Books

2666 by Roberto Bolaño; translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; FSG, $30; out November 2008

SYNOPSIS
First published in Spanish in 2004, 2666 is Chile native Bolaño’s most ambitious work, exceeding even his first epic, The Savage Detectives (published in the U.S. last year). The nearly 900-page tome is really a series of five novels, all orbiting—closely or at a distance—obscure German writer Benno von Archimboldi and a rash of unsolved murders in a Mexican border town called Santa Teresa (which is loosely based on the notoriously violent Ciudad Juárez).

In Brooklyn translator Natasha Wimmer’s hands, Bolaño’s prose falls somewhere between the expansive detail of Tolstoy and the visionary mania of Burroughs. The heroes in 2666 are literary outcasts like Bolaño himself: They’re bent on changing the world with writing, even while being tossed about by events beyond their control.

BACKSTORY
For much of his life, Bolaño, who died of liver disease in 2003, was a vagabond, spending short stints in Mexico and Chile before finally settling in Spain. Having been caught up in Latin America’s turbulent politics, Bolaño was briefly imprisoned in Chile for revolutionary activity after the Pinochet coup of 1973—an experience that proved to be a source for much of his writing. Though he started as a poet, Bolaño turned to fiction largely to support his wife and children. Shortly before he died he requested that 2666 be published as five separate books; he thought that releasing it in installments would bring more money to his family. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, decided that the books were intended to be a single work and should all be published together.

According to Wimmer, Bolaño’s impending death was an inspiration for 2666. “He was writing against a pretty ominous deadline,” she says, “and the book itself is all about death, and is consumed with the notion of legacy.” Bolaño is considered a major writer in the Spanish-speaking world, and his reputation in America has grown over the past several years. 2666 is likely to bring the craze to a fever pitch.

— Craig Morgan Teicher

EXCERPT

They met again at the postwar European literature colloquium held inAvignon at the end of 1994. Norton and Morini went as spectators, althoughtheir trips were funded by their universities, and Pelletier andEspinoza presented papers on the import of Archimboldi’s work. Pelletier’spaper focused on insularity, on the rupture that seemed to separatethe whole of Archimboldi’s oeuvre from the German tradition, thoughnot from a larger European tradition. Espinoza’s paper, one of the mostengaging he ever wrote, revolved around the mystery veiling the figure ofArchimboldi, about whom virtually no one, not even his publisher, knewanything: his books appeared with no author photograph on the flaps orback cover; his biographical data was minimal (German writer born in Prussia in 1920); his place of residence was a mystery, although at somepoint his publisher let slip in front of a Spiegel reporter that one of hismanuscripts had arrived from Sicily; none of his surviving fellow writershad ever seen him; no biography of him existed in German even thoughsales of his books were rising in Germany as well as in the rest of Europeand even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanishedwriters or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers, andwhere his work was beginning to circulate widely, no longer just in Germandepartments but on campus and off campus, in the vast cities witha love for the oral and the visual arts.

From 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, to be published in November by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2004 by the heirs of Roberto Bolaño, English translation copyright © 2008 by Natasha Wimmer. All rights reserved.

NEXT BOOK: To Siberia »

More in Books
Watch your language | Missive impossible | Pretty scary | The odds

ART | BOOKS | CLASSICAL | CLUBS | COMEDY | DANCE | EAT OUT | FILM | MUSIC | THEATER

DOWNLOAD ALL EVENTS: GOOGLE CAL | for iCAL

DOWNLOAD PDFs: November | October | September