Jun 14
done with part 4 of 2666
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done with part 4 of 2666
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2666 - Roberto Bolaño: My Ranking of the Parts
06/06/26
I recently finished 2666 by Roberto Bolano. The novel has certainly left an imprint on my being. The book is split into 5 parts and I feel like ranking them (1 being favorite, 5 being my least favorite.)
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About the Crimes
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Fate
The Part about Archimboldi
They’re all very close. It’s not really a ranking of [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] but of [1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2, 2.5] or [1, 1.01, 1.25, 1.30, 1.50].
Here’s some of my general thoughts and reactions on each section.
–
Amalfitano
The shortest part. Deals a lot with madness, going mad, a person’s surrounding’s involvement with madness, the contagiousness of madness. Madness is contagious. I related a lot with this idea, and much of this entire part in general, which is maybe why I enjoyed it so much.
The thought of understanding a book without reading it is intriguing.
This part felt the most complete, and to me offered the most amount of closure, a foreign concept in a book like 2666. At the same time, it still maintained elusiveness and ambiguity, which is what makes this book, at least to me, so magical.
–
2. Crimes.
The longest part. Not as disconnected and clinical as many make it out to be. But who cares what people make it out to be? That’s not the point. The point is that this part balances unexplained violence with narrative complexity. It is not just a multi-hundred page police report.
Victims are given names. This is beautiful and intentional. Victims are people as much as they are unsolved acts of violence.
Florita Almada, the seer, makes this part, at least to me. Bolano allows the reader to ditch thinking about whether or not she truly is a supernatural/psychic seer. That is not relevant. That is not a point of contention. What she says is important nonetheless.
–
3. Critics
The most meta part. I love all things meta.
Critics search for Archimboldi harder than authorities of Santa Teresa search for an explanation of the murders of hundreds of women.
Satire of the world of literature is always welcome. Literary critics aren’t above kicking a taxi driver to death (or nearly to death, I don’t remember) over an awkward love triangle with an uninterested woman.
Is there really such a point to searching for Archimboldi in the first place? Questions about authorship arise.
Wandering. Heavy themes of wandering.
–
4. Fate
Some of my favorite prose is in this section.
Certainly Fate, the character, is the most fleshed out and relatable character in all of 2666. Relatable is subjective. To me, he was relatable. It is easy to feel for Fate or to try to step into his shoes.
Reminds me a lot of Critics. A different take on The Part about the Critics.
Very Lynchian to me.
The strong, magnetizing force of Santa Teresa, the molten core of 2666, pulls Fate into relation with the other parts of the novel.
Contrasts with Crimes. The Part About Fate is an outside, journalistic view of what’s going on in Santa Teresa, the Part About the Crimes is inside.
–
5. Archimboldi
This part not giving my much anticipated genius, great, all-encompasing conclusion to 2666 is actually my favorite part about it.
I did not enjoy too much the historical angle to this part. I ached for more Santa Teresa after Crimes, and being pulled into early 20th century Prussia really disappointed me. Maybe I’m a sucker for instant gratification, and this just didn’t give me my fix after the intense Part About the Crimes. It wasn’t until the last few pages of The Part About Archimboldi, and consequently the last few pages of 2666, that Santa Teresa was brought up again.
This part makes it so 2666 sort of starts where it ends. This is quite beautiful.
—
After reading, I scrambled to find some great, deeper meaning or code hidden among the five parts of the entire novel. Personally, after thinking a bit though, I don’t think 2666 is meant to be read this way. I think 2666 is more of a five paneled painting, meant to be looked at, both in it’s entirety and for it’s small intricacies, but not through.
LABERINTO SALVAJE 4, Autor: Luis Vinuesa García
LABERINTO SALVAJE 4 Koldo me pide que le cuente, en segunda persona, mi reciente aventura, la que me sucedió de camino a la estafeta donde me planifican la jornada laboral como repartidor de Correos. El Bukowski madrileño, me llama Koldo con sorna desde que me he colocado en este trabajo en ocasiones infrahumano, pero que me otorga independencia económica respecto a él, mi extravagante…
u know i was really excited to get to the murder part of 2666 for reasons I now find hard to recapture sort of forgetting that I would have to read 300 pages of women getting violently murdered over and over and over again. im 10 pages into this part and im already fucking exhausted
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In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn’t want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he’s afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he’s about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren’t invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it’s because polite society was so small back then. I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn’t tell you.
- roberto bolaño, 2666
When I was around 17 years old, I learned about this book through the coordinator of a writing group for teenagers that I was a part of. She said that she reread it every year. I tried to read it at the time (in Spanish) but didn't make it very far. I still haven't read it. But I became obsessed with this cover art and have thought about it ever since. Only I always misremember it: I always think that the woman in the chair is weeping into her hands. Well, maybe she is weeping. We can't see for sure. Maybe it doesn't matter.
I can't recall now why I felt so transfixed by this image originally. I doubt I would have connected it with my own experience. I found it haunting and expressive of something important, maybe the most important thing of all. This sounds very dramatic of me but I'm not sure I've ever felt more like this image than I do right now.
SAY THAT!!!!!!!!!!
