You wouldn’t have wanted Roberto Bolano in your book club. Indeed, most bibliophiles would wince with shame and recoil in horror at the novelist’s extra-literary habitudes. Bolano would thieve books from libraries the same way graffiti artists in the 70’s would rack paint from hardware stores in New York. He and his company – a group of writers and poets who called themselves Los Infrarealistas, The Infrarealists – had the South American literary establishment firmly in between the crosshairs. To them, the hallowed and beloved – Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz in particular – were just gristly strips off the great spinning rack, lacking in meat or flavour, boxed and garnished in all the right ways.
Poetry recitals and readings were routinely interrupted my one or more of the group, who preached something akin to a Beat manifesto (an Infrarealist Manifesto, incidentally, very much exists. It is written by Bolano and imploringly titled ‘Leave Everything Behind, Again’). Attendees at such events were heckled and jeered (it is thought that Paz once had wine poured over him), and then invited to join the movement, to give up everything, to hit the asphalt. For much of his adult life, Bolano did just that. He took menial jobs and wrote in his spare time. He allegedly developed a heroin habit, something he’d kicked before his death in 2003 (but which may well have been a contributing factor to his liver failure). In the 70’s, he returned to his homeland of Chile in support of the socialist cause, and became one of the many interned and few to survive after Pinochet’s coup (incredibly, two guards were old school friends and sprung him form the cells). In essence, Bolano’s life has become the stuff of legend, and his final work, a monster epic, has anchored this myth with a golden sinker.
In an early passage of 2666 – the enigmatic title of Bolano’s last novel – one of the book’s protagonists remarks gloomily how modern readers are ‘afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown’. Clocking in at 898 pages, 2666 is one such work. It is decidedly hard to locate a single epicentre for the novel’s vast concerns, prised apart as it is into five sections of quite unequal length. Feasibly, some traction could be gained by focussing on the figure of Archimboldi, a spectral character who haunts the pages until the last section (titled, in a rare moment of clarity, ‘The Part About Archimboldi’), where he appears in a kind of bathetic maelstrom: poetic, melancholy, a drifter. An admired novelist and possible contender for the Nobel Prize, Archimboldi has a loyal following of fans and academics, all keen to meet the man in person and suspicious of anybody who claims to know too much about him.
The novel’s first part, ‘The Part About the Critics’, closes in on the interrelationships between four of these scholars. Some of the connections established here echo and reverberate through the rest of the book, serving as platforms for fresh stories, anecdotes and associations. Others, typical of Bolano’s style, are abandoned. Sentences are caught in the rush of a gusty, sprawling narrative, and are swept away. Meaning gets snagged in doubt, daydream or another story, which takes us somewhere else and makes us question the relevance of the original utterance. Just as the critics struggle to pin Archimboldi, the novel invites us into a world which is always just out of our conceptual grasp. Fate and fiction seem equally able to propel events, and the subconscious and cerebral play uneasily with incident and exchange, creating interactions that veer from poetry to porn, splitting genres and upending the very notion of expectation.
A second plausible epicentre for the novels meanderings – though more like a crusty, phlegm spattered plug at the bottom of a filthy sink, swallowing up rather than disgorging narrative shockwaves – is the pseudo-fictional town of San Teresa. Situated near the US border, the community of San Teresa is tightly bound to nearby maquiladoras (Mexican manufacturing facilities, typically making products for distribution in the US). It is a location of rust and wear, prostitution and dust. It is also a crucible of slaughter.
The experience of reading the novel’s fourth section, ‘The Part About The Crimes’, is one of the most extraordinary you will ever encounter in the pages of a book. Narrative practically expires, unable to ground itself amidst the deluge of rape, mutilation and execution that flows on for three hundred pages. Women are being pulped in San Teresa at a rate that seems likely to overtake supply. Indeed, the pace and scale of execution mirrors grotesquely the physical and material grind of the nearby factories. It comes as no surprise that these churning warehouses provide much of the fodder for the gleeful spree of San Teresa’s anonymous killers. In the end you lose count of numbers, identities, stories. This is a whirlwind town that gulps up the unknown and coughs them out unsparingly. There are enough sparse and arid city spaces to hold many more bodies, and when the price of life becomes – quite literally – this low, there are always more to come. Admittedly, watching the gruesome fusillade makes for tough reading. The novel quite suddenly halts, and becomes a record, a grisly list. Lovers of narrative development might start to choke and splutter here, but there’s no denying the force of this assault.
What more to say? This is a novel whose title carries with it the stench of apocalypse, and then gives no indication as to what this date (assuming it is one) entails. It’s a work which jumps from London to Mexico to Nazi Germany, develops multiple principle characters and is packed full of dead-ends as well as dead bodies. It is a story that manages, despite vastness and fragmentation, to knot a great deal of disparate plots and places together in a remarkably satisfying conclusion. It’s a book which bothers you, and which sits perched on your shelf like a monstrous, hulking owl – prophetic, poetic, anarchic. Leave Everything Behind, Bolano said, and absorb.
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