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2666 (novel)
Encyclopedia
2666 is the penultimate novel
written by Chile
an novelist Roberto Bolaño
. Released in 2004, it depicts the unsolved and ongoing serial murder
s of Ciudad Juárez
(called Santa Teresa
in the novel), the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers. The apocalyptic 2666 explores 20th-century degeneration through a wide array of characters, locations, time periods, and stories within stories.
In 2007 the novel was adapted as a stage play by Spanish director Àlex Rigola
, and it premiered in Bolaño's adopted hometown of Blanes
. It was the main attraction of Barcelona
's Festival Grec that year.
An English-language translation by Natasha Wimmer
was published in the US on November 11, 2008, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
, and in the United Kingdom
on January 9, 2009, by Picador
.
After many years of illness while writing the novel, Bolaño died of hepatic failure shortly after presenting the first draft to his publisher. It was published in Spain about a year later, in 2004. Over 1100 pages long in its Spanish edition and almost 900 in its English translation, it is divided in five parts. Bolaño had completed four and a half parts before his death.
The 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award
for Fiction was posthumously awarded to Roberto Bolaño
for 2666.
has noted, "The novel's cryptic title is one of its many grim jokes; there is no reference to this figure in its 900 pages. However, in another of his novels, Amulet
, a road in Mexico City is identified as looking like 'a cemetery in the year 2666'. Furthermore, in the novel, The Savage Detectives
, there exists the line: 'And Cesárea said something about days to come... and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something.' Why this particular date? Perhaps it's because the biblical exodus from Egypt, a vital moment of spiritual redemption, was supposed to have taken place 2,666 years after the Creation."
The novel's five "parts" are as follows: The Part about the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi - all linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez
(Santa Teresa in the novel).
"The Part about the Critics" describes a group of four European literary critics who have forged their careers around the elusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi
. Their search for Archimboldi ultimately leads them to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora.
"The Part about Amalfitano" concentrates on Oscar Amalfitano, a mentally unstable professor of philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa, who fears his daughter will be caught up in the violence of the city.
"The Part about Fate" follows Oscar Fate, an American journalist for an African-American interest magazine, who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match (despite knowing very little about boxing) but becomes interested in the murders.
"The Part about the Crimes" chronicles the murders of dozens of women in Santa Teresa from 1993 to 1997. It also depicts the police force in their fruitless attempts to solve the crimes.
"The Part about Archimboldi" reveals that the mysterious writer is Hans Reiter, born in 1920 in Prussia
. This section explains how a provincial German soldier on the Eastern Front became an author in contention for the Nobel Prize
.
said in the New York Times Book Review:
Amaia Gabantxo in the Times Literary Supplement wrote:
Ben Ehrenreich
in The Los Angeles Times:
Adam Kirsch
in Slate
:
Francisco Goldman
in New York Review of Books:
Online book review site The Complete Review gave it an "A+", normally reserved for a small handful of books, saying:
Henry Hitchings
in Financial Times
:
Stephen King
in Entertainment Weekly
:
for Fiction was posthumously awarded to Roberto Bolaño
for 2666. It was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award
. Time
also awarded it the honour of Best Fiction Book of 2008.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
written by Chile
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an novelist Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
. Released in 2004, it depicts the unsolved and ongoing serial murder
Female homicides in Ciudad Juárez
The phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, called in Spanish the feminicidios and las muertas de Juárez , involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women since 1993 in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El...
s of Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez , officially known today as Heroica Ciudad Juárez, but abbreviated Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez's estimated population is 1.5 million people. The city lies on the Rio Grande...
(called Santa Teresa
Santa Teresa (fictional city)
Santa Teresa is a fictionalised version of Santa Barbara, California, created by Ross Macdonald in his mystery The Moving Target .In the 1980s, the writer Sue Grafton began using a fictional Santa Teresa as the setting for her novels featuring her lead character Kinsey Millhone, a fictional female...
in the novel), the Eastern Front in World War II, and the breakdown of relationships and careers. The apocalyptic 2666 explores 20th-century degeneration through a wide array of characters, locations, time periods, and stories within stories.
In 2007 the novel was adapted as a stage play by Spanish director Àlex Rigola
Àlex Rigola
Àlex Rigola is a Spanish theatre director. He has directed the Teatre Lliure since March 2003 as well as the theatre section of the Venice Biennale...
, and it premiered in Bolaño's adopted hometown of Blanes
Blanes
Blanes is a town on the Costa Brava in the province of Girona, Catalonia, Spain.The coast of Blanes has 4 km of different kinds of beaches, including the Blanes beach and S'Abanell beach.-Main sights:...
. It was the main attraction of Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
's Festival Grec that year.
