2666 Part Uno: Los Criticos (Review)

I know, I know. It’s 201—24! and Bolaño is so last decade (or two, or more). Everyone’s heard the story of his rise from total obscurity to one of the biggest literary darlings of the 21st century. He was so hot right now.

I was late to the party anyway. I’d only picked up The Savage Detectives because I’d been hearing so much about this “Chilean poet” and I had basically planned on hate-reading it. I was sure that I would find it to be mushy and lame, like I considered almost all poetry to be at the time. I was wrong. I fell in love with Bolaño’s brand of storytelling for many of the same reasons others have: the sense that reading was fun, and important, and that its importance was a big part of what made it so fun, so vital.

All of that is old hat. I’m not saying that it’s a gimmick, but that initial Reading is Fun moment can’t by itself sustain further re-readings. Could Bolaño survive a second go-around? I’d have to find out. I’d recently re-read Distant Star, and I’m convinced that it, along with 2666 and The Return , comprise his best work. I feel this way because it is these two novels and one short story collection that most explicitly illustrate Bolaño’s primary thesis, which is that the pursuit of imaginative literature will inevitably end in the Void.

In Part I: The Part About the Critics, this kenoma is manifested on earth by Archimboldi. If 2666 is a satanic bible, which I believe it to be, then the elusive German writer and subject of the critics’ obsession is the Antichrist. This opening novel is one of the most overlooked Parts of 2666; I certainly didn’t think it was that big a deal when I first read the entire book, at least not in comparison to Parts IV and V. I remember thinking, “OK, he’s doing his Third Reich thing here.” I remember reading an interview with Bolaño where he said that 2666 had a secret center – to paraphrase – that there was a parallel story happening the whole time, a story in which zero words were dedicated. At the time I thought I could see it, he was talking about Parts IV and V, I thought. It was that secret center that had been calling to me recently, and not wanting to go through The Part About the Crimes again (I have a seven month-old daughter, so that part is impossible), I chose Part I just to see what would happen.

After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings.

I realized that the secret center is alive and thriving from the very first pages, that Bolaño wasn’t being “mundane” (there’s a tendency these days to equate mundanity with literary profundity), he was in fact crafting a slow-burning thriller, like one of the asadas presided over by an archon in the deserts of Mexico. The fantasy-characters of the critics have what a naïve, pre-coup Bolaño must have dreamed of as ideal lives, jet setters with disposable income, the luxury to have refined tastes, who are published often, and get to devote their lives to the obscure literature of a wildcard that goes mainstream. How they actually feel about Archimboldi is never explicitly mentioned, except for the comment of his “delicate” descriptions of pain and shame (which is Bolaño talking about himself). Their pursuit of Archimboldi the human being is Bolaño’s metaphor for Art butting up against Truth, and Truth is the Void. By the end it is unclear whether he even respects the critics; I suspect he still does, but they’ve been tainted, their inability to adequately sense the horror around them in Mexico betrays a coldness, their insistence on searching for a writer when the world is ending a pedantry that even Bolaño finds disappointing.

Without its secret center, this novel is mundane and boring, and one could easily ask (and many have) What’s the big deal? This dude is overhyped, they say. They’re like tourists in a Juarez flea market lookin’ for a cheap deal on a counterfeit handbag, they don’t realize the Void is all around them.