2666
Roberto Bolaño(2004)
Extract
The part about the critics, the part about Amalfitano, the part about Fate, the part about the crimes, the part about Archimboldi.
Four literary critics converge on a vanished German novelist, their search leading them to Santa Teresa, a city on the Mexican border where hundreds of women have been murdered and the killings will not stop. Roberto Bolaño left this novel unfinished at his death in 2003, and its five parts spiral from literature into violence, from academic conferences into desert where bodies are found in ditches, catalogued with forensic, unbearable precision. It asks what literature can do in the face of atrocity and offers no reassurance. Its pages hold boxing matches, lunatic asylums, Eastern Front battles, and always the murdered women of Santa Teresa, the wound that will not close. It stares into the abyss until the abyss looks away.
If you loved this
Pynchon built the sprawling, paranoid novel of systemic violence that Bolaño inherits and sets on the Mexican border.
McCarthy writes the desert with the same biblical ferocity, and the violence is just as beyond comprehension.
Proust proves that a novel can be a world unto itself; Bolaño proves it can be a series of open wounds.