2666

The following are my notes on 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. These notes are subject to change in the future.

Relevant Background Information

This book was posthumously released as one work, even though Bolaño’s intentions were for them to release as 5. His intentions were likely financial, given that he knew he was dying and wanted to provide for his family. The notes they constructed the manuscript for the book for were mostly complete.

Plot Summary

The Part About The Critics

We are introduced to two characters, Jean Claude-Pelletier, and Piero Morini. Both are interested in a writer called Archimboldi, and they translate his works. Both were graduate students when they started and publish theses about Archimboldi. Both are successful in bringing Archimboldi (a German author) to the forefront in their countries.

Pelletier’s character is described as having a dogged determinism towards pushing his career as the foremost Archimboldi scholar as a result of his ascetic graduate student youth where he toiled in poor conditions.

We are then introduced to Manuel Espinoza, a previously aspiring writer who studies Spanish literature in college. He starts reading German author Jünger as a graduate student but is slowly frozen out of the Jüngerian coterie. This same clique also repudiates his written works so he begins to be resolute that he isn’t a writer, and also that he is brave for still pushing forward. He also learns of his own immense bitterness and uses these things to push him forward to be a productive (in the literal sense only), graduate student. He ends this push by becoming a respected (in Bolaño’s own words “to the extent possible”) academic who studies German literature, and specifically has studied Von Archimboldi.

Espinoza, Pelletier and Morini all have iron wills and Archimboldi in common, but they also have something else in common, which Bolaño does not reveal to us yet.

We then are introduced to Liv Norton, unlike the previous three she is much younger and has no tragic introduction to Archimboldi, nor does she have their will or drive. She considers herself unaffected by social imperative and therefore is unconcerned with the “snare” of ends. She reads Archimboldi purely coincidentally and makes fast friends with our group of professors when she meets them at a German literature conference and defends their interpretations of Archimboldi. She is the only one who notices the oddities of Archimboldi, Italian surname for a German man, and he has a vowel ending first name which is uncommon for German men. Her friend speculates this is just a pen name.

These 4 then spend much of their time calling each other. After at rip to Avignon for a conference, at minimum Pelletier and Espinoza are in love with Norton. We are not told what passes through Norton’s head.

They are at a conference where they are being drowned out by analysis of English literature when a Swabian German tells a wonderful tale of meeting Archimboldi when he was working as a cultural promoter in a small town so wet and dark that the salty wetness was imbued in the bones of the people, where art and alcohol where the only respite from that chilling brine of an atmosphere. He meets Archimboldi and that night when they are out to dinner the local cultured woman tells a tale of being in Argentina and having her husband beat three local horse riders, but then the last rider, a little boy, the gaucho’s son, tells her that they designed it so that her husband would win the first two. This riddle is solved by Archimboldi who says that the gaucho also lost on purpose in order to keep the festivities of the night going, overcome by selflessness, but then was unable to keep with the charade and considered killing the rich German woman. They all wanted to learn more from the Swabian. Unfortunately, this Swabian is quite reserved and they don’t get much more out of him.

Pelletier and Espinoza steel themselves to talk to the publishing house. They are depressed about their loneliness. They get little from the employees there who have met Archimboldi, but are able to meet the owner, Mrs. Bubis, who is a strong willed and interesting woman. She entertains them with tales about other writers and her opinions about art. Mrs. Bubis tells them they can not meet Archimboldi, she won’t help them.

It’s on the walk back they realize Archimboldi can not fill their lives. Their will, their pursuit that they have steeled themselves towards from their meagerness in youth, they realize is fruitless. “They want to make love, not war.” This I suppose means that they are resolved to actually pursue Liz Norton.

Pelletier gets there first. They have an expensive dinner and sleep together. Norton responds to a tactful kiss with an ardent kiss back. They sleep together, and Norton goes to sleep. Pelletier recalls Espinoza and him watching a Japanese horror film, where Espinoza is struck by hatred for a character who torments another with a horror story. He is so struck he begins shouting and acting out how the helplessly tormented character should have acted, exposing some level of misogyny, but nonetheless being perceived tenderly by Pelletier. This misogyny is inline with Espinoza’s previously homophobic comment about Schnell, the editor in chief for Archimboldi’s publisher.

During this time Pelletier and Espinoza shower Norton with calls. Morini is forgotten by all but Norton, and “in his way, vanishes from sight”.

Norton eventually also sleeps with Espinoza. She, unlike with Pelletier, showers him with personal tales of her past and her past lovers. She sees Espinoza and Pelletier but only for one night at a time. She seems to not really be in love, and reveals she is an early divorcée. She seems to not be enamored with love and instead lives as freely as she can. This seems motivated by an early sexual experience with an older man, and a failed marriage with someone she viewed as a brute and as her inferior.

Espinoza in his typically primitive view of women hates that she talks to him about her past husband and her periods and all the unbecoming things he believes a woman shouldn’t disclose to a man. He also is knotted up by her engagements with Pelletier. He tells himself he won’t keep seeing her but he does.

She tells him she has told Pelletier about them. Pelletier very nobly is not incensed to learn she has more lovers but instead maturely leaves it to her but clarifies she must make a choice. Espinoza lies and claims he feels much the same. His worry over her womanly disclosures are allayed.

Pelletier calls him and they jovially talk, seemingly unaffected by their rivalry over Norton’s love.

Morini’s health seems to be declining. They all meet in Salzburg for another conference, where Liz seems unhappy, declaring Salzburg a shit hole internally because of music being ever present in their accommodation. Morini is laden with papers and books, as though the conference caught him at his busiest.

