Roberto Bolano, 2666 ** 1/2

Roberto Bolano is a very talented writer who deserves all of the critical attention he has received since The Savage Detectives was translated into English. As it says on the back cover, "With 2666, Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel...deploying encyclopediac knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it." In other words, 2666 is akin to Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, or the recently reviewed Life: A User's Guide, and as with these other masterworks, I found more to admire than to love in 2666. I often found myself slogging through its 893 pages.

The book is divided into five major sections, linked by common characters, locales, and motifs. The best, and longest, and arguably the most draining section is the fourth, which concerns a decade-long series of killings in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa. The shared theme of all five sections — and of The Savage Detectives, if I think back to it — seemed to be how people organize their lives around absences: the absent author Archimboldi, the absent wife of Amalfitano, and so on. There are also multiple artists confined to mental institutions, suggesting a message about the role of the artist.

For me, Bolano's best feature as a writer is his way with sensory metaphors. For example:

They dug up the barbecue, and a smell of meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder, and vanished mysteriously as the women carried the plates to the table, leaving clothing and skin impregnated with its aroma. (p 130)

 When the visitors returned to the surface... they were divided into two groups: those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naivete of the human race. (p 680)