The Review of Contemporary Fiction

2666, by Roberto Bolaño
Reviewed by James Crossley

Trans. Natasha Wimmer. FSG, 2008. 898 pp. Cloth: $30.00.

Spanish writer Javier Cercas, a contemporary of Roberto Bolaño, once described an overly adulatory critic: “[H]e more or less said there was an immense gulf in universal literature between me and Cervantes.” That kind of reaction is only a slight exaggeration of the well-deserved response 2666 has enjoyed from the international critical community. It’s already taken a place among “the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown,” an extremely dark, violent, confrontational book that “struggle[s] against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench,” as a much-cited self-descriptive passage from the novel puts it. It’s an allusive and literary book strongly concerned with the role and function of art, but it’s also deeply engaged with the mundane world, from global politics to the smallest domestic detail. Bolaño is occasionally lyrical but more frequently direct, demonstrating a facility with styles and tones from broad comedy to blackest despair. The five discrete sections that make up 2666 could stand as novels in their own right, twists on different genres from academic satire to clinical police procedural to bildungsroman. Each chapter is itself a tantalizing buildup toward an unrealized revelation, and the collective narrative, tied together by minor plot threads and larger thematic concerns, eventually circles back to where it started. Seeking a fuller exegesis of the complexities on offer will be more than worth your time, but in this brief overview I’ll mention just one interesting effect of this structure. It creates an almost suspenseful narrative movement, not forward with time’s arrow but along a downward spiral toward the abyss at the center of the novel, the cloaca that is the fictionalized city of Santa Teresa, around which all the characters revolve and from which all the world’s evil threatens to emerge. The underlying horror at the heart of the book remains a suggestion rather than a clear manifestation, however. The unsettling sensation produced by continual approach without arrival is evocative of the Shepard scale, an auditory illusion involving overlapping scales that appear to rise endlessly in pitch without actually getting any higher. It’s the sound of Munch’s infinite scream, the whine of the plummeting rocket above Pynchon’s theater that hasn’t quite hit us when the last page turns. You’ll be amply rewarded if you listen closely to it.