He thought of his novels, stories and poems as an interconnected system, and in the short novel Amulet we hear a character describe a certain street in Mexico City as 'more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child'. The date 2666 is a riddle that recurs throughout Bolaño's body of work. We follow Archimboldi, too, and his movements east and then west across Europe as a soldier in the Wehrmacht, and after the war as an itinerant writer and, at one point, a gardener in Venice (which is either a joke, a metaphor, or proof that I know less than I thought about Venice).

And Archimboldi's sister comes to Mexico to visit her son, who is jailed there. An American journalist becomes embroiled in violence while covering a boxing match. Four European academics travel to Mexico on the trail of the reclusive writer Benno von Archimboldi (mirroring the journey the poets Belano and Lima make from Mexico to Europe in The Savage Detectives, one of numerous links between the books). Its five sections are essentially various kinds of quest narrative, each of which share as their focal point the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa. Like the majority of Bolaño's work, 2666 is mazy with journeys. Bolaño intended it to be published as five separate short novels in order to best provide for his family (he knew he would be dead before it was on the shelves), but its truest expression is as a single, mammoth volume. Its pages bear more than enough blood, mortal wounds and stench for it to earn its epigraph, 'an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom' (from Baudelaire's poem 'Le Voyage'). He remembers an old acquaintance who 'chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick' and 'A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet', and finds it 'a sad paradox' that people should beĪfraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown … They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters … 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.Ģ666 is great, imperfect and torrential. In what Roberto Bolaño intended to be his final novel, 2666, the philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano considers the difference between long and short books.

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