Archimboldi is potentially up for a Nobel prize in literature, but the greater public doesn’t seem to care so much about him, and no awards are given to him in Germany. This does cause the Archimboldi scholars to declare a truce and support each other’s work.

After this conferences Pelletier happens upon the Swabian’s story which as been published, it’s much the same but it includes an interesting few comments left out of the previous telling where we learn Archimboldi is Prussian, of some vague nobility. Our main characters are sure the Swabian is not Archimboldi given his stature, but they are unsure about the veracity of the story.

Pelletier is made to believe that Liz’s “cross to bear” her purportedly thuggish ex husband and the stories she tells about him are simply Liz’s way of manifesting her guilt for letting herself marry him. He is mistaken.

Pelletier and Espinoza call each other and realize together that they are civilized and will be friends, and will not be torn apart by Liz. They share positive sentiment in that virtue but then are left alone in the night, searching for something, perhaps the same thing the Swabian searched for in the window.

Liz tells Morini about her trysts, and he is not surprised. He tries to idly talk about other things but can’t. He asks about her ex-husband, accidentally referring to him as her husband, and she is clearly still affected severely by it based off of the follow ups. He contemplates talking about his illness, but eschews the idea. He then learns about a serial killer in Mexico who has killed hundreds. It interests him and he imagines love but soon forgets it.

Liz emails Morini about how up until the moment she emailed him she was in love with her ex-husband, but now she is past him. Ready for life. Morini notes how wrong she is, as he says nothing is ever behind us.

Norton has no close friends. Her relationship with Pelletier and Espinoza both progressed to the same degrees. She is unsure who she liked more. She considers them about equal as lovers, although for different reasons. She is very cold and analytical about their ability to have sex. She doesn’t seem really enamored with them at all.

Espinoza and Pelletier both saw themselves as a Ulysses, and they marginalized Morini to their sidekick. They believe him to both be a shrewd and solitary individual, but also to be someone who will be eventually struck down for his faux-enlightened above-it-all nature.

Morini met with Liz in London. Although he rejects staying with her. He has a pleasant time with her but nothing happens, more pleasant than he expected. He goes out to read, and a stranger assaults him with a story about how anodyne mug making drove him mad when it became modern. Before he was fine with it, but the mugs drove him crazy. Morini isn’t sure what to think of that. The stranger asks him to read the titles of the recipes in the book Morini is reading, and Morini does so. Then the stranger falls asleep. The stranger remarks before this Morini’s name is similar to the author of the book Morini is reading, Morini rejects this (although their names really are pretty similar).

He has lunch with Liz in a London upscale neighborhood that used to be cheap. In the story a painter gets obsessed with the pain of the neighborhood and its emptiness. He paints some good paintings of the neighborhood, but also paints a self portrait where he chops off his own hand, and then paints that mummified hands. He went mad and was sent to a convalescent home. The neighborhood then becomes expensive. Morini says he isn’t sure what to think. But he has an urge to weep or faint.

The story is interesting. Was the painter really mad, was it the extravagant but inauthentic display of cutting his own hand off that drove him mad. Whether that was real or not does it matter? The art was sent to some wealthy Arab, what did it really mean. Did the people moving their chase something pointless? Even if he was authentic would them moving there be as tragic? I feel similarly to Morini.

Nothing happens romantically between Morini and Liz. Morini inspects the paintings of the tortured artist Edwin Johns. He then goes back to Italy.

A Serb publishes a dry work that places Archimboldi as a man who existed. In it he has bought a ticket to Morocco. The scholars are relatively unimpressed by its dryness, but think it has a place in the ‘Archimboldian project’.

The Serb describes Archimboldi as a pachyderm. Old, stubborn and unchanging. He probably abandoned his flight as easily as he booked it. A flight to some promised horizon of joy not present where he lived in Italy like so many other bachelors. Doomed to crossing the amniotic sea and instantly aging. Realizing that he was in the past. Pelletier reflecting on this looked at himself and saw himself as that same aged empty bachelor as the Serb described Archimboldi.

Norton wanted space. She wanted to get away from Pelletier and Espinoza. She arranges for them to meet her in London. Pelletier arrives first and is initially calm about the whole thing, not expecting anything drastic to occur. Espinoza is late but is extremely worried. He thinks Norton is going to break things off with him and end up with Pelletier.

Norton makes Pelletier wait to discuss the matter with Espinoza. Pelletier is shaken and questions his friendship and life as he realizes he wasted his life and his friendship with Espinoza is keeping his life wasting and stopping him from ending up with Liz. He wishes Espinoza was late because his plane crashed. He turns on the TV and assumes the crashed plane is Espinoza’s. Espinoza arrives and Liz brings it up, and Espinoza immediately knows what Pelletier was thinking. Liz resolves to leave.

Pelletier contemplates a feeling of hatred towards a book that represented more about his frustrations with Liz. Espinoza thinks about how Archimboldi’s last work being published would mean the end of his productive life as an Archimboldi scholar, he also laments the threesome proposed as Pelletier would have used it to be “oh so modern” and beat him at the game of sex? Something like that.

All 4 attend a conference and they are distant. Pelletier and Espinoza attend some smaller conferences and finally discuss the elephant in the room. They don’t seem to come to a conclusion but get drunk together. Liz is distant from both.

