I have read a lot of brilliant posts about 2666 over the past 15 weeks, but like Maria Bustillos, I have only felt quieter and quieter as I went through it. She ends her last post on the Bolaño group blog thanking the author for “the ice cream, which is absolutely first-class ice cream, and which I hope to enjoy (if that is the right word) many times in future.” The metaphor is strange but not at all wrong.

The Part About Archimboldi was in some ways fated to disappoint me, capping as it does such a big novel. As the fifth of five parts, its job is to pull everything together; not to answer every unanswered question, but to draw a circle around the novel, so you can say this is in, this is out, and not deal with the overwhelming impression that everything is in. I didn’t expect Archimboldi’s connection to Santa Teresa to be such that I’d be satisfied with the strength of that circle, but I was.

I was also satisfied with Archimboldi, I think, though for a while it was touch and go. His experiences on the Eastern Front in World War II left me cold. What new thing could any writer make of that? So Bolaño takes us out of the front lines and to the past in Moscow for Ansky’s story. That is good, but it’s not amazing. It does have the effect of piling on the stories, just like we have been in every part up to now, getting somewhere and then doubling back to tell yet another character’s life story. But when Archimboldi comes out of the whole thing disdaining “poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge…that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness,” I feel reassured that the project is working for me. This is what I got out of things up till then anyway. The real key idea for me comes later, when Archimboldi’s sister dreams of talking to him in the desert:

“It’s unfathomable and hostile,” she told him, and only then did she realize that she was a girl again, a girl who lived in a Prussian village between the forest and the sea.

“No,” said Archimboldi, and he seemed to whisper in her ear, “it’s just boring, boring, boring…”

Many readers find 2666 very outward-facing, almost a call to action. I don’t see it as unengaged, but I perceive it much more as a bringing together of the tropes and ideas of a lifetime, in the form of a great, imperfect and torrential work. That means I have a lot of work to do before I’ll be ready to come back to this particular Fürst-Pückler-Eis.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how The Part About the Crimes was easier to read because of its form, and was surprised to get pushback on that idea. Perhaps I should have said that the form makes it deceptively easy to read; as Steve Brassawe notes, the just-the-facts approach to the crimes “is a Hitchcock technique in the sense of making what we do not see much more horrific than anything that we might have been shown.” That is certainly true of not only the femicides but of all the crimes in the section, including those of the Penitent and the killings of the Caciques.

By the end of The Part About the Crimes, though, one notable thing about its form has more to do with deviation from tradition. The dispassionate descriptions of police procedure do not extend much further than finding the bodies; the forensics don’t lead anywhere or reveal much, the investigators muse for a few moments on the M.O. of the murders, but they don’t do much to really analyze the crimes either individually or as a group. They reflect on the crimes, but impotently. They lament the state of the city, but hopelessly. They don’t take the cold analytical mind of detective fiction to it.*

Lalo Cura is one exception to this trend. Plucked from a small village to work as a teenage bodyguard for a narco’s wife, he becomes a policeman after saving her from assassins. He finds piles of untouched textbooks on investigative technique at the police station, which he takes home to read since no one will miss them. He makes a few noble—but yes, still quite impotent—attempts to analyze motives, noting that a body must have been dumped in a particular location because the murderer wanted it found, for example. Far from being fostered by the police department, his initiative is frowned upon, and Lalo Cura is in no position to solve the crimes.

Albert Kessler seems poised to be another exception, and it’s he who somehow managed to get my hopes up and make me think somehow (even though it would be impossible) something would happen when he came to Santa Teresa. Billed as an American Sherlock Holmes, he could be the one they are all waiting for, someone from the outside who won’t be powerless to find the root of the femicides. And he seems so different, right from his arrival, more purposeful. He sneaks out the backdoor of the police station so he can ride a taxi around the slums of the city, figuring out where all the industrial parks are and where the bus routes go and imagining how some of the crimes may have happened. He asks questions and makes notes. But just as Kessler sparked those hopes, he took to drinking bacanora and it turned out the Mexican police had been following him all the time. His failure to realize he was being tailed by these good-for-nothing cops is one of the more depressing signs of impotence in the whole section. There can be no hope to solve these crimes.

*Of course, this manifests itself as another notable deviation from genre: there is no single main detective. There are several we are very familiar with, like Juan de Dios Martinez, as well as other characters with an investigative function, like Sergio Gonzales. But we don’t stick with anyone, following their steps to solve the mystery of the crimes, for very long and they certainly don’t take us very far.

It’s no secret that 2666 is long. So long that my edition comes in three volumes, that I’m participating in a months-long group read of it, and that I’m through the first three parts and still have no idea what it’s about.

I mean, I can tell you that it’s about the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, but that’s not saying very much. What was The Part About Fate about? Something about how there are no Mexican light heavyweights, I think.* But because of the stature of both Bolaño and 2666, I have put myself into his hands entirely. I don’t know what he’s doing yet, but I’m willing to assume he does and it will be something in the end. Of course, I do this to some extent with almost all books, but only to some extent. Sometimes you’re working on a big one where you have to just close your eyes and not look down…for several hundred pages.

And that’s great. But it leaves me fixating most of all on passages where you know that, in whatever indirect way, the writer is saying something about his own book, his own writing. When I caught that breeze in The Part About Amalfitano, it alluded to novelistic structure and ambition. In The Part About Fate, my ears perked up at an interlude regarding the novel and society.

A “white-haired man” eating at a diner with a young man is discussing death, and how “society tended to filter death through the fabric of words.” He gives the young man a history lesson, on how “[r]eading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime…yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings.” But the society that didn’t want death to intrude on it closed its eyes, like a child—and that meant that it closed its words.

