Some thoughts on Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.
Map of Ciudad Juarez cc-by-sa Open Street Map
Films and books purposefully shrink the world, connecting continents with the efficiency of budget flights. Thrillers act out tour guides, triggering our holiday memories, interrupting the tourists at their cafe tables. Protaganists effortlessly move their havoc from one tourist destination to another, the globe becoming a series of themed computer game levels to quickly conquer. This restricted environment enables novels to be built on an improbable, but familiar foundation of coinciding events and characters. It makes possible the easy encounters and plot twists which make stories work. We consider ourselves sophisticated as we use literary novels to familiar with alien places, moving deeper than a city break can ever take us.
2666 has a similar global reach, spanning two continents. But it does the opposite. The world is returned to its true scale.
Disappearance
The long book directly shows how its protagonists can disappear. The first part is based on the mystery of a writer’s true identity, which is never solved. The upset of the Second World War shows how families are split, people are never seen again. A mother loses all sight of her son, and her brother too. Life becomes a series of fleeting encounters. We use history to merge details of the war into one huge, horrible sequence of events – but Bolano shows how solders on the Eastern front experienced a wholly different, incommunicable reality to those on the West.
Later we glimpse Archimboldi using the internet to search for old names, “forgotten occurrences” – we don’t know if he succeeds.
Anonymity
The unending, relentless series of murdered women in Santa Theresa manifests as endless lists of names and place names. We can only guiltily scan, ignore, skip, generalise, fusing all into one, reacting with the disinterest of a newspaper reader. It’s like reading a phone directory – except that this matters, as it’s people, who we should care about. The book is a barely concealed documentary, based on real killings in Ciudad Juarez. Perhaps only for a reader in the UK, the sheer unfamiliarity of Latin American names renders them meaningless all the same, easily dismissed and indistinguishable.
Distance
A single city is centre stage, but is bewilderingly vast, with murdered girls appearing without a hope of finding a connection. Detectives follow the threads, to find them bewilderingly short. The victims don’t have long enough stories to form a join – they are too busy working for the Maquiladoras (low wage factories assembling products to be sent over the border to the USA)
Santa Theresa is ignored in Mexico, let alone the USA, which it almost touches. It is surrounded by desert, or unthinkably vast rubbish dumps, which are mistaken for mountains. Drug lords proceed in cavalcades of expensive cars to their remote ranches, where they orgy uninterrupted.
The American counterpart of the city is rarely mentioned, except as the border which attracts hopeful migrants. When a visitor from the other half disappears, the Sheriff is determined to find out what happened. He makes progress, doggedly following a lead to its end – he gets somewhere, but in the scale of things, it’s nowhere.
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