Pelletier and Espinoza go to London together. Perhaps out of loyalty or friendship, which Bolaño says are much the same. They see a figure in the window. The figure does not abide by the social graces Liz expects of them. They go up and are frozen. Pelletier and Espinoza insult Alex Pritchard, the younger man who Liz is seeing. He threatens them. Liz asks him to leave, and he does so without issue.

Espinoza and Pelletier give Liz infinite power and say she can make any decision she wants whenever she wants because they are both completely in love with her. Whether they are lying to themselves or not is not said.

They still see Norton but it’s not great. Cold and dark. They see a lurid hospital from where they stay, a “post-nuclear nest”. Pelletier, Espinoza and Norton talk about having a threesome.

Pritchard warns Pelletier about Liz, and describes her as the medusa. Unlike them he is a real poet as he tells Pelletier “once you have her in your hands, she’ll blow you to pieces.”

Pelletier and Espinoza, dumb as rocks, try to interpret this through garbage analysis of Greek myth. They think Pritchard is Perseus who will kill Medusa (Norton), and that he is saying they will only find love after Norton is dead.

They go to see Norton, and they go out with her. They ask her to make a choice but she questions them and calls them jealous. This hurts them. As they are lovestruck they don’t push it further, and the three of them go out drinking. On the way back they are in a cab and a Pakistani cab driver, in a certainly misogynistic but, also certainly true way, pointed out that Liz was being extremely selfish, and Pelletier and Espinoza were fools for allowing it.

Pelletier and Espinoza commit a heinous crime and nearly beat the driver to death. They don’t make it right at all and immediately rationalize it all as completely acceptable.

Espinoza has a dream where he lives in a house overlooking the sea and Norton is with him. In it the people on the beach often look at the horizon to stop their menial activities. One day they look and leave. He then sees some rock like statue, where he makes out an arm emerge from the sea. It’s grotesque but beautiful.

Espinoza and Pelletier are guilty but they rationalize it away and blame the cab driver. They both start seeing prostitutes.

Pelletier falls in love with a prostitute Vanessa who is married to a Moroccan man who embodies freedom. He lets Vanessa do what she pleases and is not bother much with the vicissitudes of life. He thinks Vanessa is a perfect blunt person, she is headstrong and proud, not extremely self aware and extremely present.

Pelletier talks to Espinoza and in his classically misogynistic way he says “whores are meant to be fucked, not psychoanalyzed”. Espinoza is empty and cares little about women or their internal lives, Pelletier is an idiot who thinks he understands others personal and internal lives completely.

Espinoza doesn’t remember the prostitutes he sleeps with at all. He sleeps with women and is clearly affected by one, but pushes through and lets it go. Bolaño has said before that everything leads to emptiness eventually. Pain leads to emptiness. This seems to be the path that Espinoza takes.

Espinoza and Pelletier were rejuvenated by their affairs. They started meeting with and calling Norton more. They meet with Norton in London in a small gallery. Difficult conversation leads Espinoza to talking about his, Morini and Pelletier’s trip to Switzerland where he went to the insane asylum of the painter Edwin Johns, who Norton had told Morini about.

They get there and the asylum is much nicer than they expected. They meet Edwin Johns who is martial, thin, but put together. He has a prosthetic plastic hand. He has a book that he has given to his nurse on German literature that he never read. It has a deep connection to the three academics. Johns’ muses about coincidence:

“The whole world is a coincidence.” He has a friend who believes in change, and people, and will and revolution and humanity and order, and redemption, and progress. This friend doesn’t accept complete coincidence. He knows that pain brings more pain. People who suffer suffer more. They don’t get the luxury of coincidence. Johns disagrees, coincidence is the flip side of fate. Everything is coincidence. The world is brutal and decided. God makes senseless gestures at every moment on our planet, to the senseless creatures he produced. “In that osseus implosion we find communion”.

Morini asks Johns about the self mutilation. He is incredulous and asks Morini if he thinks he is anything like him. Morini says no. Then Johns leans in and says something to him, shakes Pelletier and Espinoza’s hands and then leaves. Morini disappears for days which worries Pelletier and Espinoza deeply. He eventually reappears. He was in London.

Morini says that John did it for the money. The depressed appraisal of inauthenticity I had perhaps rings true.

The owner of the gallery where they are eating tells a sad story of the ghost of his grandmother, someone he respected being disappointed in him for his failing business. This saddens Pelletier, Espinoza and Norton.

They all go to a conference where a young Mexican author speaks to them. All but Morini ignore him, and Morini therefore gets the chance to hear his story about how a friend met Archimboldi.

There is an older Mexican government official named El Cerdo (the pig), he is a mentor of sorts to Alatorre, and he meets Archimboldi when Archimboldi gets held up by some local cops and Archimboldi calls him. Archimboldi had his number because Mrs. Bubis gave it to him. Archimboldi goes out for a night of drinks with El Cerdo, and then heads off to Sonora, a poor and dangerous part of Mexico. Our scholars are bewildered as to why he would do this.

The four academics having heard this story keep it to themselves. Other Archimboldian scholars speculate wildly as to who Archimboldi is. They know he is a German man names Hans Reiter. They set off to find Archimboldi in Mexico, but Morini stays back. He has started has own voyage, into the dissolution of the self.

The three of them are in Mexico. Norton leaves the TV on, uncharacteristically. Another Taxi driver is beat at the hotel in Mexico they stay at. Norton contemplates a plan crashing, just as Pelletier did.

