Junot It: Chilean Author Robert Bolaño’s 2666 Is The Best Book Of All Time, Ever

Time takes a look at Chilean writer Robert Bolaño’s last novel, 2666. Part mystery, part crime story, all 898 pages of beautifully-written prose that can be confusing and often meandering, 2666 is heralded by Time as the best book of 2008. First, let’s get to know a little about this –unfinished– book’s author. We’ll try to do it in only about, oh. 897 pages:

Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, the son of a truck driver (and boxer) who moved the family to Mexico City when Bolaño was still a boy. He dropped out of high school to pursue his obsession with poetry full-time. After a brief and not very successful return to Chile — he was imprisoned by Pinochet as a radical, then released when it turned out that he had gone to school with his guards — he fell in with a band of antiestablishment poets called the infrarealistas, who specialized in showing up at the readings of better-known poets and yelling at them.

That’s a practice we can certainly get behind:

In 1977 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 as an infrarealista. But by then he was already suffering from the liver disease that would kill him at age 50. He had all but completed 2666 when he died.

So what sort of novel would a drop-out, former prisoner, recovered heroin addict, recovered poet with liver disease dream up? A long one. That also happens to be, we’re told, quite extraordinary. The story is divided into 5 parts, titled “The Part About Fate”, “The Part About The Crimes,” etc. The story takes several turns, following one series of characters and their travails in or around an industrial town in Northern Mexico called Santa Teresa, only to later drop these completely for a new round of exhaustively-described characters. Only to, then, drop these. The last parts of the novel concerns the systematic rape and murder of women in and around Santa Teresa. The last part introduces a character of which we’d only heard of earlier in the book, but had not yet had the opportunity of meeting. So the book would seem to come full circle as it simultaneously lays littered with, perhaps intentionally crafted, loose threads:

There is, of course, something incontrovertibly Bolañoesque about 2666 itself: an enigmatic, unfinished novel, translated from another language, orphaned by its author. The world, whose number Bolaño indisputably had (was it 2666? We never learn), has subtracted Bolaño from the picture, and we must read his work in his absence. But in a tragic, paradoxical way, his death completes the book: it touches 2666 with the disorder and rootlessness that is its subject. And what more could Bolaño have told us anyway? With what final wisdom could he have supplied us?

How do you guys feel about reading this book along with us? Guanabee Book Club, anyone? Yes, no, illiterate?

Bolaño’s 2666: The Best Book of 2008 [Time]