An English-language translation by Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer
Natasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English....
was published in the US on November 11, 2008, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger W. Straus, Jr. and John C. Farrar. Known primarily as Farrar, Straus in its first decade of existence, the company was renamed several times, including Farrar, Straus and Young and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy...
, and in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
on January 9, 2009, by Picador
Picador
A picador is one of the pair of horsemen in a Spanish bullfight that jab the bull with a lance. They perform in the tercio de varas which is the first of the three stages in a Spanish bullfight.The picador has three main functions:...
.
After many years of illness while writing the novel, Bolaño died of hepatic failure shortly after presenting the first draft to his publisher. It was published in Spain about a year later, in 2004. Over 1100 pages long in its Spanish edition and almost 900 in its English translation, it is divided in five parts. Bolaño had completed four and a half parts before his death.
The 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
for Fiction was posthumously awarded to Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
for 2666.
Plot summary
The title of 2666 is typical of the book's mysterious qualities. This was the title of the manuscript rescued from Bolaño's desk after his death, the book having been the primary effort of the last five years of his life. There is no reference in the novel to this number, although it makes appearances in more than one of the author's other works. Henry HitchingsHenry Hitchings
Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history...
has noted, "The novel's cryptic title is one of its many grim jokes; there is no reference to this figure in its 900 pages. However, in another of his novels, Amulet
Amulet (novel)
Amulet is a novel by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. It was published in 1999. An English translation, by Chris Andrews, was published by New Directions in 2006.-Plot summary:...
, a road in Mexico City is identified as looking like 'a cemetery in the year 2666'. Furthermore, in the novel, The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives
The Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
, there exists the line: 'And Cesárea said something about days to come... and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something.' Why this particular date? Perhaps it's because the biblical exodus from Egypt, a vital moment of spiritual redemption, was supposed to have taken place 2,666 years after the Creation."
The novel's five "parts" are as follows: The Part about the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi - all linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juárez , officially known today as Heroica Ciudad Juárez, but abbreviated Juárez and formerly known as El Paso del Norte, is a city and seat of the municipality of Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Juárez's estimated population is 1.5 million people. The city lies on the Rio Grande...
(Santa Teresa in the novel).
"The Part about the Critics" describes a group of four European literary critics who have forged their careers around the elusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi
Benno von Archimboldi
Benno von Archimboldi is the pen name of the fictional German author Hans Reiter , one of the central characters in Roberto Bolaño's 2666....
. Their search for Archimboldi ultimately leads them to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora.
"The Part about Amalfitano" concentrates on Oscar Amalfitano, a mentally unstable professor of philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa, who fears his daughter will be caught up in the violence of the city.
"The Part about Fate" follows Oscar Fate, an American journalist for an African-American interest magazine, who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match (despite knowing very little about boxing) but becomes interested in the murders.
"The Part about the Crimes" chronicles the murders of dozens of women in Santa Teresa from 1993 to 1997. It also depicts the police force in their fruitless attempts to solve the crimes.
"The Part about Archimboldi" reveals that the mysterious writer is Hans Reiter, born in 1920 in Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
. This section explains how a provincial German soldier on the Eastern Front became an author in contention for the Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
.
Themes
The novel is substantially concerned with violence and death. According to Levi Stahl, it "is another iteration of Bolaño's increasingly baroque, cryptic, and mystical personal vision of the world, revealed obliquely by his recurrent symbols, images, and tropes". Within the novel, "There is something secret, horrible, and cosmic afoot, centered around Santa Teresa (and possibly culminating in the mystical year of the book's title, a date that is referred to in passing in Amulet as well). We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."Critical reception
The critical reception has been almost unanimously positive. The writer Jonathan LethemJonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels...
said in the New York Times Book Review:
- "2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage DetectivesThe Savage DetectivesThe Savage Detectives is an award-winning novel published by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in 1998. Natasha Wimmer's English translation was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007...
looks positively hermetic beside it. (...) As in Arcimboldo's paintings, the individual elements of 2666 are easily catalogued, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. (...) "- It would later that year make the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008" as chosen by the paper's editors.
Amaia Gabantxo in the Times Literary Supplement wrote:
- "(A)n exceptionally exciting literary labyrinth. (...) What strikes one first about it is the stylistic richness: rich, elegant yet slangy language that is immediately recognizable as Bolaño's own mixture of Chilean, Mexican and European Spanish. Then there is 2666s resistance to categorization. At times it is reminiscent of James EllroyJames EllroyLee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black...
