Can a novel change your life? Can it indeed! One third of the way through Roberto Bolano’s final, posthumously released, 898-page novel, I scribbled down: ‘2666 has changed my life.’ What on earth did I mean? I’m still puzzling over those five words (and the puzzle feels increasingly meaningful) but I think I was exulting in the superlative quality of Bolano’s writing. If writing can be this sublime, surely heaven is on earth!
2666 comprises five interlinked parts: four geeky academics seek the subject of their scholarship, the obscure and reclusive writer Benno von Archimboldi; a Mexican philosophy professor disintegrates; a New York journalist comes to Santa Teresa (an imagined Mexican city) to cover a boxing event; Santa Teresa detectives spend years trying to catch a killer of hundreds of women; and a World War II refugee travels far. I’ve deliberately been coy about the plot elements, for each of the five parts is in fact overwhelmingly complex, packed with characters and connections and places and ideas. Bolano never hesitates to dart sideways for long digressions, never makes any concession to the minds of his readers. Such is his consummate skill that the reader relishes every new twist, every new layer.
Bolano fuses many different styles, incorporating at different times noir, magic realism, post-modern complexity, satire . . . you name it, it crops up. Yet all is seamless and the whole makes up the wonder of Roberto Bolano. Every page is dense with marvellously concrete description, allusions, rawness and lyricism. Sometimes when I completed a page, I’d sit back and nearly cry: how did he do it?
Ask any two readers of 2666 and you’ll get different verdicts on the best of the five sections. For my money, the short third section is the one that has stayed with me – the growing dread evoked is seemingly permanent. But no, what about the gorgeous yet respectful skewering of the randy geeks in the first section? And who can forget the Santa Teresa detectives, dealing with a horror too great to bear? And . . . and so on. All I can say is: if you wish to read one masterpiece by a truly remarkable novelist this year, grab 2666.