The first thing you should know about Roberto Bolaño is this: he is foreign. I think Chilean, but possibly just Spanish. The second thing to know about Roberto Bolaño: he is, according to Wikipedia, dead. The third and final thing to know: he keeps showing up in The New Yorker. Hardly a week goes by wherein I do not pick up The New Yorker, page briskly though it in search of cartoons that are about dogs and cats pretending to have sophisticated human relationships with each other, and also dutifully note that the Fiction part has been written once again by Roberto Bolaño.
Do I read the Fiction thing? No. Of course not. The first sentence is always something like, “In the village of my grandparents, which does not appear on any map, a man named Luís Salazar was once said to have sold a fish to an unfamiliar woman, said to be Argentine, who was in every physical way identical to a cousin of his with an unpronounceable name of between eighteen and twenty-five syllables.” So why the hell would I read that.
It’s always either Roberto Bolaño or some Irish person.
Anyway, Bolaño is very trendy right now, and so it seems like a good idea to review 2666, which I keep hearing about. Is 2666 a sequel to Bolaño’s earlier work, The Savage Detectives? Let’s just say yes. So it’s also about detectives. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s probably some unreliably narrated detective meta-story that keeps telescoping in on itself and conflating the protagonist’s search for clues with the reader’s search for narrative truth if such a thing even exists because the authenticity of all narration is in doubt, etc. In short, a book that makes normal human readers want to drown themselves in sputum. So basically we are talking about a Chilean or maybe Brazilian Paul Auster here. And we all know that Paul Auster is a serious dicknibbler.
I’ve been meaning to read something by Paul Auster but I never seem to get around to it.
I’m also going to hazard a guess that 2666 is about the future, specifically the year 2666, so there’s probably some kind of futuristic thing going on as well. By that, do we mean, say, nano-bots hovering and whizzing around in some exciting way? No. It’s probably more boring. It’s probably something about the future of government. I have no interest in reading about that. That sounds excruciating.
There’s a chance that Roberto Bolaño is actually from the Philippines, which would change everything. It would mean that the technology part is way more interesting, but the psychology is clumsy and under-conceived and ultimately sabotages the enjoyability of the entire book. This is the case with every Asian book ever.
Sometimes in The New Yorker two tabby cats are grimly enduring a long-failed marriage. That’s my favorite.
rating: ★★½☆☆
2666, Roberto Bolaño (2004). Editorial Anagrama: Barcelona.
