It seemed it might never stop; behind it a train
Of souls, so long that I would not have thought
Death had undone so many.
- Canto III, Dante's Inferno
In a 2003 interview with the Mexican edition of Playboy, which turned out to be one of his last, when asked what hell was like, Roberto Bolaño, the now-internationally celebrated Chilean-born poet, critic and novelist answered: "Like Ciudad Juarez, which is our curse and our mirror, the unquiet mirror of our frustrations and of our vile interpretation of freedom and our desires."
Juarez, a Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Tex., has a population of more than 1.5 million and is one the fastest- growing cities in the world. The driving force behind its explosive growth is its 300-plus maquiladoras (i.e. assembling plants).
It also has one of the highest homicide rates in Mexico: Since 1993, 400-plus women have been victims of sexual homicides; many of them were factory workers between the ages of 12 and 22. Although there have been some arrests and convictions, the overwhelming majority of cases remain unsolved.
2666
, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 898 pages, 3 volumes, $33
2666, Bolaño's posthumous magnum opus, is set in several countries (e.g., Germany, Spain, Britain, the United States, Russia) and dozen of cities (e.g., Berlin, Madrid, Paris, London, Detroit), but it revolves around the Mexican city of Santa Teresa, a sort of fictional Juarez, placed near the Sonora-Arizona border, where his second-last novel, The Savage Detectives, violently concludes. In Bolaño's Santa Teresa, as in the real Juarez, women are regularly being killed and their mutilated corpses turn up in ditches, parking lots and garbage dumps. The worst of these dumps is the condemned "El Chile" (the original Hebrew word for "hell" in the Gospel of Mark is Gehenna, i.e., the fiery garbage pit at the southwest of the old city of Jerusalem; in 2666, "El Chile" equals hell).
Although the novel's large cast circles Santa Teresa and is eventually drawn to the city like water to a drainage hole, 2666 opens in modern-day Europe with The Part About the Critics, the first of the novel's five parts.
In the opening pages, French critic Jean-Claude Pelletier, Italian critic/translator Piero Morini, Spanish critic Manual Espinoza and English critic Liz Norton all become enthralled by the works of elusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi and, eventually, by one another. Archimboldi's works have unsettling and hallucinatory effects on the critics, like a "steaming cup of peyote." Other elliptical artists fill these pages, such as English painter Edwin Johns, who cuts off his painting hand, takes it to a taxidermist and installs it in an artwork.
Although existentially unsettling, 2666 is also funny, very funny, and oddly reassuring
While contending for the affections of Liz Norton, the critics attempt to locate the German master's whereabouts. Pelletier, Espinoza and Norton are led to Santa Teresa - Morini stays in Italy because of declining health - after receiving a tip from a man named El Cerdo, "the Pig," that Archimboldi was spotted on his way to northwestern Mexico. Where, in The Savage Detectives, the hunt for the mysterious Mexican avant-garde poet Cesárea Tinajero sets in motion the plotline(s), the hunt for the elusive Archimboldi sets in the motion the plotline(s) of 2666 (if poets and poetry are at the heart of The Savage Detectives, then novels and novelists are at the heart of 2666).
