2666 by Roberto Bolano

I need to write a review for this book. I've been putting it off for days. I'm not entirely sure that I'm smart enough - at least, to understand it fully, I feel like I'd need to read it in small chunks along with other very smart people and unpack it, bit by bit. Because, wow, do I ever know I'm missing things.

But hey, I finished it! That was an achievement in and of itself. It was one of those books I took out of the library, and proved not amenable to reading large chunks at a time, so I took it slow, renewed it three times, and still had to take it back to the library. Then, a month or two later, I took it out again and read the last book of the five that are contained here.

Let's start there, maybe. This is five books, which apparently Bolano thought would be published individually, one a year. They were connected, but not a series in any way that we're familiar with. After his death, his literary executors decided to publish them together as one. So we have five very different books in one novel.

The first is about academia and English professors and love triangles and obsession over one particular author and the battles that take place over interpretations thereof. It's exacerbated by the fact that the author is still alive (probably), but no one has ever seen him.

The second section is about another academic the four from the first book met in the town of Santa Teresa, in Mexico. It covers his life, his sort-of disgrace, the daughter he's trying to raise by himself, and the complicated relationship he had with his wife.

Then we skip in the third book to a journalist who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, but ends up staying to try to hunt down a story of the many, many women who have been killed in the town.

The fourth book is all about the murders, a relentless litany of the dead and disappeared, those killed by one or more serial killers side by side with those women killed by domestic partners. This juxtaposition is stark - the mad killer(s) side by side with more prosaic and intimate dangers of men who have no problem taking out their frustration, anger, and jealousy on the bodies of women. We also follow along with the police investigation here. It's a difficult book.

The last book, the only one that I read recently, is about the mysterious author from the first story, and through that, we see how he's intertwined with the other books. We follow his early life in Germany and the many twisty paths he took to literary immortality.

Each is interesting in its own way, and there are obvious ways in which these books intertwine, but I also feel like there's a lot more just outside my reach, and to get it, I'd have to go back, and read more closely, and converse, and research. And...I'm not going to. Not right now. Maybe someday down the road, when I'm in the mood for that kind of deep, prolonged dive.