I read for beauty and spectacle rather than meanings and messages. (It always feels good to get that out in the open asap so there’ll be no misunderstandings.) I read for the pleasure of words and word arrangement rather than the pleasure of a good yarn or believable characters. It puts me in the position of approaching his work ready – no, eager! – to be the boy who shouts “The emperor has no clothes!” Obviously, this isn’t the ideal vantage point from which to begin reading a book.Ĭouple that with my personal affinity for what Gary Lutz calls “a page hugger” versus “a page turner,” which I take to mean a novel that values sentences over stories, and all of a sudden the cards begin to stack up against me reacting positively to 2666. I’m only halfway kidding, but even so I find the perceived level of unanimity seriously uncomfortable. In fact, to my knowledge no critic has ever said anything negative about Bolaño’s work in any venue, be it digital, print, or conversation. “Oh my god, have you read 2666? Oh my god, it’s the greatest book ever written!” “Oh my god, have you read The Savage Detectives? Oh my god it’s the greatest book ever written!” One looks left, one looks right, and all one sees is a wash of superlatives: brilliant, genius, spellbinder, etc. Critic after critic hails him as the savior of literature.
First, I must admit I have until now avoided Bolaño’s work with ferocity because I am skeptical of trends-and Roberto Bolaño is the epitome of literary trendiness. Let me begin by establishing some context. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission-to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium-that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve.(All references are to the First Picador Edition, 2009, trans. 2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize-and why Natasha Wimmer’s lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant. It is in Bolaño’s allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his character’s frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches-above all, in the dark insights of Benno von Archimboldi, who finally takes center stage in the book’s fifth section-that the real story of 2666 gets told. That is why so much of the activity of 2666 takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor. Time and again, Bolaño hints, without ever quite saying, that what is happening in Santa Teresa is a symptom of a universal derangement in which hidden dimensions of reality are coming horribly to light.
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