Preliminary observations and predictions about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a long, ambitious novel that might be TOTALLY dope.

I learned of Roberto Bolaño last fall, but it wasn’t until this month that I purchased 2666. As with any novel that gets unmitigated praise, I was skeptical of its lasting import. Nor am I completely convinced of its value having just begun it. But my first impression is that it is a tremendous book, and very likely canonical. It is also a book that few purchasers will read beginning to end. The New Yorker recently declared January National Reading 2666 Month, and suggested that the citizens of the country assign themselves one of the five books contained therein, and then everyone could just compare notes. I don’t think that this is necessarily the most effective way to metabolize a novel, but Flatmancrooked welcomes any suggestion that might bring a community together around reading.

2666 is a daunting thing to look at on the table. My copy sits near War and Peace, and I must say that Bolaño’s masterpiece isn’t much slimmer than Tolstoy’s. And without knowing the direction 2666 will eventually take (I’ve deliberately avoided any reviews divulging its plot), at first glance it appears to be as ambitious in scope as War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov, if Dostoevsky had, while being Dostoevsky, also been Jorge Luis Borges.

I had the pleasure of reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the first time last year, and realized that Nabokov had carried to its logical conclusion one of Borges’ stories. That isn’t to say that Pale Fire borrows one of Borges’ plots. But whereas Borges might have written a short story about a book that consisted of an epic poem and the editor’s notes about that poem, but whose narrative was only comprehensible if the two pieces were read together (so that the notes illuminated the poem, and the poem the notes), Nabokov actually wrote the book—epic verse and commentary both. I bring this up because, unless he is misleading me, Bolaño has given himself a similar task.

The beginning of the first book of 2666—“The Part About Archimboldi”—concerns the discovery (separately, by four different scholars) the oeuvre of Benno von Archimboldi. Like the characters obsessed with Archimboldi, Archimboldi himself is an invention of Bolaño’s, and I believe it is in this invention that I’m sensing Bolaño’s affinities with Borges, or better say Nabokov. Imagining a body of work written by an imagined author requires, if not a largeness of soul, a largeness of mind. Borges and Nabokov possessed that largeness of mind, and Bolaño appears to have it also. But what Borges may have lacked, at least through the composition of Ficciones, was a certain largeness of soul. “The Gospel According to Mark” and to a lesser extent, “The Aleph,” are instances of Borges balancing the emotional and the intellectual, but there are few other examples.

Nabokov was, on the other hand, perhaps since Shakespeare, the greatest harmonizer of the heart and the brain. I haven’t gotten deep enough into 2666 to make a prediction such as, “Bolaño is Nabokov’s emotional equal,” but what is striking in the first section of “The Part About Archimboldi” is that I am as astonished by Bolaño’s intellectual heavy-lifting as I am intrigued by the relationships amongst the four scholars: I like their brains and hearts equally, likely because, it seems, Bolaño prepared both organs with equal care.

These preliminary assumptions may prove embarrassingly premature, but I’m reading 2666 with the same, if not more, excitement that I read Jim Harrison’s Returning to Earth, and that was an almost exclusively emotional novel. Now, it appears, I also have a brain to enjoy.

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Over the next few months, Kaelan Smith will be brandishing his opinion about 2666 like a sword. Check back regularly, and take care not to get cut. Oh!

By Kaelan Smith