The scholars end up in Sonora. They are immediately judgmental of everyone and everything around them. A university dean calls them colleagues and they disappear up their own asses in condescension and arrogance laughing at the fact he did that. They are finally called the critics. An extremely fair assessment by Bolaño.

They meet Amalfitano, the local Archimboldi scholar, and they immediately judge him an empty failure. Bolaño continues to call them the critics.

The critics’ rooms each have something different about them. Norton two mirrors that can see each other, Espinoza a painting of men on horseback in the desert, and Pelletier a broken toilet, where the break appears violent. They each have dreams that involve the aberration of their rooms. Pelletier of the remains of violence and effluvium, Espinoza of the deserts whispers, and Norton captured by both mirrors. In Norton’s dream, just like in the dream of Morini in the pool where Norton is behind him but he mustn’t look at her face another character who looks like her but isn’t her also must be avoided by her gaze. She ends up studying this character while being terrified by it. It’s her but dead. It passes through every emotion, smile interspersed.

The critics respect Amalfitano more when they learn that he has translated Archimboldi when young. They ask him questions about this, he clarifies he is an exiled immigrant from Argentina. Pelletier provides his apologies, but Amalfitano says it is fine, as it disrupts fate. Fate is important.

Amalfitano points out Archimboldi isn’t god to the critics. They first let some ground go, but then roast him alive as they can’t live with that reality.

They call all the hotels, and Archimboldi isn’t at any of them. They pointlessly speculate why he would be in Mexico, and then call more places. Amalfitano suggests that it is likely El Cerdo made it up. He is looking for bread. He needs power. The critics ask why that would be different than any other literary critic in Mexico, pot slanderously prejudiced against the kettle.

Amalfitano provides a lengthy description of a state sponsored literature program. It has an endless machine and monster behind it, but no one can look it in the eye. Only dance in front of it and appease it as best as they can. This power needs to be managed, fed and cultivated.

Norton sleeps with both Pelletier and Espinoza. She goes to bed but doesn’t sleep and thinks about Morini. He lives in a still lassitude. He has surrendered himself to life.

The scholars have exclusively fruitless attempts at finding Archimboldi. Eventually Norton leaves. Amalfitano is clearly sad or stressed or both. Norton sends them a letter which probably says she is done with them. She laments about the city the way she laments about every city.

Espinoza is striking up a relationship with a rug vendor while Pelletier buries himself in Archimboldi. Espinoza’s relationship with Rebeca the rug vendor progresses.

Norton went to see Edwin John’s paintings in the city. She then goes to see Morini in Turin. They are in love and they announce it to each other. Pelletier and Espinoza left in the dust.

Espinoza and Pelletier talk to each other and realize that Archimboldi is in Santa Teresa, he is there and they won’t find him but this is the closest they will ever be to him. Their life’s work. The part about the critics ends with Norton’s email to Pelletier and Espinoza, she doesn’t know how long it will last but she and Morini are in love, and she hopes they understand.

The Part About Amalfitano

Amalfitano hates Santa Teresa and wonders why he is there. He thinks about his wife who is gone, and when he does so he sometimes laughs and sometimes cries.

She carries a switchblade everywhere, and is a very mercurial and spiritual woman. She is taken by a poet Amalfitano introduces her to and introduces a total history for them that couldn’t have existed which Amalfitano hears about in letters she writes him as she is gone.

The poet in Spain rejects her completely. He doesn’t care about her fantasy and remains in his asylum. Her friend Inma leaves, a knobby handed ratty older but not old austere woman. She is left in Mondragón, in the Basque country poor. A man believes her to be a prostitute and falls in love with her, but she doesn’t care or notice as she is in love with this poet, or at least the idea of this poet.

Eventually she leaves Spain, ends up in Paris and works as a cleaning lady. She is sick with AIDS which tells us the poet was gay, unlike what she claimed when she said being gay was a youthful attack on the natural order, as the philosopher he lived with was gay and died of AIDS. She visits Amalfitano one last time and they share very little before he lets her go again.

Amalfitano grows nervous and weary in Santa Teresa. He lets the Testamento Geométrico hang on a clothes line as he can not put his finger on where he got it and it disturbs him greatly and Duchamps once suggested people do this to see if the heavy axioms of such serious books could stand up to nature, or learn the facts of life. Funny little practice.

He gets more nervous when he hears a voice in his head, but his daughter Rosa at this point thinks he is growing crazy. In the background we learn of more killings in Santa Teresa. He doesn’t much care for his colleagues and wants to leave the city.

The voices continue, and when he goes on a trip with Professor Perez he feels bored and distant with the world even though he takes in it’s beauty. He wants distance from everyone in his life.

He meets the Dean Guerra’s son, who immediately talks to him about rage and lucidity with the world. Dean Guerra’s son thinks people are cowards till their last breath, that most people are corrupt to their core and have lost their respect. He picks fights, is armed, and goes nuts with the state of Mexico. Much like Amalfitano he hates it there, but Amalfitano doesn’t care much for him.

Amalfitano has a dream about a Russian philosopher who tells him life has cold reality but must also have a magic otherwise it all collapses into the garbage pit of history which collapses into the garbage pit of the void.

The Part About Fate

We are introduced to Quincy Williams, a man in pain. We know his mother is dead and it affects him deeply.

A very clinical description of Quincy dealing with the aftermath of his mother’s death is given. He doesn’t know many details about her life in the apartment she was in. He wants to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.

He is disturbed by the unsettled nature of fate he witnesses in his dream. He thinks that his mother would tell him to be a man and bear his cross.

