about endlessness

I finally finished 2666. Or did I?

2666 surely has the most dream sequences of any novel published in the last 30 years. We are constantly made privy to the dreams of many, many different characters, dipping into their unconsciousnesses for a moment before coming back to the main narration. My personal favorite comes at the end of part 2, “The Part About Amalfitano,” in which Amalfitano, a professor in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, has a dream of “the last Communist philosopher.”

That night, as young Guerra's grandiloquent words were still echoing in the depths of his brain, Amalfitano dreamed that he saw the last Communist philosopher of the twentieth century appear in a pink marble courtyard. He was speaking Russian. Or rather: he was singing a song in Russian as his big body went weaving toward a patch of red-streaked majolica that stood out on the flat plane of the courtyard like a kind of crater or latrine. The last Communist philosopher was dressed in a dark suit and sky-blue tie and had gray hair. Although he seemed about to lose at any moment, he remained miraculously upright.

As can be seen, the dreams don’t read as particularly ‘dreamy.’ There are no harps on the soundtrack or hazy camerawork. Indeed, they are recounted in the same straightforward prose as the rest of the book, with subjects and predicates clearly identified. 2666 has a reputation as a difficult book, which is not entirely unearned, but at the level of its sentences and their clarity, it is noticeably easier to read than, say, Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow. The difficulty of the book has more to do with the question raised by the proliferating dreams, essentially, “why is this here?” That is the question a reader of 2666 will ask oneself again and again. Why is this here?

Which is the point, one comes to understand over the course of the novel’s 900 pages. “Why is this here?” is the question author Roberto Bolano wants us to ask, about, well, everything. Why is the world here? Why am I here? What is this hole, this crater, doing in the center of the world?

2666 invites us to think of itself as divided into five parts. Open the book to the table of contents and you will see it's divided into five Parts, about various things: The Critics, Amalfitano, Fate, the Crimes, and Archimboldi. Really, though, it’s about two things, or rather, one person, and one event. This person and this event remain mostly offstage for the book’s first 400 pages or so. Why are these central things delayed for so long? One may ask. To which the answer is: Exactly. 

The person in question is Benno von Archimboldi, a German novelist whom the critics in the book’s first part believe to be the greatest novelist alive, a shoo-in for the Nobel. His books are widely read, yet almost nothing is known about Archimboldi himself. He has never given an interview, never been photographed. At least we know Thomas Pynchon’s real name, where he was born, where he went to college and who his friends were. With Archimboldi, not even those biographical details are available. 

The second thing the novel places at its center, albeit off to the side, is the Event, or rather a series of events that constitute one entire event. It is difficult to say where it starts and ends. This Event are the Crimes of Part Four. These crimes are a series of unsolved killings of women in a Mexican city called Santa Teresa, right on the US-Mexico border. Santa Teresa is a clear stand-in for Cuidad Juarez, rocked by violence. Dozens, and eventually hundreds of women are killed over the course of the 1990s and into the 2000s. Some of these deaths are domestic disputes gone lethal; many others are more mysterious in nature, with bodies appearing in ditches at the edges of the city. Most are never solved. 

The Part About the Crimes is usually what people first mention when they talk about 2666. If you’ve heard of the book, this is almost certainly the part you heard about. It is indeed about 300 pages long and recounts the murders, various attempts at investigating them, none of which quite arrive at a definitive conclusion. But what interested me most was how, exactly, the murders would connect with the case of Archimboldi. How the Event would connect with the Person. The critics in the book’s first part eventually travel to Santa Teresa in pursuit of a rumor that Archimboldi has been seen there. Of course they don’t find him. 

The Part about the Crimes is indeed a bravura performance, but I have to admit that my favorite part of the book is the fifth and final part, The Part about Archimboldi. There is a sense of sweep, yet also compression, as this section takes on the whole of 20th century European history in about 250 pages. 

Here, we meet a German man named Hans Reiter, who, the title all but tells us, will become Archimboldi, Famously Reclusive Novelist. Reiter is born in the 1920s. In WWII, he is conscripted into the army, where he serves on the Russian front. A truly horrific ordeal, as he shivers through frigid winters and nearly starves. He also meets a woman, known as the Baroness Von Zumpe, which will prove decisive to his literary career after the war. She works at the publishing house that puts out his novels, without ever reading them herself. Strange, perhaps, but one must admit that the thought of an editor who’ll publish anything you write without ever giving you notes on what to cut does hold a certain appeal. 

After the war, Reiter/ Archimboldi meets a young woman named Ingeborg, who is, she says, obsessed with the ancient Aztecs. The Aztecs! From Mexico! Is this where the connection with Santa Teresa comes in? Not quite, or at least not at this point, but the little shiver this passage gave me, of a tentative connection that yet doesn’t quite follow through, illustrates the strange pleasures of this book. 

It is not only when the novel is nearly at its end that we discern the nature of Archimboldi’s connection to Santa Teresa. We learn that Archimboldi’s younger sister, whom he lost touch with entirely after the war, married and had a son named Klaus Haas. This is a name we recognize. In the Part About the Crimes, a tall blonde German is arrested under the suspicion that he is the murderer–serial killer, really–responsible for the murders in the area. His guilt is inconclusive. Archimboldi meets up with his sister after decades, and she tells him about the plight of her son, and thus his nephew. She’s tried to get him out of prison for years, traveling to Mexico multiple times for the purpose. Archimboldi resolves to help, and leaves for Mexico himself. 

And that’s it. The novel ends right there, with Archimboldi leaving, heading toward the city where so many others searched for him in vain. 

2666, then, is an asymptote, the mathematical term for two curving lines that never quite meet. Really, it’s a whole series of asymptotes, one after another, as stories, characters, and yes, dreams, almost, but never quite, connect with each other. This accounts for the excess of dreams and dream sequences throughout the story. A dream is an asymptote of its own, a little narrative contained within our minds, but one whose connection with ourselves and our lives all too often goes unexplained. The living world and the dreaming one, side by side, never quite meeting.