: gritty and scurrilous. At other moments it seems as though the Alexandria Quartet had been transposed to Mexico and populated by ragged versions of DurrellDurrell-Members of the Durrell Family:*Gerald Durrell* Jacquie Durrell* Lawrence Durrell* Lawrence Samuel Durrell* Lee McGeorge Durrell* Louisa Dixie Durrell* Margaret Durrell*Leslie Durrell...
's characters. There's also a similarity with W. G. SebaldW. G. SebaldW. G. Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's work (.....) There are no defining moments in 2666. Mysteries are never resolved. Anecdotes are all there is. Freak or banal events happen simultaneously, inform each other and poignantly keep the wheel turning. There is no logical end to a Bolano book."
Ben Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich is an American freelance journalist and novelist who lives in Los Angeles. Ehrenreich began working as a journalist in the alternative press in the late 1990s, publishing extensively in LA Weekly and the Village Voice...
in The Los Angeles Times:
- "This is no ordinary whodunit, but it is a murder mystery. Santa Teresa is not just a hell. It's a mirror also -- "the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant, useless metamorphosis." (...) He wrote 2666 in a race against death. His ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void. So his reach extends beyond northern Mexico in the 1990s to WeimarWeimarWeimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...
BerlinBerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and Stalin's MoscowMoscowMoscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, to DraculaDraculaDracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to relocate from Transylvania to England, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor...
's castle and the bottom of the sea."
Adam Kirsch
Adam Kirsch
Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic.-Early life and education:Kirsch is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch, and a 1997 graduate of Harvard College.-Career:...
in Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
:
- "2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve."
Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College. He is workshop director at , the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez...
in New York Review of Books:
- "The multiple story lines of 2666 are borne along by narrators who seem also to represent various of its literary influences, from European avant-gardeAvant-gardeAvant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
to critical theoryCritical theoryCritical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
to pulp fictionPulp magazinePulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
, and who converge on the [fictional] city of Santa Teresa as if propelled toward some final unifying epiphany. It seems appropriate that 2666s abrupt end leaves us just short of whatever that epiphany might have been.."
Online book review site The Complete Review gave it an "A+", normally reserved for a small handful of books, saying:
- "Forty years after García Márquez shifted the foundations with One Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
, Bolaño has moved them again. 2666 is, simply put, epochal. No question, the first great book of the twenty-first century."
Henry Hitchings
Henry Hitchings
Henry Hitchings is an author, reviewer and critic, specializing in narrative non-fiction, with a particular emphasis on language and cultural history...
in Financial Times
Financial Times
The Financial Times is an international business newspaper. It is a morning daily newspaper published in London and printed in 24 cities around the world. Its primary rival is the Wall Street Journal, published in New York City....
:
- "2666 ... is a summative work – a grand recapitulation of the author's main concerns and motifs. As before, Bolaño is preoccupied with parallel lives and secret histories. Largely written after 9/11, the novel manifests a new emphasis on the dangerousness of the modern world...2666 is an excruciatingly challenging novel, in which Bolaño redraws the boundaries of fiction. It is not unique in blurring the margins between realism and fantasy, between documentary and invention. But it is bold in a way that few works really are – it kicks away the divide between playfulness and seriousness. And it reminds us that literature at its best inhabits what Bolaño, with a customary wink at his own pomposity, called "the territory of risk" – it takes us to places we might not wish to go."
Stephen King
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
in Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
:
- This surreal novel can't be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory. Suffice it to say it concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juarez, Mexico. Given this as a backdrop, the late Bolaño paints a mural of a poverty-stricken society that appears to be eating itself alive. And who cares? Nobody, it seems.
Awards and honors
The 2008 National Book Critics Circle AwardNational Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award is an annual award given by the National Book Critics Circle to promote the finest books and reviews published in English....
for Fiction was posthumously awarded to Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
for 2666. It was short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award
Best Translated Book Award
Best Translated Book Award is an annual literature award given by Three Percent, the online literature magazine of Open Letter Books, which is the book translation press of the University of Rochester. It is awarded to the best original translation published that year. A long list and short list...
. Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
also awarded it the honour of Best Fiction Book of 2008.
External links
- Roberto Bolaño's "2666", by Juan Asensio
- 2666, at complete reviewComplete reviewcomplete review is a literary website founded in March 1999. It is best known for reviews of novels in English translation, in particular drawing attention to otherwise neglected contemporary works from around the world, but there are also reviews of classics, non-fiction, drama and poetry...
. Aggregates links to most of the professional reviews. - Roberto Bolaño's "2666", by Francisco GoldmanFrancisco GoldmanFrancisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College. He is workshop director at , the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez...
- Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño's 2666, by Natasha WimmerNatasha WimmerNatasha Wimmer is an American translator best known for her translations of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and The Savage Detectives from Spanish into English....
(the novel's English translator)