The Part About Roberto Bolaño

I’ve just finished Roberto Bolaño‘s looooong novel 2666, a beautiful edition of which my wife gave me for Christmas this year. Weighing in at approximately 900 pages (the original, Spanish-language version is apparently over 1,000, for some reason), it’s broken into five separate “books” of approximately 200 pp each. Each book touches on the same overlapping set of stories, which involve a series of mysterious murders in the north of Mexico, a German author with an assumed Italian name that no one has ever seen, and a constellation of characters who circle around these.

I’m not going to give away any of the story, so don’t worry if you haven’t read it. I just want to gather a few thoughts about Bolaño, his life and writing, and the odd position these have taken in the world of poetry and my own literary sphere.

I first heard about Bolaño through my friend Roger Snell, a poet living in San Francisco. He was nuts about The Savage Detectives, another Bolaño novel that had recently been translated at that time, from which I gathered that the Chilean novelist, who also had a background in poetry, must have become a sort of cult figure among poets in the Bay Area. Roger insisted I read The Savage Detectives, and I went so far as to put it on the reading list for my oral exams at Texas State and special order it through the library, though I never actually finished the book as it turned out.

Flash forward to my arrival here in Buffalo. Back in September, when I drove down to New York with a couple of classmates for my ill-fated reading at the Cake Shop, I met a friend of one of them who was interning at New Directions. Not only that, but he had pursued the gig especially because of his love for Bolaño. So we talked about him a bit at the bar one evening and he told me how New Directions was sort of bitter because Farrar-Strauss had swooped in and gobbled up the rights to his two most lucrative books, The Savage Detectives and the upcoming 2666.

Now, having read it, and having read a bit about Bolaño’s life, I have to confess I understand the strong feelings he’s inspired. The book is brilliant — funny, compelling, mysterious, provocative, whatever’s important to you in literature, it probably has it, and more. I haven’t read a lot of Pynchon, but that’s probably the closest English-language author I can think of. He’s worlds better, in my opinion, than DeLillo, whose books tend to be too conceptual and not human enough for me. And it’s refreshing to find that Bolaño hated Garcia-Marquez (and the facile sort of magic realism that dominated Latin American letters in his wake), revered Borges and Cortazar, and again hated Isabel Allende. That should give you some clue what you’re getting here.

2666 is long, too long — a third of it could have been cut without losing a bit of the story. But the story isn’t the point. Check it out and let me know what you think.