He works for a magazine. There people call him Oscar Fate. Bolaño also starts referring to him by Fate. One of his co-workers was stabbed to death in Chicago. It affects him very little and he struggles to even remember details of who the person was.

He goes back to his mother’s place and talks to the neighbors. There he meets Rosalind, and the other woman who was in his mom’s apartment is also present, but sobbing in a backroom. Their mother is also dead. Their mother was very close to his mother. He doesn’t do a good job of comforting them or himself, he goes home and gets prepared to leave for Detroit from New York where he lives. He is working on the Barry Seaman file.

Fate is in Detroit and continues his usual uneasiness and emetic nature. He goes to the bar where Barry Seaman typically is and doesn’t find him. He then eventually gets a tip and finds him in his home. Barry Seaman is one of two founders of the black panthers, and now he is so old he has no more teeth. He goes with Barry to a park and then a church, where Barry delivers a sermon about danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness.

His story about danger is about how mothers are valuable and that which we are drawn to is often dangerous for us.

His story about money makes it clear that people spend money the wrong way and shouldn’t be scared to invest in themselves even if they will fail.

His story about food is really a story about hope and holding onto oneself when one is cast asunder by life. He is a grateful man who recognizes that his movement made the world move past him, but that there is still beauty to enjoy and experience.

His story about stars is about how things are really all semblances, and seeming is all we have. That metaphors help us make sense of these semblances. Some are useful and some are not.

His story about usefulness is about how one should take care of themself, and about how one should read. He specifically says the works of Voltaire were useful to him. Seaman seems like a good man.

Fate heads to the airport picks up the book on the slave trade his first profile in the magazine recommended he read on the slave trade. He reads it and it’s a dry and detailed account mixed with some personal commentary.

He flies to Tucson and begins the drive to the boxing fight he must cover since the other reporter has died. More chatter about the serial killer is heard on his way there. A long speech is given by a professor, presumably of criminology, who has caught serial killers before, about the nature of crime and of people and of the world and where it’s going and what it has been.

He says the world has always had crime and murder and torture and madness, but that writing and words had served as a filter to remove it from our lives. Children close their eyes when they are scared, and just like that people removed the death from their lives in their writings before now. The world isn’t getting worse, it’s always been bad, it’s always been brutal. People only wrote about the murder that was inside the societal walls they constructed. Slaves dying in ships, members of the French commune, that go no press. But a knife sharpener murdering his wife and mother, that stirred people into a fantastic frenzy. The professor says Mexico is booming, that the whole place is outside society. That the people there are best served going elsewhere.

Fate continues and gets to a place near Santa Teresa where he begins to cover the match.

He meets other sports reporters and doesn’t really like them. They are weird and racist towards him. He is a bit disconnected from life and wants to write more literary articles than his magazine lets him. He learns about the killings from a woman reporter who gets him to agree to go with her to interview the main suspect in prison, an American.

He then goes to the fight and meets up with Chucho Flores another sports writer, his friend Charly Cruz a movie buff, Rosa Mendez a friend of theirs who is a free spirit and kind of naive, and Rosa Amalfitano, who he clumsily falls in love with immediately. The fight is over very quickly and the Mexican fighter loses.

They go to some clubs and then Charly Cruz’s house. It seems like a confrontation between Corona and Chucho Flores breaks out, probably because of the poor performance of the boxer, and when Fate goes to check on Rosa he gets threatened with a gun. They might have been planning to rob Fate? It’s not clear. He knocks out Corona and leaves with Rosa and Chucho. He leaves Chucho on the street and goes to his hotel with Rosa.

Rosa talks about how she met them and got into this life. Met all of them at Charly Cruz’s video store. Then she meets Chucho and he courts her for a while. She ends up sleeping with him, and their relationship become strange.

Fate commits to going to a cyber cafe and continues to watch over a sleeping Rosa. They meet with Oscar after the police give them pursuit. Oscar uses his connection with Guerra to help them leave. They cross the border.

They enter the prison and meet the suspected killer. A tall blond German man who speaks many languages. Probably Von Archimboldi.

The Part About The Crimes

We learn about the deaths. First we hear about a little girl. Raped and strangled to death. Not the first killing but the first reported as a part of the killings. We learn about more killings, some by local men, others mysterious.

The police are at least partly complicit as they do not investigate heavily.

A new criminal appears, who pees in churches while crying and laughing and then assaults people and statues around him. The press calls him the demon penitent and gives him more attention than the killings.

More women are killed in some disturbed and varying ways. No one pays it any attention. A reporter comes down to Santa Teresa to write about the penitent but learns about all the pain buried in the South. He is intrigued to write about all of it but only writes his story about the penitent.

We also learn about the lead investigator Juan de Dios Martinez. He doesn’t take the case extremely seriously but does follow through on leads and investigate. He is far more interested in Elvira Ocampo the asylum director than the case, and as he asks her for details he clumsily makes it clear he is interested. No one has any urgency or interest in these deaths as the women are usually workers in maquiladoras, kids or both.

The women are almost always anally and vaginally raped. We are introduced to Lalo Cura. He is a boy when the police effectively kidnap him. He’s a born killer, and instinctually confident. He doesn’t take part in the raping the police station does.

A black peregrino is at a lot of the killings. We’ve heard of this car as the police car that Amalfitano talks to when Rosa and Oscar escape. It seems exceedingly likely the killer is the police, maybe specifically Guerra but more likely all of them.