The old man, perhaps a professor, speculates that this was possible because of how very small polite society was “back then.”

I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations.

What was different about those who were part of society: “What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible.” The old man again refers to “back then” when he says that words were used mostly to avoid rather than to reveal. What about now? What about coming right up, in The Part About the Crimes?

An anecdotal data point: the femicides were, presumably, known to everyone who began reading 2666 with our group, yet several people seem to have been quite affected already by reading a novel that’s not yet anywhere near as intense about making these women legible as it’s going to be (or so I understand).

*I am (only slightly) joking here. Note that I have really not read much of the group discussion over the past week, or much on other people’s blogs; I’m posting this before I get a chance to, which I should later today. But that’s not the point here.

Philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano, unlike the critics of the first volume of 2666, is for me a highly sympathetic character. The first thing to note about The Part About Amalfitano is that it very quickly seems not to be about Amalfitano at all, but about his wife and her leaving him and their daughter. Right away we find that Amalfitano, who has no idea how he ended up in Santa Teresa, isn’t actually there after all—he’s in his own head. He lives in a world of memory and reminiscence, mulling his abandonment by Lola, the origins of old books, Duchamp readymades.

On the 2666 group read blog, Maria Bustillos describes Amalfitano thus:

Part of the trouble with Amalfitano is, he’s like Hamlet, kind of. He’s stuck, largely because he has no faith in the significance of his own actions, so it’s like he just can’t move. He is outside all these games everyone else is playing; he can’t understand them. For example, he is neither macho, nor is he gay. He likes Archimboldi just fine, but his head wasn’t turned by Archimboldi as the heads of the critics were. He’s not doing any of that stuff; he’s just a human being, just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.*

This is what makes him so much more likeable than the critics, who are only playing games. They have a brittle, opaque veneer, so that we can’t get at them at all or know what they’re thinking. We don’t know much of what they think about Archimboldi, except for the most superficial asides. And it’s only when the veneer is chipped away by some out-of-the-ordinary incident that we discover the machismo, say, bubbling within Pelletier and Espinoza.

From their perspective, in The Part About the Critics, Amalfitano appears to have a veneer too, albeit a strange one. Aside from their prejudices against him as a backwater professor, they perceive him as somewhat strange or off even as they begin to like him. Because they cannot understand him either. But in The Part About Amalfitano, the narrator (who I would argue is the same as in the first part) takes his point of view and we actually have access to his thoughts and feelings—including thoughts and feelings about books!

Archimboldi, the “obviously” failed European bumbling around in the dust of Mexico, is skeptical, thoughtful, ruminative, and brings more of value to 2666‘s direct discussion of literature than his illustrious professional rivals even in his wandering thoughts. He reminisces about a young pharmacist he saw often in Barcelona, who would read during his quiet night shift. Amalfitano once asked him about what books he liked: “The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol.”

…[T]here was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick. …What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

So for all that Amalfitano is not impressed with Archimboldi, he is impressed by “real combat”—and certainly we don’t get the impression that “blood and mortal wounds and stench” are what the Archimboldi critics are wrestling with back in Europe. They seem much too sterile for all that.

*Marco Antonio Guerra, the son of Amalfitano’s dean, is similarly stuck and ineffectual, but rather than daydream about geometric shapes and philosophers, he takes the fight club route out of this Sonoran malaise.

Last week, 2666 project contributor Maria Bustillos wrote about the passage in The Part About the Critics where a taxi driver is badly beaten. The scene is jarring. Three sophisticated, middle-class university professors are one moment in a taxi on their way home from a fancy restaurant; the next moment they are involved in a brutal street fight, unleashing a violence we didn’t even notice under the surface before. According to her post, “it is no surprise whatsoever that the first blows administered (predictably, by Espinoza) are described as ‘Iberian.’”

I hadn’t really thought of that myself, but that post immediately came to mind as I finished The Part About the Critics, which concludes with three of the critics making a trip to Mexico, to a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juarez. We’re not into The Part About the Crimes yet, which I expect to be beyond jarring, but there is a definite undercurrent of this violence the whole time the critics are in Mexico.

The first night they spend there, Liz Norton looks out her hotel room window in Mexico City and sees a taxi driver beaten by hotel employees. Their guide, El Cerdo (who has dirty fingernails), explains that there is a “war between taxi drivers and doormen”; this is an exotic place. In Santa Teresa, Pelletier finds a chunk missing from his toilet bowl: “It looked as if someone had ripped it off with a hammer. Or as if someone had picked up another person who was already on the floor and smashed that person’s head against the toilet, thought Norton.” The critics can feel the change, that “something strange was going on,” but eventually:

…[T]hey lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn’t the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn’t make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.

Bustillos notes of the earlier violent incident, “I think that Bolaño is saying, here, that machismo is a literally uncontrollable source of violence; that no matter how ‘civilized’ a man is, he will always be in some danger of a catastrophe like Espinoza’s.” The critics may have no intention of raising their voices, but they’re in a strange and tense place, where so many women have been killed over the years that a native boy “had to repeat it two or three times because neither Espinoza nor Pelletier could believe his ears.” The cool English Norton leaves Pelletier and Espinoza in Mexico to continue in debauched style.

As he is good at everything else, Bolaño is good at dealing with this violent undercurrent. There is great brutality and control, and it has me both worried and reassured about what I know is coming up further on. The ambiance is already intense, but I trust that it’s part of something, in service to the whole.