As Jonathan Galassi put it in Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s advance publicity for the English translation of The Savage Detectives (2007), the novel isĪbout us in a way that very few novels dare to be.
This sense of art and life slipping into each other is a big part of Bolaño’s appeal.
Bolaño’s dedicated readers, who seem to be everywhere these days, though perhaps not in plain sight, often come across like the slightly unhinged characters in his fiction, the sort of people who might pursue an obscure, avant-garde poet into the Sonoran Desert, for instance. The enthusiasm, which has been hard to contain, also has a touch of fan-based craziness to it. It has consistently referred to epochal significance and a decisive, generational shift in the field of Latin American literature (evident in the number of reviews and essays that include the phrase ‘not since Gabriel García Márquez’, or something similar). The praise for his work has been ecstatic, and almost universal. 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.Bolaño-esque, Bolaño-ized, little Bolaños: eleven years after his death, the fanaticism Roberto Bolaño’s work has inspired is evident in neologisms that suggest a literary universe remade in his image. 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. That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize-and why Natasha Wimmer’s lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant. It is in Bolaño’s allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his character’s frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches-above all, in the dark insights of Benno von Archimboldi, who finally takes center stage in the book’s fifth section-that the real story of 2666 gets told. That is why so much of the activity of 2666 takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor.
Time and again, Bolaño hints, without ever quite saying, that what is happening in Santa Teresa is a symptom of a universal derangement in which hidden dimensions of reality are coming horribly to light.
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