After an American is killed, a sheriff from their town in Arizona, Huntsville, comes down to Santa Teresa to begin investigating seriously. Harry Magaña. He is a brutal but effective man and he learns about the man Miguel Montes who appears to be a part of the scheme that is killing all these women. The police, Chucho Flores, the embassy and many more seem to be involved. As Roncal says, everyone seems to be implicated. Harry seems to get ambushed and killed after making significant headway in the investigation.

We learn about a seer La Santa, who by all means is not a mystical reasoning believer, but who becomes a seer against her own will. Her real name is Florita Almada and she is by any description very virtuous. She cares for people and tries to spread her wisdom. She eventually is called onto TV where on the show she uncontrollably has a vision where she denounces Santa Teresa and the many killings of women, “her daughters,” that are happening there. “What does this enormous solitude portend.”

Lalo Cura demonstrates morals once more.

The women are typically clothes after they are killed in new clothes that are not their own. Often hastily, leaving flaws. The American consulate appears to be in on the murders.

The consul is involved, the state is involved and it’s clear everyone is guilty. The reporter stews on the deaths even though he is now in a better place. The seer Florita Almada continues to expostulate with the people about the killings in Santa Teresa.

The killings get more frequent and more brutal. Now with a signature, biting off the left nipple and slicing off the right breast. Brutality reigns supreme but city officials hint at not offending then wrong people and obliquely ask to keep the investigation lighthearted.

A tall blond man from a computer store is a new suspect. Isabel Urrea, the reporter who was shot, the first death we learn of, is revealed to have had connections to narcos. Pedro Rengife is revealed to be a narco. Lalo is learning all these things.

Klaus Haas is the computer store guy. He is brought and questioned but he denies being the killer even after being beaten. They imprison him, and even in prison he maintains his innocence. Less women are killed but the police are clearly trying to pin the killings on someone.

They imprison another gang for killing the daughter of a rich man. In prison they are tortured, raped and killed. Haas’ lawyer explains it’s all about money, everything else is nonsense.

Another gang is imprisoned so the murders after Haas’ imprisonment can be explained as Haas’ hiring goons to make him appear innocent. The public accepts this as he has ties to a narco. His ties are implied to not be the real cause of these murders, although they are probably real in the sense that he helps drug trafficking.

No one in Mexico cares about the women. They think they deserve to be raped, but not killed, they think all women are whores.

Sergio visits Florita but can’t find her truth.

A woman makes it to the hospital before death and implicates El Cerdo heavily. We know the rector is involved. Pretty much every man in power in Santa Teresa.

Haas says that Antonio Uribe and Daniel Uribe are the Santa Teresa serial killers. They are young and virile men. They are both athletic, put together and modern men. He met them in a club. His lawyer almost shed tears of rage when he was exposing these facts. We are led to believe he is telling the truth. Their father owns the shipping fleet that delivers goods from the maquiladoras. They are all connected to narcos.

A foreign FBI agent is brought in to deal with the serial killings. Albert Kessler. He is very well respected. He doesn’t seem to be implicated in the mess.

Pedro Negrete, police chief, twin brother of Pablo Negrete, rector, does not meet with Kessler. Kessler notes this. Wherever Kessler goes, unmarked police cars follow him.

Azucena Esquivel Plata, an extremely influential PRI congresswomen invites Sergio, the reporter covering the Santa Teresa murders, into her car. She tells him about how she investigated the disappearance of her childhood close friend Kelly. She hires a PI and learns that the conspiracy goes to the top. She probably stays in the same room as Liz Norton did.

We learn of a reporter who covers Haas’ reveal of the killer’s identities has been disappeared. Mary-Sue Bravo investigates this.

Another death happens and this time it is abundantly clear the police are involved. But somehow not all of them, or at least some act innocent. Lalo Cura comments as to how strange the cover up is (as the killer is not identified, and is certainly just a random petty criminal, and the killer commits suicide, but the weapon is lost).

Esquivel Plata puts Loya on the Kelly case for two years. Kelly was a pimp, who organized orgies for rich men. She started by hiring models but then used women from Santa Teresa. We learn from a model who went to one of these parties that everyone attended. All the narcos, and all the peoples they funded. We specifically learn of someone who controls the garbage, someone who invests in the maquiladoras, and generals for Campuzano a big Narco. Although it is claimed it’s unclear if he ever attended. It is implied porn was shot at these parties, as the model denies porn was shot there three times. Likely snuff as well. We know underage women were there.

Everything lines up as we would expect it. Peregrinos for the Narcos. Bodies found in the garbage, in the maquiladoras, and strewn in the desert. They kill on purpose and don’t care who sees it as the police are there. One peculiar detail is the clothes. It’s a gang of influential killers who rape and murder their victims without a second thought.

The Part About Archimboldi

We learn about the youth of Archimboldi (Hans Eiter). He is born to a Prussian father and Prussian mother. His mother is blind in one eye and his father a veteran in of the First World War. His father is an austere and principled man. He wonders where Prussia went. He despises all other kinds of people. He goes to war and loses his leg, he experiences horrors and emptiness in the hospitals of Düren. There he loses all hope in the rest of humanity, even in his comrades. He meets another sergeant who has lost an arm in the war. The sergeant assures him the war is coming to an end and everything will change. He replies that nothing ever changes. They had both lost legs and still they hadn’t changed.

He wanders the countryside and Germany surrenders. When he is informed of this he thinks good. He eventually makes his way back to his town. There his wife, a blind in one eye, blue eyed blond woman with blond hair recognizes him instantly, when the others barely could. He worships her. They have a son Hans Reiter. He wishes desperately for Prussia to exist. When he sees his wife and child they are temporarily lifted from the sea.

“Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths.”

Hans Reiter is a natural diver. He feels an alien on Earth. He rejects the forest, the German metaphor. He doesn’t like the sea, rather he considers the sea most people see to be the parts of the sea whipped up into a furor by the wind. The real sea is all that lies beneath. He can’t focus in school, so he leaves.

Nazi’s visit his village and are brought to tears by the notion of this noble and virtuous Prussian soldier who is so poor he can not come to the tavern and drink with the others. Around this time Hans gets a sister, Lotte. She is the first person he cares for and shows an interest in. He loves her dearly.

He is eventually put under the wing of a German descendant of some nobleman. There he reads, and specifically loves Parzival. He is smitten with the idea of a knight who wears his madman’s garb under his armor. He sees himself in the knight Parzival. He also rejects the tutelage of letters. He also is humble in what station he feels he is owed in this life. He is then called to war.

People notice he seems to be disconnected from the world. A visitor from another land. This disconcerts his enemies and baffles his comrades. He still only wants to dive.

He is restationed to Romania. There he enters a castle, and meets Baroness Von Zumpe again. She is ferried around the castle by her Romanian hosts. They discuss death and culture, but come to no real conclusions. Von Zumpe insists Reiter stay with them. Every soldier is attracted to Von Zumpe. She has a relatively lucid air. Seems to not be concerned with grand conceptions of life and culture. Seems like Bolaño supports her grounded view on life.

The assault on the Russians begins. Hans has slid into a suicidal nature. This causes him to act recklessly in battle and always volunteer for assignments where he might die. He survives all of these encounters. Eventually in a trench he stands up and gazes at the stars. Even takes off his helmet. He is shot in the neck and chest.

He has surgery and is sent to convalesce in a Russian town. Less a town then a few homes. Likely scourged by a German assault group when the residents were discovered to be Jewish. He can’t stand convalescing with the others in the summer so he takes residence in another home. In the winter he must rejoin the others. There some soldiers remark they are in a frozen paradise. He doesn’t understand how they can feel that way.

He finds a hiding place, a fantastic hiding place, where one would have had to have had a partner to be hidden. This strikes him as beautiful. The rescuer and the rescued must be in unison. One forced to sacrifice. Designed that way. Without one individual placed in primacy. Within it are notes by a Boris Ansky.

We learn this Boris Ansky is a Russian soldier. An idealist who left his parents who loved him for the Communist dream. Experienced the horrors of the war front. He then returns to Moscow and begins interacting with a writer who sees hope in him, Ivanov. Ansky finds all types of odd jobs in and around literature and culture for the party. Ivanov writes his first great work. It is praised by Gorky. He is a man who is driven by the fear of being a bad writer. He has nothing. He wants to live in his dream. A grand ego that can not be deflated or recognized. To him the image of good and bad writer are real. He writes two more books that are worse and obvious copies of the first. The communist movement declines. The October revolution fails. He is imprisoned once but let go. He continues to write letters to try to return to his station. He goes to Gorky’s funeral and is accosted by young communist writers, as they see him as a fraud. He is eventually imprisoned and killed for being Trotskian. A man concerned with ghosts unable to reground himself in reality. Ansky’s notes become more fraught. The fervor of revolution leaves him. He is left empty but gains some level of tranquility from thinking about a painter Archimboldo, who he doesn’t know well, and another painter Courbet.

The remainder of Ansky’s notes make it clear that he is an enemy of the state. He is Trotskian somehow, and so he flees Moscow. He ends in Kostekino, his hometown. Shortly after this his father dies. His notes end describing him trying to join some guerilla group. Eiter contemplates when the hiding place was crafted. Clearly in an artisanal way, probably by Ansky’s father. But not used. He imagines Ansky’s mother placing his notes in this hiding place. The whole story is terribly moving. Reminds one to cherish that which is real. He is brought to tears and emptiness. He feels horrified at the prospect of having killed Ansky. Eventually a nightmare wakes him where he thanks god he lived instead of Ansky. In Ansky’s notes he finds strength. A reason to keep going.

Eiter’s regiment moves backwards as the Soviets counterattack. He ends up travelling back Westwards alone. He finds himself in Kostekino where he feels at ease. He thinks about semblance, something Ansky wrote about. In semblance so much is created and destroyed. No corner of the human mind is safe from semblance.

He thinks most love is semblance. His love for his sister is real. But most love amongst men and women is semblance. With jealousy and play acting and money and sadness. Just semblance.

He eventually realizes he must go Westward lest he is found and killed by the advancing Russian army. He makes it to Germany and then surrenders to American soldiers. In a POW camp he and his fellow soldiers are inspected looking for a war criminal. We learn of a man, originally introduced as Zimmer, real name Sammer who had control over 500 Jews and systematically killed them before the end of the war. This man is deeply concerned with his sins being forgotten, but he also maintains that he is innocent and anyone would’ve done what he did. This conviction of innocence is clearly contradicted by his fake last name and the way he trembles when they get to his name. He is strangled in the yard.

Reiter is left in Cologne. He is reunited with Ingeborg, the woman who kissed him and told him not to forget her when he was searching for Halder. He finally remembers her and they find themselves together. They talk endlessly. Initially they don’t have sex but then they do. It is heavily implied Hans killed the war criminal in the camp, by strangulation. He is interrogated by the police of the POW camp and not let go so he escapes to Cologne. There a fortune teller tells him to change his name, and gives him the leather jacket he wears.

