“The Monster at the Heart of this Book: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and the Scene of Human
Suffering”
Andrew Martino, Southern New Hampshire University
At the beginning of Canto III of the Commedia, Dante the traveler comes upon the
following inscription in stone:
Per me si va ne la citta dolente,
Per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
The famous inscription above the gates of Hell alert the traveler (it doesn’t matter if the
traveler is the poet or the reader, for both are a kind of traveler) to what he or she is about
to experience.
The West owes a great deal of its understanding of the nature of Hell to Dante.
Dante’s concept of Hell and human suffering is thoroughly medieval, yet, the concept has
proven strong enough to stand the test of time and become embedded into the human
consciousness for hundreds of years. Although Dante’s vision of Hell is truly frightening,
it is, I believe, his portrayal of human suffering that has significantly stood out. The utter
lack of hope is the primary condition of Dante’s Hell, and every punishment suits the sins
committed in life.
Although many authors and artists have chosen human suffering as their subject,
there is perhaps no contemporary exploration of the subject as vast and affective as that
described by Roberto Bolano. With the posthumous publication of his masterpiece, 2666
in 2008, Bolano gives us the first epic of the twenty-first century. 2666 is a lengthy and
complex narrative that examines life in the last years of the twentieth century. Cut into
five separate, but interlocking parts, the segmental narrative shadows the life of a
reclusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi and the murders of hundreds of young
women in the Sonora Desert.
Part one depicts the lives and relationships of four academics, all of whom are
obsessed with the reclusive writer Benno von Archimboldi. “The Part About the Critics,”
as the first section is titled, reads like a quasi-academic novel. The Pynchon-like
Archimboldi has captured the imaginations of these critics and three of them travel to the
Sonora Desert in search of the reclusive author on a tip that he was last seen in the border
city of Santa Teresa. What happens to the three critics while there are there is, as we shall
see, central to my thesis. “The Part About Amalfitano” examines the life of a fifty-yearold Chilean professor teaching in Santa Teresa. Amalfitano has a daughter, Rosa that he
thinks may be in great danger. As the narrative progresses, Amalfitano becomes more and
more unhinged. “The Part About Fate” follows an African-American journalist to Santa
Teresa to cover a boxing match. While there, Oscar Fate becomes caught up in the story
of a series of murders of young women in and around Santa Teresa. “The Part About the
Crimes” is the fourth part of the novel. It reads like a series of police reports on the
murders of the young women. This is also the longest part and is, both physically and
metaphorically, at the center of the novel. “The Part About Archimboldi” returns the
reader to the reclusive writer Benno von Archimboldi. This part depicts the life of
Archimboldi from birth to old age in the style of a Bildungsroman.
Reading this epic, and it is an epic, is like watching a trail of blood run down a
drain. The drain is the quasi-fictional city of Santa Teresa, Mexico, located in the Sonora
Desert. The violence, especially against women, is a “true” representation of actual
events. Read in a certain way, 2666 is a novel that serves as a document for human
suffering. This paper is an attempt to not only put forth that thesis, but, and perhaps more
importantly, make some sense of a large and densely populated work of imaginative
fiction.
My inquiry into the theme of suffering in 2666 does not begin at the beginning of the
novel, but rather in the penultimate section entitled, “The Part About the Crimes.” This
fourth part is figuratively and literally at the heart of the novel. “The Part About the
Crimes” is an account of the unsolved femicides told by a series of narrators, often in
horrific detail. The location is Santa Teresa, Bolano’s fictional city based upon the real
city of Ciudad Juarez, in the Sonora Desert. Santa Teresa is a border town that
experienced an economic boom as a result of the NAFTA implementation in 1994,
championed by the Clinton Administration. However, like all economic rewards, there is
a residue of waste that comes along with it. For Santa Teresa that waste is the poverty and
relative obscurity of the working class Mexicans. For the most part they, particularly the
women, are victims of a capitalist society that thinks of them as standing reserve.
The action of this part of the novel begins when the body of 13 year-old
Esperanza Gomez Saldana is discovered. The narrator informs us that Esperanza was
probably the first to be killed, but that the discovery of her body marks a significant
event: from Esperanza on, “the killings of women began to be counted” (353). The bodies
of countless women, ranging from the very young to the middle aged, begin turning up in
vacant lots, by the side of roads, far into the desert. The detail with which the narrators
share this information is as cold and technical as that of a medical examiner. Consider the
following passage:
Esperanza Gomez Saldana had been strangled to death. There was bruising
on her chin and around her left eye. Severe bruising on her legs and rib
cage. She had been vaginally and anally raped, probably more than once,
since both orifices exhibited tears and abrasions, from which she had bleed
profusely. (354)1
The style of the narration is deliberately detached and cold. The reader has stumbled into
the heart of the narrative and as such he or she finds himself or herself drowning in a kind
of quicksand of clinical detail. It is as if the narrator is asking the reader to take on the
role of detective to his role of medical examiner.
The recounting of the crimes goes on for another 283 pages. “The Part About the
Crimes” constitutes the longest section of the novel, and is the most difficult to read.
After reading the first fifty pages or so the reader tends to get the point, yet the narrator
goes on and on. All together 108 bodies are “found” and described in the fourth part. The
question becomes, then, why does the narrator spend so much time and go into so much
detail describing the dead bodies of these women? In her essay “Alone Among the
Ghosts” Marcela Valdes writes, “Each one of these forensic discoveries is clinically
detailed—at 284 pages, the section is the longest of the book—and the resulting chronicle
of death is braided through the narratives of four detectives, one reporter, the chief
1 Bolano, Roberto. 2666. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2008. (page 354)
suspect in the crimes and various ancillary characters” (19).2 The reality described by the
narrators is one of unthinkable horror. “The Part About the Crimes” serves as a focal
point on a map of human suffering and loss. Those who narrate the deaths experience the
suffering in “The Part About the Crimes.” In most cases the reader is told very little about
the lives of the dead women. In fact, most of them remain nameless, thus adding the
breakdown of security one feels while reading the novel.
