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...Bolaño moved to Europe and misspent an entire decade there as an itinerant laborer, living the life of a poète maudit and striking up an acquaintance with heroin. But in 1990, finding himself a husband and father, Bolaño decided to kick the smack and take up writing fiction in the hope of supporting his family. His prose turned out to be better than his poetry. In 1998 the publication of The Savage Detectives vaulted him into the first rank of Spanish-language literature, right up there with all those writers he had mocked...
...down. They are alone and bewildered in a squalid, industrial Mexican city. During that suspended moment - with the smell of revelation in the air but the actual article nowhere to be found, as if the author had accidentally left it in his other coat - Part 1 ends. Bolaño has not told us what Archimboldi's books are about, or anything about them at all besides their titles...
...slowly going insane, and then again into another genre entirely, a hard-boiled yarn about a journalist sent to Santa Teresa from New York City to cover a boxing match. It only becomes clear in Part 4 - "The Part about the Crimes" - that Bolaño is performing these lateral leaps the better to observe from all sides what the reader only gradually recognizes as the book's true subject: the horrific serial rape and killing of hundreds of women in and around Santa Teresa. Part 4 consists of a ruthlessly precise forensic catalog of those killings, complete with torn...
...novel that any responsible critic could describe with words like brisk or taut. (Not like all those other brisk, taut 898-page novels.) That's not Bolaño's method. He's addicted to unsolved mysteries and seemingly extraneous details that actually do turn out to be extraneous, and he loves trotting out characters - indelible thumbnail sketches - whom we will never encounter a second time. If three people spend the night at a hotel, you can count on Bolaño to stop the story cold for 10 pages while he describes each of their dreams...
...relentless gratuitousness of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which builds into something overwhelming that hits you all the harder because you don't see it coming. This is a dangerous book, and you can get lost in it. How can art, Bolaño is asking, a medium of form and meaning, reflect a world that is blessed with neither? That is in fact a cesspool of chance and filth? In Part 2 of 2666 the philosophy professor, whose name is Amalfitano, recreates one of Marcel Duchamp's ready-made artworks: he hangs up a geometry...