"2666"

2666 was the only book I read during the winter of 2008-09. Busy personal schedules took a deep cut into my usual leisure reading time, and for 4 months or so, this nearly thousand-page epic was the focal point of my coffee table. It was probably better this way, because the constantly shifting story arcs paid no attention to regiment or structure. Nor did the writing style, or the rhetoric of the storytelling. It plumbed depths that I have never experienced in literature, and to savor them over an extended period of time was just as satisfying as the read itself.

2666 is a novel that leaves you on your own, grasping for meaning and toiling in uncertainty. And it's barely even a finished novel, as Roberto Bolano ran out of life at age 50 while furiously composing the five chapters that make up this book. That in itself creates the vast undertones of conflict, mystery, and themes of natural human degeneration that sweat through every page. How can you wrap your head around that kind of reading experience? I can't think of any other way to explain than this excerpt:

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Is it that conflict and dark realism we're drawn to? Is the written story no longer a means of communication, but rather a reflection of what we're scared shitless of? I have my own personal conclusions about the array of characters and what was really happening in the village of Santa Teresa, but I feel too mentally exhausted to even talk about them. I wouldn't even know where to begin. Besides, a novel like this doesn't benefit from review; it exists in complete independence from any such attempt. I'd rather just place it on my bookshelf and think about how utterly fantastic it was.