Overall so far – it seems like a book for literature teachers, typa shit Ms. Steg would faun over, similar flavor as A Dance to the Music of Time. It's a saga, and a drama of characters where the cool/exciting things that are going on occur only at the periphery, as things for the characters to talk about. There is a subtle, grander plot stringing together the 5 parts, but it's intentionally nebulous as an artifact of the publication history, see the forward to the novel.

Part I: The Part About the Critics: 6.5

Very much just a drama about characters in a love quadrangle. I think Bolaño is playing to the readers' expectations for what a story (any story) ought to be about, and subverting them (humorously), but nevertheless, this is just a story about characters, whom are satirical caricatures of literary academics who all think far too highly of themselves. There's some interesting symbolism and what the characters talk about is often intriguing, but that seems like a "gotcha: you too are an intellectual ass" from the author lol.

If nothing else, this sets the stage for the subtle plot transcending the five parts with the hunt for Archimboldi, as well as foreshadowing that there will not be any great satisfying payoff...

Part II: The Part About Amalfitano: 8

Haven't finished this part yet, but I'd liken it to the chapters on Septimus Warren Smith from Mrs. Dalloway as we follow a man who is going insane. And it's good and entertaining. Dark, but dry, and still funny throughout, with some pretty good imagery again (in part I, it was the painter who cut off his own hand, in this chapter it's the geometry text book he's hung out to dry to see if nature can learn anything from what we have to say about it).

The killings are discussed more, but from the unreliable narrator, which adds a bit more flavor to the overarching plot as well. At first, we only heard about the killings from the critics who were less concerned with the violence and more interested in the fact that the city they're taking place in might harbor their Archimboldi. Now we get an earful from a guy who's arguing with the ghost ? of his grandfather who he's convinced thinks him a homosexual. Still a lot of yapping for not a lot of action, but I'm certainly intrigued enough to continue

Okay, end Part II: locking in an 8, that was fun.

Part III: The Part about Fate: 7.5

I think Bolaño is describing purgatory and trying to make the reader feel like they're in it by rugpulling every little bit of fascinating detail that could be latched onto out from under them. So far it strikes me as very bland, but simultaneously captivating bc of the way he'll sneakily introduce something really intriguing, like the inner monologue of a character who is actively going insane, and then just move on leaving me like "wait, go back to that?!!" But nevertheless he proceeds ~like a cloud over the arid mexican landscape~ teasing some irony out of the fact that he knows he had some promethean fire right there, but just wants to cast a light on some other things for awhile.

I think the part about the Critics is about irony, the part about Amalfitano feels like it's about madness, and the part about Fate about identity?

re madness: not just madness, but the nature of madness because Amalfitano goes mad during this chapter, but about the nature of madness itself and what it means to go mad. This is made clear from the dialogues that he has with himself/the voice in his head/his grandfather/father about whether or not he is going mad, directly alongside his convictions about telepathy and geometry.

Interesting parallels in the part about Fate which begin to tie the other prior parts together. Fate is filling in for the sports journalist to cover the title fight who died suddenly, and in Santa Teresa he encounters the detective who replaces Kessler (who also got murdered!!). Once again in this chapter, Bolaño siubverts expectations with an exciting scene describing a lower-card fight building up to the title fight which is over and done with w/o any fanfare in like 2 sentences.

Charlie Cruz being concerned with the sacrosanctity of kino + knowing that he got grilled by Amalfitano about hexagons is really funny

Okay, fin "The Part about Fate" and I'm becoming increasingly intrigued. Next part is "The part about the crimes" so u know it's bout to go down

The final foreshadowing that Achimbaldi is the killer per the german singing in the prison is chefs kiss, and I already know that we'll probably not get the satisfaction of any such confirmation. There must be something significant about the characters' names.

Rosa Menendez + Rosa Amalfitano / Oscar Fate + Oscar amalfitano.

Also more hilarious Amalfitano bits where, between Rosa, Fate, Cruz, and Guccho, he's still somehow the most coked up character.

Part IV: The Part about the Crimes: 8.5

Halfway through the part about the murders which takes up a third of the whole book and just ... damn.

