2666
2666 is the last novel by Roberto Bolaño. It was released in 2004, a year after Bolaño's death. Its themes are manifold, and it revolves around an elusive German author and the unsolved and ongoing murders of women in Santa Teresa, a violent city inspired by Ciudad Juárez and its epidemic of female homicides. In addition to Santa Teresa, settings and themes include the Eastern Front in World War II, the academic world, mental illness, journalism, and the breakdown of relationships and careers. 2666 explores 20th-century degeneration through a wide array of characters, locations, time periods, and stories within stories.
Over 1100 pages long in its Spanish edition, and almost 900 in its English translation, it is divided into five parts. An English-language translation by Natasha Wimmer was published in the United States in 2008, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the United Kingdom in 2009, by Picador.
Critical reception of the novel has, on the whole, been very positive. In Chile, it won the Altazor Award in 2005. The New York Times Book Review included it in the list of "10 Best Books of 2008"; Time named it Best Fiction Book of 2008; and the novel won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Wimmer's translation was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award. Critics have compared it to W. G. Sebald's works and praised the book's multiple story lines and scope.
Creation of the novel
While Bolaño was writing 2666, he was already sick and on the waiting list for a liver transplant. He had never visited Ciudad Juarez but received information and support from friends and colleagues such as Sergio González Rodríguez, author of the essay "Huesos en el desierto", concerning the place and its femicides. He discussed the novel with his friend Jorge Herralde, director of Barcelona-based publisher Anagrama, but he never showed the actual manuscript to anyone until he died: the manuscript is a first copy.Originally planning it as a single book, Bolaño then considered publishing 2666 as five volumes to provide more income for his children; however, the heirs decided otherwise and the book was published in one lengthy volume. Bolaño had been well aware of the book's unfinished status, and said a month before his death that over a thousand pages still had to be revised.
Title
The meaning of the title, 2666, is typically elusive; even Bolaño's friends did not know the reasons for it. Larry Rohter, writing for The New York Times, notes that Bolaño apparently ascribed an apocalyptic quality to the number. Henry Hitchings noted that "the novel's cryptic title is one of its many grim jokes" and may be a reference to the biblical Exodus from Egypt, supposedly 2,666 years after God created the earth. The number does not appear in the book, though it does in some of Bolaño's other books—in Amulet, a Mexico City road looks like "a cemetery in the year 2666", and The Savage Detectives contains another, approximate reference: "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".Plot summary
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. We can at most glimpse it, in those uncanny moments when the world seems wrong."The novel's five parts are linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in the fictional border town of Santa Teresa though it is the fourth part which focuses specifically on the murders.
The Part about the Critics
This part describes a group of four European literary critics, the French Jean-Claude Pelletier, the Italian Piero Morini, the Spaniard Manuel Espinoza and the English woman Liz Norton, who have forged their careers around the reclusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. Their search for Archimboldi himself and details of his life causes them to get to know his aging publisher Mrs. Bubis. Then in a seminary in Toulouse the four academics meet up with Rodolfo Alatorre, a Mexican who says a friend knew him in Mexico City a short while back and that from there the elusive German was said to be going to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora. Three of the academics go there in search of him but fail to find him. A major element of this part centers around romantic entanglements between the critics.The Part about Amalfitano
This part concentrates on Óscar Amalfitano, a Chilean professor of philosophy who arrives at the University of Santa Teresa from Barcelona with his young adult daughter Rosa. As a single parent Amalfitano fears Rosa will become another victim of the femicides plaguing the city.The Part about Fate
This part follows Oscar Fate, an American journalist from New York City who works for an African-American interest magazine in Harlem, New York City. He is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match despite not being a sports correspondent and knowing very little about boxing. A Mexican journalist, Chucho Flores, who is also covering the fight, tells him about the murders. He asks his newspaper if he can write an article about the murders but his proposal is rejected. He meets up with a female journalist, Guadalupe, who is covering the murders and who promises to get him an interview with one of the main suspects, Klaus Haas, a German who had become a citizen of the United States before moving to Santa Teresa. The day of the fight Chucho presents Oscar to Rosa Amalfitano. After a violent incident they end up at Óscar Amalfitano's house where the father pays Fate to take Rosa with him back to the United States by car. Before leaving, however, Rosa and Fate go to the prison with Guadalupe to interview the femicide suspect, Klaus Haas.The Part about the Crimes
This part chronicles the murders of 112 women in Santa Teresa from 1993 to 1997 and the lives they lived. It also depicts the police force in their mostly fruitless attempts to solve the crimes, as well as giving clinical descriptions of the circumstances and probable causes of the various homicides. One of the policemen focused on is Juan de Dios Martínez, who is having a relationship with the older Elvira Campo and who also has to investigate the case of a man, aptly nicknamed "The Penitent," who keeps urinating and defecating in churches. Klaus Haas is another of the characters this part focuses on. Haas calls a press conference where he claims that Daniel Uribe, son of a rich local family, is responsible for the murders.The Part about Archimboldi
This part reveals that the mysterious writer Archimboldi is really Hans Reiter, born in 1920 in Prussia. This section describes how a provincial German soldier on the Eastern Front became an author in contention for the Nobel Prize. Mrs. Bubis, whom we met in the first part, turns out to have been Baroness von Zumpe; her family were a major part of Archimboldi's childhood, since his mother cleaned their country home and young Hans spent a lot of time with the Baroness's cousin, Hugo Halder, from whom he learned about the artistic life. Reiter meets the Baroness again during the war while in Romania, and has an affair with her after the war. At the end of this part Bolaño's narrator describes the life of Lotte, Archimboldi's sister, and it is revealed that the femicide suspect Klaus Haas is her son and thus Archimboldi's nephew.Critical reception
The critical reception has been almost unanimously positive. 2666 was considered the best novel of 2005 within the literary world of both Spain and Latin America. Before the English-language edition was published in 2008, 2666 was praised by Oprah Winfrey in her O, The Oprah Magazine after she was given a copy of the translation before it was officially published.The book was listed in The New York Times Book Review "10 Best Books of 2008" by the paper's editors. with Jonathan Lethem writing:
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+", a rating reserved for a small handful of books, saying:
Henry Hitchings in Financial Times:
Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly:
In 2018, Fiction Advocate published a book-length analysis of 2666 entitled An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom by author and critic Jonathan Russell Clark. An excerpt of the book was published in The Believer in March of 2018.
Awards and honors
It won the Chilean Altazor Award in 2005. The 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award 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.Adaptation
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. The play was the main attraction of Barcelona's Festival Grec that year.In 2016, it was adapted into a five-hour stage play at Chicago's Goodman Theater. The stage adaptation was praised for its ambition, but according to The New York Times, it fell "short as a work of dramatic art."
In 2016, it was adapted into an 11-hour play by Julien Gosselin and his troupe "Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur". It was presented at the Festival d'Avignon and then in Paris at the Odéon theatre as part of Festival d'Automne.