidy systems of
mathematics and philosophy, but without success. His inability to confront
directly and act on his fears – the wrong orientation by Bolaño’s moral
compass – results in his daughter’s becoming ensnared with the drug
traffickers who might be involved with the killings. This is the focus of
Part Three, narrated from the perspective of an African-American journalist
who comes to her aid, and written as a tribute to the noir novelists whom
Bolaño loved. Part Four, the longest section, is devoted to the serial
killings themselves. Many are described with such appalling precision that
it is difficult not to become desensitized; this is perhaps the author’s way
of making even the reader feel complicit in the crimes.
Following these harrowing passages, Bolaño concludes with the life story of
the mythic author Archimboldi and his fateful arrival in Santa Teresa. Here
the many related strands of the earlier parts fall into place. Archimboldi,
who had nearly been swallowed by the abyss during the Second World War,
emerges with the courage to challenge it. Bolaño indicated that there was a
“hidden center” to 2666; readers will undoubtedly find many possible
candidates in its 900 pages. It is significant, however, that Archimboldi
discovers his own centre in a young Russian poet and political martyr, Boris
Ansky. Like the figure in Bolaño’s hospital poem who lives in “deliberate
immaturity”, we discover that “Ansky lived his whole life in rabid
immaturity because the revolution, the one true revolution, is also
immature”. He insists that reality could be pure desire, “a desire that in
time not only supplants reality but is imposed upon it”. His elders dismiss
this as naive; one says that over her lifetime she has seen too much to
believe it. Ansky responds that belief is irrelevant: “it has to do with
understanding, and then changing”. This was Bolaño’s stubborn credo as well.
Perhaps, he reflects in the poem “The Donkey”,
That is the unrestrained longing of our ignorance,
But that is also our hope
And our courage.
Roberto Bolaño
2666
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
898pp. Picador. £20.
978 0 330 44742 3
THE ROMANTIC DOGS
Translated by Laura Healy
143pp. New Directions. $15.95.
978 0 8112 1801 6
Michael Saler is the author of The Avant-Garde in Interwar England,
1999. The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular magic in a rational age,
co-edited with Joshua Landy, is forthcoming.
