Five different stories take place on different continents yet they come together seamlessly in Roberto Bolano's 2666
Five different stories take place on different continents yet they come together seamlessly in Roberto Bolano's 2666
2666
Author: Roberto Bolau00f1o
Publisher: Picador
Price: Rs 750
Rating: ****
This book will be read because
It's like eating a bowl of well-arranged salad. Once you've crunched your way through reams of zesty lettuce and endive, savouring each mouthful, you suddenly discover a new layer of something special - truffle, perhaps, or artichoke hearts! And then, just when you've lost yourself in their unique flavour and texture - what do you know, something entirely new and terrific starts again - caviar, maybe, or fresh-roasted ponk.
This book is actually five novels in one, and they are laid side-by-side and presented to us with casual titles: The part about the critics, The part about Amalfitano, The part about Fate, The part about the Crimes, and The part about Archimboldi. The author died after he'd written it all though apparently a bit before he was satisfied that every comma was in place and had left instructions for each part to be published separately.
However, his heirs agreed with the publishers - that the true literary worth of this work would only be felt if the whole thing appeared in one chunk. So we have a wrist-spraining 898 pages to support as we read. Luckily, each one is spellbinding. And this device also gives us the pleasure of participating in the grand coming-together and resolution of events in which all the different characters on different continents unexpectedly but gratifyingly fall into place.
But then it's also like a roller-coaster ride. Oneu00a0 that you ride standing up, with your arms stretched out on either side, speeding high up and then swerving down in a long loop and then up again, then down again, stomach leaping and lurching, almost as if you were flying. There are long and involved sentences that lead you in a long journey through twists and turns, long gasping moments of truth interspersed with parenthetic explanations which sweep you to another realm, as if on a sailboat or even better like a song on the wind.
And there are tiny ones that pack a punch or drip with irony or simply make you laugh aloud. The plot of each section is complex and rich with life. Some of the characters we get to know intimately, over a hundred pages. But even the short-lived ones who are massacred, violated, and killed in a short space are, in a few sentences or short paragraphs, alive and embellished with detail that gives them a unique character.
It takes place in Europe, and South America, and North America, and then Europe again. There are so many countries, and each depicted so clearly, that to read this book is to get an educated glimpse of the many different cultures represented, and the daily routines and preoccupations of their people.
But it's also filled with sentences so laced with bigotry that it makes us laugh with relief relief that we can finally split our sides in this area we had lost our sense of humour about some time ago. No nationality or race or gender is spared. In fact, as the book lets slip, "People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closes thing there is to a rat."
It's also a murder mystery. The largest section, and the most sensational ingredient of the plot, is that hundreds of women are being raped, murdered, and callously disposed in garbage bins, tossed off hillsides, found in hotel rooms, and basically all over the place. Unlike regular serial killers that is, the killers in American TV serials there is no signature or any kind of effort to portray individual genius.
It's just a horrible phenomenon, an incredibly grotesque epidemic, and there is no cure. A large number of these women are migrant factory workers and new to Santa Teresa, where all this is happening (a small town in northern Mexico), and their bodies remain unclaimed.
Something like this did actually happen in a Mexican town called Ciudad Juu00e1rez and the killers were never found. Could the feelings you get as you read these ghastly tales be similar to what Bolau00f1o felt when he read news reports about them? Are they what made him write it?
Roberto Bolau00f1o has been ecstatically received in America. His first major novel, The Savage Detectives, became a cult hit among readers and, Time magazine reports, "practically a fetish object to critics".
The son of a truck driver, Bolau00f1o was born in Chile and the family moved to Mexico when he was still a boy. He dropped out of high school to write poetry and apparently turned to fiction later in life as a money-making proposition. Before that, he had lived in Europe for ten years, still writing poetry, and flirting with drugs and insanity, and the book perhaps indicates some of what he learnt and experienced.
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