A review by tmackell
2666 by Roberto Bolaño

5.0

I'm staggered..... this book is just so many things at once..... as absurd, fucked up, and complicated as the world we live in, with just as few clear answers. Although many connections and parallels to draw...... allusions to real life people and events, lots of wikipedia holes to fall down from reading this.... if you take real life and alter it slightly, add some fictional elements, a biography of an invented Nazi general, a fictional town in Mexico modeled after Ciudad Juarez, you can see how insane real life really is.... "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." as Bolano said about this Baudelaire quote that serves as the epigraph: "There is no diagnosis more lucid that expresses the sickness of modern man. In order to get free from boredom, to escape the dead zone, all we have at hand….. is horror, that’s to say evil." Horror. Fear of women. Fear of the Sacred. This could apply to our absent-minded scrolling through social media feeds filled with footage of atrocities and banality alike just as much as it could apply to the critics violent lashing out on the immigrant taxi driver in Part 1, a moment in the book in which it really shifts into another gear, or at least it did for me. This book itself could just as easily be called an oasis of horror or a desert of boredom, but I wouldn't call it boring at all, I burned through it in a month because I could hardly put it down, but for however propulsive and gripping it is, it doesn't lay out a clearly linear plot, something which I would consider a strength given the subject matter. The fragmentary and disjointed nature of it only serves to better reflect the world we live in.... The absurdity of seeking out a lone serial killer for so many hundreds of murders, the temptation to pin Archimboldi as that killer but the impossibility of doing so and futility of even trying.... just as ridiculous and insular as the critics'/professors' world of specialization in a certain literary field.... just like the Polish clerk left to dispose of hundreds of Jews in part 5, we are simultaneously all guilty and all absolved, distanced from and a part of the oasis of horror in the desert of boredom that is the world as we know it....