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A review by roberto_balogna
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
5.0
“No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”
2666 is the book of our era. Next to it, Blood Meridian is puerile and pessimistic; Gravity's Rainbow is petulant and pretentious.
In the interest of brevity, this review will focus only on the controversial heart of the novel. Part Four ("The Part About the Crimes") contains hundreds of pages of detailed, clinically detached accounts of countless femicides committed in Santa Teresa (a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juárez, where these rapes and murders actually took place in the 1990's). Interspersed throughout these accounts are digressions detailing an overwhelmed and corrupt police force, which furthers the overarching feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and despair that permeate each sentence of this section. These pages are, full stop, the best sequence of fiction I have ever read. It is an extended, unblinking stare into the Heart of Darkness that Joseph Conrad attempted to transmute into ink 100 years ago. Bolaño's depictions of violence never feel exploitative or gratuitous; they result in an impossibly profound synthesis of political anger, literary activism, and high art that has never before been achieved in the medium.
2666 is the book of our era. Next to it, Blood Meridian is puerile and pessimistic; Gravity's Rainbow is petulant and pretentious.
In the interest of brevity, this review will focus only on the controversial heart of the novel. Part Four ("The Part About the Crimes") contains hundreds of pages of detailed, clinically detached accounts of countless femicides committed in Santa Teresa (a fictionalized version of Ciudad Juárez, where these rapes and murders actually took place in the 1990's). Interspersed throughout these accounts are digressions detailing an overwhelmed and corrupt police force, which furthers the overarching feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and despair that permeate each sentence of this section. These pages are, full stop, the best sequence of fiction I have ever read. It is an extended, unblinking stare into the Heart of Darkness that Joseph Conrad attempted to transmute into ink 100 years ago. Bolaño's depictions of violence never feel exploitative or gratuitous; they result in an impossibly profound synthesis of political anger, literary activism, and high art that has never before been achieved in the medium.