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This read tried my patience at first but eventually hooked me. It’s got the power to change the way you look at life and possibly make you a better human. For anyone considering reading the book, the challenge of its length and content calls for a significant basis to make the decision. Hence the unfortunate length of this review.

There are so many plot elements, diversions, and ideas in this book that it felt like drinking from a firehose. And, boy, did it quench my thirst. Bolaño doesn’t preach, but there is a pervasive moral inquiry throughout related to what it is people can and should do about evil in this world. The main evil is epitomized by a large number of murders and rapes of women in the fictional town of Santa Teresa in northern Mexico, which is modeled after a real epidemic in Juarez starting around 1993. The overall theme for me is writer as avatar. How it is that they are expected to make sense of life for us and reveal how to live. Is this role we hand them, Bolaño included, reasonable or absurd?

The first section of the book leads us to this city by a strange route. Four scholars specializing in the work of a modern German novelist, Archimboldi, each from a different country, forge a friendship and engage in a game-like quest to find the extremely reclusive man. The presumption is that gaining information about his personal life can elucidate their interpretations of his work. They are led to his last sighting in Santa Teresa, where they (and we the reader) first learn about the murders. Two successive sections of the book bring us closer to the black hole of these crimes through two engaging characters. In the first, a literature professor from Spain, Amalfitano, moves to a college teaching position in Santa Teresa and soon begins to worry about the safety of his teenaged daughter Rosa. In the second, a black journalist from New York City, strangely named Oscar Fate, gets tasked with covering a boxing match in Santa Teresa in the face of the recent death of their sports writer. While there he gets hooked by the prospect of covering the murder story. The fourth section is a long account of the history of the rape-murders, including their investigation, suspects, and impact on the victims� families. The last section jumps into the life of Archimboldi as a child in Prussia, his service with the German army in World War 2, and pathway to a career in writing after the war.

From the first section, my guard was down, and I was charmed by the mystique that the academics build up over Archimboldi. I got a satiric amusement over the sense of their parasitic relationship to the writer. They essentially make a living off his works. Their efforts resemble the parable of the blind men describing the elephant from the different parts they experience, and in this case the elephant isn’t even in the room. That the three men take turns being in love with the one female scholar highlights their of interchangeability, as in the Paul Simon line about Celia: “When I came back to bed, someone’s taking my place.� Pursuit of the personal life of an author as a key to understanding their work reminds me of the absurd interest by literati in the lives of writers like Salinger and Pynchon. On site in Santa Teresa they begin to feel an element of evil in this border town. Looking beyond the seedy brothels, slums, and factory districts from their tourist cafe: The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

Amaltifano is no less on an abstracted plane as an academic. As a professor his work depends on the products of writers in different way than the critical scholars. As with all teachers his job is to help convey to his students how to pull knowledge from the writers� transduced experience to help them address problems in real life or apply it in practical careers in our society. As a humanist we expect him to rise above the cynicism of the playboy son of the college dean, who tells him, “I’m telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest thing there is to a rat.� We want him to succeed in convincing his daughter not to party with people like him and drug gangsters. We feel the sense of helplessness of this sensitive man when he asks himself, “Why did I come to this cursed city?�. Is it a meaningful response when at one point he replicates the action of the Dada artist Duchamp by hanging a geometry book out to weather in nature on a clothesline as an “experiment to see if it learns about real life�? I loved this as an apparent testament to the impotency of art and math to make an impact on human violence: “In any case, nature in northwestern Mexico, and particularly in his desolate yard, thought Amalfitano, was in short supply�.

The American, Oscar Fate, is more a man of action it seems. A product of the mean streets of New York and coverage of racial violence. His editor warns him to stick to his assignment, as the crimes don’t involve blacks, who comprise their readership. A female journalist from Mexico City engages him to visit with her a suspect in jail accused of a particular set of murders. Oscar can’t quite remember after a night of drinking if she was the one who told him: “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.� Like me, you will probably be eager to see if Oscar makes any progress on the crimes.

A lot of readers have trouble with the section of 2666 that deals more directly with the crimes. For me it was the core of the book, brilliantly done, and a big source some enlightening zaps. Maybe not like Paul had on the road to Damascus, but something to make me suspect what Bolaño is up to. About 100 of the murder-rapes are covered in some manner (in the main wave of the real epidemic of ““feminocidio� between 1993 to 2005, Wikipedia informs me of estimates between 200 and 400). It’s mostly a very indirect exposure to the violence that emulates police reports of victim details and elements of investigation, i.e. without the horrors of live-action portrayal we get in contemporary thrillers. But there is still plenty of horror in your imagination, sort of like what Hitchcock could evoke without directly showing murders. You can’t escape the sense of being hit over the head with this litany of death and torture. You quickly pass through awe at its enormity and human impact and on to numbness. Yet your eyes (or ears if doing an audiobook like me) can’t skip away as with TV images of war, terrorist, or catastrophe events. The permutations of personal destruction--form of rape, weapon inferred, injuries sustained—become a form of ghastly poetry. Mostly the victims are vulnerable low-income factory workers and some prostitutes. When some of the victims turn out to be children, you take another level on the downbound train (or fly out with pique at being hammered too much). What is a bigger heartbreak: a victim disposed carelessly in public spaces or their attempted erasure from a burial in the desert? For me, the latter (“If a woman was felled in the desert, and there was no on there to hear it, did it happen?). You eventually feel ready and even hungry to learn more of the backstory of some of the victims and the more about the ability of any family members to cope. Bolaño delivers on that in timely fashion.