The suffering that takes places throughout the novel, and particularly in “The Part
About the Crimes” bleeds over onto the consciousness and patience of the reader. Yet, it
is quite hard to put the book down. The reader becomes like a spectator at an accident
scene, shocked and horrified, but unable to look away. We know that we are reading
fiction, but Bolano’s portrayal of the femicides is as real as any we’ve read about, and we
know that his fictional representation of those murders is found in reality.
The murders that take place in Santa Teresa places a spill over the city. The
murders represent a kind of plague that settles over the geographic location and, in turn,
affects all those who journey there. Not all who travel there end up dead, some encounter
a fate even worse. It is from the geographical location that we can begin to investigate a
deeper sense of suffering that emanates from the Sonora Desert and the city of Santa
Teresa. Virtually every character in the novel who travels to Santa Teresa is left
profoundly affected and damaged by what he or she encounters while there. Bolano
weaves a web of suffering and confusion around the characters that travel to Santa Teresa
2 Valdes, Marcella. “Alone Among the Ghosts.” Introduction to Roberto Bolano: The
Last Interview & Other Conversations. New York: Melville House Publishing, 2009.
(page19)
in the subtlest of ways. Characters take to drink, to visiting sex parlors, to getting food
poisoning, to descending into extreme states of madness and paranoia.
“The Part About the Critics” has three of the four critics traveling to Santa Teresa
to search for Benno von Archimboldi: Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Liz
Norton. Left behind because of health reasons is the wheelchair bound Italian Piero
Morini. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Liz Norton is sleeping with
both Pelletier and Espinoza, though not simultaneously; at least not yet. What begins as a
fact-finding research mission tailspins into a paranoia-laced and self-destructive abandon.
Once there the trio arranges to meet a so-called expert on Archimboldi by the name of
Amalfitano, a professor at the local university. Amalfiato’s story is recounted in the third
section. It’s clear from the very beginning that Santa Teresa is different from the cities
they have encountered throughout Europe. As the first part also shows, the critics travel
all over Europe attending various conferences. In short, they are all seasoned travelers.
Yet, when they arrive in Santa Teresa they quickly begin to disintegrate and break down.
All three begin to have recurring nightmares. Norton is the first to realize that the city is
wicked, that there is something with it, and with her in it.
When she leaves, Pelletier and Espinoza spiral further into a suffering that seems
to be caused by the city itself. Their sense of reality becomes warped and sinister, as if
something were hunting them to the ends of sanity. “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” (135). The narrator’s
allusion to reality as “paper scenery” is particularly interesting. Behind the scenery of one
reality, our daily lives and the relative comfort and sense of security with which most of
us live, lies another, more sinister and threatening reality; the reality of Santa Teresa. The
city itself serves as scenery for the critics as they carry out their search for clues that
might lead them to Archimboldi.
At the end of the first part Pelletier and Espinoza end up like two shades in
Hell, trying to recall how they got where they are and what it all means. The last words
spoken by Pelletier to Espinoza carry a resonant sense of gravitas. “’Archimboldi is here,’
said Pelletier, ‘and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.’” Not only
have Pelletier and Espinoza ended up as shades, but also they begin to realize that
Archimboldi is a shade himself; that they have been following a ghost.
The novels the critics have read, written on, and translated are all part of the first
reality: the beautiful and the sublime reality of our everyday waking world. Through their
obsession with the enigmatic writer, the critics fall into a paranoid state verging on
madness through suffering.
If the critics are left at the edge of madness, then Amalfitano has fallen into the
abyss. “The Part About Amalfitano” begins:
I don’t know what I’m doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitano said to himself
after he had been living in the city for a week. Don’t you? Don’t you
really? He asked himself. Really I don’t, he said to himself, and that was
as eloquent as he could be. (163)
The failure of language for Amalfitano, his inability to be eloquent, especially since he is
a professor of literature, signals the first step toward madness and suffering. Without the
grasp of language, one falls into a kind of madness that can only be remedied by the re-
acquirement of that language. Furthermore, the inability to express oneself constitutes a
suffering on an intellectual and emotional level.
Amalfitano’s suffering is perhaps caused by his inability to come to grips with
certain people in his past, such as his wife, and his tenuous connection with his live-in
daughter Rosa. Soon, he spots a black car parked frequently outside his home. He begins
to hear voices, and becomes concerned for the safety of his daughter. “Why did I bring
my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I
hadn’t seen yet? Because I really just want to die?” (196). Amalfitano’s self-argument is
the reasonings of a man about to plunge into the abyss of madness. The lines inform us of
his suffering and his inability to come to terms with where his life has ended up: in the
hellhole of Santa Teresa.
In this moment of crisis Amalfitano spots a book he has hung from his clothesline in the backyard. “And then he looked at Dieste’s book, the Testamento geometrico,
hanging impassively from the line, held there by two clothespins, and he felt the urge to
take it down and wipe off the ocher dust that had begun to cling to it here and there, be he
didn’t dare.” (196). The book represents reason and sanity, knowledge and security. To
Amalfitano, if the book can survive the harsh climate of Santa Teresa, then surely reason
can win out over insanity. Part of Amalfitano’s condition is to suffer without know
precisely why he suffers. In any case, the city of Santa Teresa remains at the center of the
storm.