The writer's epic magnum opus so perfectly concentrates the spirit of his previous works that it practically renders them obsolete.

"2666" by Roberto Bolaño
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 898 pages, $29.95.

Review by Tommy Wallach

"All criticism is ultimately a nightmare," writes Roberto Bolaño midway through his epic 898 page masterpiece, "2666." I'm not sure what he means by that, but it doesn't really matter. The sentence is less a rational statement than a Zen koan; it forces the reader to consider something nebulous and create their own meaning. Most of Bolaño's best work functions this way, through language and stories that are neither Campbell-logical nor Marquez-magical, but suggestible, malleable.

The crowning achievement of Bolaño's career"2666" wasn't quite finished when Bolaño died in 1999, but his heirs assure us in their postscript to the novel that it was close enough to merit publication. The claim seems legitimate. Everything we've come to expect from a Bolaño book is here. There's the meandering pursuit of a literary figure, by way of "The Savage Detectives" (itself clocking in at 600 pages). There's the encyclopedic treatment of a distasteful, morbid subject, lifted from his experimental novel "Nazi Literature in the Americas." And through it all, there is the dissonant prose style of a revolutionary poet who turned to fiction begrudgingly, because he thought there was more money in it. "2666" is vintage Bolaño: not distilled, exactly, but writ large.

The novel is divided into five parts, "each independent," as Bolaño clandestinely explains within the book itself, "but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole." While the plots of these five parts involve everything from book critics to professional boxers, mad poets to African American journalists, the centerpiece of "2666" is the city of Santa Teresa, where a series of murders are occurring.

In Part 4 of the novel, Bolaño describes dozens of these crimes—all of which involve the violent death of a young woman, and most of which involve rape. Reading this litany simultaneously provides one of the most disturbing and emotionally numbing experiences in literature.

Bolaño treats sexual assault and strangulation like elements in a fugue, constantly recombining them in new orders and combinations, so they never lose their ability to shock: "According to the forensic report, she had been raped and strangled." "One of her breasts was almost completely severed and the other was missing the nipple, which had been bitten off." "Her neck was broken and both arms displayed knife wounds." "She had been raped numerous times and stabbed..." "...the cause of death was various stab wounds to the chest, all or almost all potentially fatal, produced by a double-edged blade."

Santa Teresa is an imaginary city on Mexico's northern border, a wasteland of maquiladoras (factories), populated by sad strivers. Bolaño sees an apocalyptic pathos in this setting, and brings each of his protagonists there in turn, as if to find out who will survive it. Plot lines don't so much resolve as diffuse, achieving meaning not in bursts but in a gradual accumulation. Catharsis is as ungraspable for the reader as it is for the characters. The pleasure of the novel lies solely in the implacability of its author's vision; Bolaño (who admitted that the narrator of "2666" was Arturo Belano, his literary alterego) is always there in the shadows, stalking the reader, and his killing blow lands all the harder for its subtlety.

I think nothing ever disappears, said the Mexican. There are people, and animals, too, and even objects, that for one reason or another sometimes seem to want to disappear, to vanish. Whether you believe it or not, Harry, sometimes a stone wants to vanish, I've seen it. But God won't let it happen. He won't let it happen because He can't. Do you believe in God, Harry? Yes, Senor Demetrio, said Harry Magana. Well, then, trust in God, He won't let anything disappear.

In fact, "2666" is not a novel about disappearance. The mysterious author Archimboldi, unsuccessfully hunted by his critics in Part 1 of the novel, resurfaces as the protagonist of Part 5. The serial killer mentioned early in the book is eventually named and brought to justice. The bodies of missing girls almost invariably turn up at the Santa Teresa dump or in a ditch outside of town. Yet by describing the victims of these crimes in such detail, by reciting the degradation and torment they must have experienced, Bolaño shows us that there are worse things than disappearance. In fact, disappearance can sometimes be a blessing.

Everyone owes themselves a Bolaño novel at some point, just for the experience of reading an entire book with the author's breath on the back of one's neck.Bolaño wrote "2666" knowing it would be his last novel, the last stand he might make against his own disappearance, and a sense of mortality and legacy pervades the book. "Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished," we are informed by Archimboldi. "Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies." Yet it is hard to believe that this is really Bolaño's opinion.

Elsewhere in the novel, another intellectual protagonist takes exception to a pharmacist's preference for the "perfect exercises of the great masters" to the "great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown."

Bolaño must have known that "2666" would be his great, imperfect, torrential work. He believed that great novels had to be imperfect and torrential, and there is indeed a whiff of the perfect exercise to his shorter books. In truth, I find all of his fiction -- long and short -- difficult to get through. I read in a haze of confused awe; always impressed, but nevertheless glad to be finished.

But everyone owes themselves a Bolaño novel at some point, just for the experience of reading an entire book with the author's breath on the back of one's neck.

"Every book that isn't a masterpiece is cannon fodder," Archiboldi explains, "a slogging foot soldier...a piece to be sacrificed, since in multiple ways it mimics the design of the masterpiece." For better or worse, much of Bolaño's work will be subsumed by "2666." In it lies every theme, every setting, and even some of the characters that make his other novels so compelling. With it, he gave us the crowning achievement of his career.