Ingeborg is sick and gets sicker. This brings Reiter to tears. Her family visits and he hosts them in Cologne. One of them accuses him of having done the worst thing that can be done to women. He objects. They have sex even though the family is staying with them. Ingeborg starts to get better. Hans searches out a typewriter and buys it with a fake name.

The writer assures him that most works are minor works, mere copies or reflections of true masterworks. The writers that create these minor works are really not doing anything productive at all, they are just increasing the camouflage of the main masterworks. He then says most writers should quit, as they are just playing or are deluded. He ends by claiming the crucifixion of the Christ is the only non-minor work.

Archimboldi types up his work and sends it out to publishers. None in Cologne respond, but one in Hamburg does. There he meets with Mr. Bubis, who is dating Baroness Von Zumpe. He recognizes her and she recognizes him, and Mr. Bubis, initially skeptical of him because of his clearly fake name, warms to his presence.

Mr. Bubis is in love with the works of Archimboldi, but no one else seems to like them. Archimboldi is deeply pleased that Mr. Bubis sees him, and believes in him, and continues to write books and get them published quickly. Eventually Ingeborg develops tuberculosis so they move Northward.

There they live in a bucolic mountain village, hosted by a man named Leuber. He is accused to have killed his wife, which he denies to Ingeborg but eventually confesses to. Ingeborg succumbs to her true madness and leaves the house to the dark snow to look at the stars. Archimboldi, not understanding her tries to calm her down by referencing the Aztecs, that old thing she told him about when they first met. She replies that none of that is important and looks towards the stars, and calls him Hans to remind him his life isn’t the identity he created.

Eventually she gets better and they manage to travel, but she is definitely near death, and we learn of her death by drowning in some remote village. Left open is if Archimboldi killed her, although he seems like a good man so he probably didn’t.

When she dies Von Zumpe visits Archimboldi. They talk and make love and Archimboldi apprises her of what happened to Entrescu. She sees value in Entrescu but Archimboldi thinks he is wretched. She makes fun of him for watching them have sex, and makes a joke about how she sees why he’d assume another’s name given that he did that, and he laughs but doesn’t really understand her.

Bubis and Archimboldi discuss Sisyphus and Thanatos. Archimboldi thinks Sisyphus, the ever crafty, and definitely mortal, will eventually find a way out of his punishment when they least expect it.

Archimboldi becomes a gardener and continues to write. Ingeborg dies and Archimboldi disappears. He releases another book and Von Zumpe goes to deliver the money since Bubis is old. They catch up and discuss Lapsus Calami at the publishing house’s office.

Eventually Bubis dies surrounded by people he loves, doing the things he loves. We learn Popescu led a profitable and corrupt life. Archimboldi meets a vanished essayist who invites him to an asylum.

We learn that Von Zumpe keeps in touch with Archimboldi by letter, and that she lives her life the way she did when she was young till she is very old. She runs the publishing house well after Bubis’ death.

We then learn about Lotte. Lotte grows up and thinks about Hans a lot. Eventually she marries a man who she likes and loves her, and they have a somewhat successful business. She doesn’t think about Hans as much. They have a son named Klaus who is reckless and goes to America. This is the man in prison in Santa Teresa.

Her husband dies after she visits America and learns that their son is imprisoned in Mexico. Over ten years they try getting him out but nothing works and he is stuck in jail. His lawyer is in love with him. Eventually Lotte meets Hans again. They reconnect and she reads his books by chance in the airport.

The books are written in the style Bolaño has written this book. Transparent, telling some narratives loosely connected. The narratives dissolve, and give way to the environment and eventually that dissolves as well. Everything returns to nothing.

Lotte implores him to go to Santa Teresa to save Klaus. On his exit he meets someone who is the son of a writer who is only remembered for his ice cream. Another jab at the self importance of writers. He departs and the book ends.

Final Thoughts

A decidely nihilistic book that yet paints a sketch of virtue.

Reoccurring themes

1. Major
   1. Strange Attractors
      1. People that bind many people together and bring them together in powerful but weird ways
         1. The poet in the asylum in Switzerland
         2. The poet in the asylum in Spain
         3. Von Archimboldi - Hans Reiter
      2. El Rey Del Taco
      3. Room that Liz Norton and Esquivel Plata stayed in.
   2. Madness
      1. Asylums
         1. Poets in asylums
         2. Professors in asylums
         3. Finally, Archimboldi with the other vanished writers
      2. Madness itself
         1. Ingeborg
            1. Perhaps was just lucidity
   3. Emptiness
      1. Everything fades
      2. Everything gives way to emptiness
   4. Dreams
      1. We see dreams comport to reality and dreams reflect the internal lives and fears of our characters
      2. Some characters don’t dream or suppress their dreams
2. Minor
   1. Hating the city you are in
   2. Fatal view on life and the opportunities presented within it
   3. Extreme distance and borderline lack of respect of the self in relation to the partner
   4. South America less than Europe in some significant insurmountable way
   5. Poets in asylums

Points of Investigation

1. Pain leads to emptiness, everything eventually leads to emptiness
2. A sketch of virtue
   1. Lalo Cura
   2. Plata Esquivel
   3. Oscar Fate
   4. Amalfitano
   5. Archimboldi
      1. Even though he was a nazi, he tried his best to be a good man
3. Search for meaning
4. The vanishing point (the year 2666, the graveyard)