2666 pt.1

So I picked up 2666 by Roberto Bolano about a month ago and now being about halfway through it I figured I'd share some of my thoughts on the book. As if the reviews haven't already been glowing enough, I figured I'd throw my gauntlet into the ring if for no other reason than to shed light on some of the finer points I've stumbled across in the first half of the massive novel. This will be posted in multiple pieces.

The novel revolves around the true story of the rape and murder of 300-400 women in the Ciudad Juarez region of Mexico (referred to as Santa Teresa in the novel), though it grows in scope by adopting worldly and multicultural vantage points. Divided into five seperate books, we are given a glimpse of how the murders affect people stemming from disparate social, academic, moral and cultural backgrounds, which soon effaces itself as the central aspect of the novel. We are first introduced to a small group of European intellectuals, who are united under a fondness for the elusive author Benno von Archimboldi and who eventually are drawn to Mexico and Santa Teresa in their search for him. Maybe the strangest of all the things I've noticed about the novel thus far is the fact that during this first book, Bolano adopts a sort of undertone of latent disapproval and a very faint reading of contempt for these academic types. He explores the supposed open relationship between three of the academics (two male, one female), but no matter how rationally and learned they sound in trying to justify their open relationship and make it work, it fails on account of petty emotions. Perhaps this is the first instance we see of Bolano trying to tell his readers that there are animalistic aspects of our being which cannot be exorcized.

When the intellectuals try and do anything, its always very drab and calculated. They fly back and forth between various residences in Europe, they attend conferences and give lectures, but for all the yearning they have for the exciting life they read about in books, they never get too close to excitement themselves. Once they finally reach Mexico, we're left watching them sit at various coffee shops hearing about the murders but never getting too close to the actual epidemic. All this left me with a feeling that for all their self-imposed worth in the world, the intellectuals were just as vapid and succeptable to basic human emotions and desires as anyone else. Because of the environment they choose to enmesh themselves in, the academics are unaccustomed to both violence and the lifestyles of the rural third world, leaving them and the skills they've harnessed in life almost entirely useless.

Throughout this (and every other) portion, Bolano does a masterful job of writing an accesible, compelling narrative that draws in what he wants but rarely becomes boring or tedious. The reader is drawn into a European lifestyle which is glamorous at first, but in the end (or perhaps out of its context) proves to be fairly boring and dripping with timidity.

More to come later.