If the history of twentieth century literature is one of deepening disorder, a collapse of tradition in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s storm of progress, then “2666” is a novel with ambitions to exist at that storm’s center.Īt nearly 900 pages, “2666” perfects the digressional style that Bolaño honed throughout his entire fiction career. Bolaño manages to etch the host of themes that characterize his entire body of work-the community of literature, popular culture, and Latin American politics-into a structure that renders them at once inherently meaningless and infinitely meaningful. Written as he slowly succumbed to a failing liver before his death in 2003, “2666” is a work of sheer enigma, the cryptic suturing of staggering indifference and nonrelational pain. If “The Savage Detectives” gives us hope for this dream, then “2666,” Bolaño’s posthumously-published final novel, released in 2004 in his native Spanish and translated into English last year, is the violent and inevitable calamity that finally shakes us all awake.

Bolaño suspends Madero’s fate: as readers, we know he will never see his mentors again, but in the novel’s final moments, Madero seems poised for a life of happiness, however fleeting. “Oh, Lupe, how I love you, but how wrong you are,” he replies in his journal, to himself and to us. “Someday the police will catch Belano and Lima, but they’ll never find us,” his girlfriend Lupe assures him. But by the book’s end, the two have parted ways with Madero and the last pages belong, fittingly, to him. The intervening chapters of the novel’s larger arc outline the movements of Belano and Lima from Mexico to Europe to Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa across three decades, through the testimony of friends, lovers, acquaintances and total strangers.

Madero is the disciple, devotee and faithful hanger-on of two older poets, Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s alter ego throughout his fiction) and Ulises Lima, who follows the pair through the Sonora Desert in flight from a violent pimp and his henchmen. “The Savage Detectives,” Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s greatest novel, is a kaleidoscopic fictional autobiography-a treatise on youth, love, literature and death-whose frame is the journal of the Mexican poet Juan García Madero.

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