This chapter is a plunge into darkness, perhaps the most violent and inumane stuff I've ever read, in large part because of the presentation. It's a month-by-month series of police reports of murders of the women of Santa Teresa for the decade spanning '92 - 04, interwoven with these "fun" little vignettes of the detectives or characters that find the bodies. The summary of the book on the inside flap mentions "and the murders of 200 - 300 women in Santa Teresa" which I thought would be a plot point i.e. that a couple hundred women had been murdered, but no – that is the plot of this book, making the first three parts hilarious by comparison. Bolaño beats the reader into submission and desensitizes them to the gruesome crimes unfolding in the god forsaken city.

There's more connections with names, e.g. many people names Pedro and Rosita, but I don't think it matters anymore for these characters which are just death tolls, and maybe it didn't matter in the earlier chapters either. It's an impressive stretch of fiction, and it's difficult to read. A lil "Cmd + F" indicates that a rape occurs on average once every 10 pages across the whole novel, but most of them occur in this 250pg chapter, so once every three pages or so, and the dry, police-report-esque rhetoric used to describe the victims is so dense.

It's brutal, and really good as well. Not a page turner, and not a mystery, not quite a social commentary either, and also not smut. Cannot wait to see wtf the final Part holds. So far this section is an 8.5

Finished with the grueling Part about the Murders, locking in an 8.5. Some thoughts:

• Desire & art, more than anything else can make sense of humanities collective psychoses

• What’s at stake, established within the first thirty pages, is how quickly desire shape-shifts and turns feral if enough pressure is applied. The pressure can be anything, poverty or insecurity or madness or imminent death. Or simply the sense of impunity that comes with power. The man laughing in the bar at night becomes, by day, the pig-masked child rapist in the black van with tinted windows. The virile Romanian general is stripped naked and crucified by his own men. Two docile academics are reduced to beating a Pakistani cab driver almost to death. Russian Jews are murdered by their former comrades, or else rounded up by the Germans. An artist cuts off his hand for money; a man (several) kills his wife out of love (and jealousy). The devotion to art and literature becomes secondary to the hunger for money, sex, revenge, and personal validation. Bolaño sums up his novel’s mordantly comic cynicism in Part Two, where Professor Amalfitano argues with the voice in his head: “So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.” And, actually, it is.

For the bulk of this chapter, I wished it wasn’t crafted so expertly so that I didn’t have to keep confronting the worst that the human race has to offer. So much rape and prison rape, and murder. There's meta dark humor about being grateful for a "normal strangling."

The rare participants of consensual sex scenes are endowed with superhuman stamina, always fucking for a specific amount of hours >> 6hrs, where the lust between those people supersedes their common interest in literature, art, or Archimboldi. This chapter, especially juxtaposed against the first, really seems like an indictment of the male sex and/or Mexico.

Mexico/Santa Teresa is defo purgatory per the dialog at the end which reads "In Mexico, a person can be more or less dead."

This book/chapter is the same caliber, if not more, evil as Carrion Comfort. But, in the absence of supernatural villainous elements, we're just left with the ambient depravity of humanity, which makes the sexual violence much more oppressive and inescapable.

Part V: The Part about Archimboldi: 7.75

I think if Bolaño were German, this would be a weird / poor taste chapter since it's very humanizing to Nazis while still getting into the horrors of the Eastern front against the Russians and Poles.

More commonality w/Carrion Comfort w.r.t. the really passages about exterminations, but this time told from the POV of someone who was "just taking orders."

The tirade from the guy who lends Hans Reiter the typewriter about what it means to be a writer and how all stories that aren't masterpieces are trash and concealment is very interesting. There's a lot of meta-commentary on the concept of the novella or short story vs. the fledged novel, from the critics ofc, Amalfitano, and then the people Archimboldi interacts with, and it's pretty funny. Not a singular author self-insert, but rather an amalgamation of many.

Reiter == Writer facepalm. The genesis of his nomme de plume is really cool
It's kind of funny that Archimboldi doesn't really associate with other German writers much strictly because they stay at different hotels when traveling, and in an era where he has a computer and is pretty well-connected in his literary circles, his social life is largely dictated by proximity. Old dogs...

Very nice "aha" moment where Lotte finds one of her brother's books, which itself includes a thesis for 2666's "purpose."

Long chapter, we got some closure, but still more of a standalone rollercoaster than a fifth part of five.

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