the 941

Well, folks, I must admit: It’s been a while — 42 days, actually — since my last entry in what I hoped would be a regularly scheduled program of book notes here on The 941. But I have my reasons! I’ve actually been cranking this whole time on Chilean-born author Roberto Bolaño’s 893-pager, 2666, which — although completed before the author’s 2003 death — only came out in an English edition last fall. When it finally did appear in American bookstores, though, 2666 was pretty much universally hailed as a masterpiece, the capstone to Bolaño’s titanic career.

And, well, while I can’t speculate on the novel’s relation to the rest of Bolaño’s oeuvre, I can ring in with my agreement that 2666 is a monster achievement.

The books is (very loosely) organized around a series of vicious killings of women that take place in northern Mexico, murders that are a fictionalized version of very real violence that has haunted the city of Ciudad Juárez over the past decade-plus. But from this grisly core, a number of tales spin out, connecting police detectives, psychiatrists, philosophy professors, literary academics, African-American journalists and on and on, with a series of settings that almost literally spans the globe: We see Mexico, sure, but also Detroit, New York City, Tucson, Turin, London, Madrid, Germany, Romania, western Russia, Venice, Greece and hundreds of other destinations I can’t recall off the top of my head.

What emerges from all this chaos is difficult to sum up. 2666 functions less as a coherently plotted novel with a singular driving purpose, and more as a giant compilation of one-off tales. Minor characters pop up, deliver a 10-page monologue, then disappear very nearly for good. Bolaño constantly keeps us unsettled; we’re never sure what might be a crucial detail later in the plot, or when a small detail is simply being flashed for its innate beauty. It’s a wonderful style, more immediately coherent than that of another author of massive tracts, Thomas Pynchon, but it share’s Pynchon’s dreamlike way with words and images.

I could go on and on, but the appeal is simple: 2666 shows a great author working at the peak of his game. Worth the 42-day wait? In a heartbeat.

Upcoming entries in The 941 Book CL-B

• James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (A 100-page tract on race relations circa 1960, I’ve almost finished this fiery essay already, and should have something up on it later this week. Hopefully.)
• Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah: A Personal Journey Into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System
• Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness
  
• And maybe something from other authors on my to-do shelf: Milan Kundera, Richard Yates, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Henry James and a couple mo’.

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