The context of organized crime, drug cartels, and police corruption are brought out through the story, but they do not make a focus. We get to know some of the police involved (city, state, and judicial), some corrupt or stupid, some humane or sharp. The medical examiner; the one woman staffing the office for sexual violence; prosecutors and defense lawyers; FBI and an Arizona sheriff for rare cases of American victims. Is it one or a few related killers or an epidemic of copycat crime? Quite the panoply of ineffective people are officially involved in resolving the problem, no less interpreters of the signs and signifiers behind reality than the critics and the professor who plumb the depths of literature. Some of my favorite characters are in a position to render for the reader a diagnosis of key causes or meaningful judgment of the crimes . One is a saintly herbalist woman who has visions about the crimes. On a regional TV talk show beseeches the government to do something:

In dreams I see the crimes and it’s as if a television set had exploded and I keep seeing, in the little shards of screen shattered around my bedroom, horrible scenes, endless tears. …And finally she said: I’m talking about the women brutally murdered in Santa Teresa, I’m talking about the girls and the mothers of families and the workers from all walks of life who turn up dead each day in the neighborhoods and on the edges of that industrious city in the northern part of our state. I’m talking about Santa Teresa. I’m talking about Santa Teresa.

Another indelible character is a woman psychiatrist who runs a local mental hospital and speaks to police inspector from her expertise on the criminally insane. She come alive as a warm, wise, and dedicated, open to an affair with the detective. Here she discusses with the dubious policeman of strange pathologies in the society, starting with “gynophobia� (fear of womn):

Very widespread in Mexico, although it manifests itself in different ways. Isn’t that a slight exaggeration? Not a bit: almost all Mexicans men are afraid of women. …Some Mexican men may be gynophobes, said Juan de Dios Martinez, but not all of them, it can’t be that bad. What do you think optophobia is? asked the director. Opto, opto, something to do with the eyes, my God, fear of the eyes? Even worse: fear of opening the eyes. In a figurative sense, that’s an answer to what you just said about gynophobia. In a literal sense, it leads to violent attacks�.

Will Archimboldi emerge as a superman to make sense of the madness? Is the disease of Santa Teresa part of a larger pattern that a novelist can puzzle out and put in context or provide guidance like Dante’s Virgil past Hell to redemption? Inquiring minds want to know. This part of the book is to be your reward for passing through an artificial limbo of the first sections and the pit itself in the fourth section. What purgatory will forge his spirit? Some brilliant writing awaits you in this section. Absurdist elements in the vein of Vonnegut alternate with mythological forays buried in the stories the future author absorbs from others in his journey through wartime Poland, Brittany, Romania, and Russia. The stories of Prometheus, Sisyphus, Odysseus, and Dracula become worked into the fabric.

By juxtaposing a contemporary epidemic of violence with the World War 2 experience of Archimboldi, and then titling the book with a distant 2666 containing the “Number of the Beast� from Revelations, Bolaño surely is making a moral call to action. This book doesn’t yield unambiguous solutions, but it does leave with hope that some paths are worth pursuing. There are a lot of characters in this tale, and although they tend to struggle alone, many are able to forge enough connections other lives to dispel any sense of existential isolation. The book says to me that we are not alone in this journey, and that by opening oneself enough you can find others headed in the same direction as you and perhaps collectively break out of our destructive patterns, I am in no position to fully appreciate the main crucible for the book in the real femicides in a troubled Latin American borderland, but it makes a potent epitome of pathology in our human civilization .

What I garner from Web accessible elements of the author’s life is a confidence in his deep knowledge of political struggle against tyranny and in his gifts in marshalling language: growing up in Chile, where he aligned himself with Allende, exile to Mexico after Pinochet’s rise, where he found a voice as a poet, and, from the 90’s,a permanent home in Spain where he settled into family life and development remarkable skills in fiction. The book was a last effort before his death in 2003 at age 50 and was published essentially as a first draft in 2004. I don’t detect any problems with its construction and craft that this fact might imply. I very much look forward to his other acclaimed work, “The Savage Detectives.