2666 parts four and five a finales de, pero infinito

Near the end of his life, Roberto Bolano became obsessed with the savage murders of hundreds of women that have been occurring in Ciudad Juarez throughout the past two decades.

Through extensive research, he compiled an impressive amount of forensic information regarding the history and nature of these brutal crimes, which he has in turn used to craft a true-to-life fictional account of the culture and victims of Juarez (a town he never actually visited) by way of Santa Teresa.

His approach, in this regard, is highly original (one that he also employed to create a bibliography of fictional Nazi war-criminals in "Nazi Literature in the Americas"). With "The Part About The Crimes", one can presume that Bolano intends to give testimony to the countless victims of Juarez through the medium of literature, an art he believed possible of offering fundamental truth.

In novel four, we are thoroughly introduced to the central character of "2666": the fictional border city of Santa Teresa, Mexico, which is based on the actual town of Ciudad Juarez.

4. The Part About The Crimes

Novel four begins in Jan. of 1993, with the discovery of a thirteen year old girl who has been raped, beaten, strangled to death, and then abandoned in a dusty lot within the border city of Santa Teresa, just south of Arizona.

The following 280 pages (the lengthiest of the novels) are dominated by similar accounts of women and girls (some as young as eleven years old) found raped, tortured, murdered, and mutilated throughout the city and surrounding state of Sonora, Mexico; some are identified by family or neighbors, while many remain forever anonymous, fated to be dumped in public mass graves.

The majority of victims are workers at local factories (maquiladoras), while others are those who have continued to emigrate north in hopes of finding work, or with dreams of living in the U.S.

Many are teenage girls from local schools; some are waitresses, hitchhikers, or dancers.

However, most are referred to as whores.

These horrific accounts span five years and the length of the novel, anchoring Bolano's layered depiction of a community struggling to survive under the menacing shadows of corrupt state officials, drug lords, and a police force predominantly complicit and indifferent to the perpetual acts of exploitation and violence.

Bolano breathes both life and death into the sparse desert landscape and cluttered urban industry of factories, taquerias, and strip-joints that Santa Teresa revolves around, as the mystery unfolds, but never fully reveals its secrets.

As some cases (mostly domestic murders) are solved, and others (those bearing the gruesome signature marks of various serial-killers) are not, we are introduced to a sporadic host of characters: reporters, police inspectors, an American sheriff, a psychic, an insane German entrepreneur-turned-scapegoat, as well as the fleeting witnesses and inhabitants of Santa Teresa.

Through these characters, Bolano draws out the pervasive, almost deafening, misogynistic dialogue (there are two pages devoted entirely to cops swapping women-in-their-place jokes) as a canvas on which the blood of women is painted with presumed entitlement and impunity.

His characters, with Santa Teresa at its core, tread through a precarious existence of ennui, naive promise, anxiety, rage, and the threatening potential of insignificance or obliteration.

"The Part About The Crimes" presents the point of impact; an impact which the novels preceding and following tremble beneath, feeling its ripple impressed within the broader masterpiece.

The fourth novel provides an ominous center of gravity, although, one resembling a black hole, rather than a sun, to the lives in its orbit.

5. "The Part About Archimboldi"

David Rodriguez

Assistant Editor

Reminiscent of the feeling of a friend that hasn't visited in a long time, but is about to depart from your life indefinitely, the anxiety of a great cinematic masterpiece that has captured your attention for it seems like a lifetime, but it has only been a blink of an eye, or an enrapturing novel of epic proportions that forces its reader to reread the last pages very slowly, over and over again.

Roberto Bolano's "2666" is this novel, unconventional and unexpected.

The fifth part is a 262 page chapter, containing an infinite arc that leaves the reader sedated, but in an utter state perplexity on the ways of the physical and ethereal world; mortality, death, writing, toiling, notoriety, love, failure, murder, war.

"The Part About Archimboldi" takes "2666's" audience far back to the first sketches of those obsessed intellectuals, but with a view not from their vantage, the seekers, but a chronological account of the hunted, Benno Von Archimboldi and his existence, works, and pain.

It is hard to imagine holding the attention of an audience for such a time span and through such a zealous project, but this is what the reader has been climbing towards, not an apex, or closure, just more, a slight glimpse.

Fiction is the chance to be an innocent bystander in something else that is distant, and possibly nostalgic, a vicarious university of self- realization.

Bolano takes the reader and Archimboldi from before his birth to his father's stay in a destitute hospital ward, before Archimboldi is who he has created, to the virtual present. Undeniably linking his life by blood, to blood, and called to a fated encounter caused from numerous accusations of bloodshed.

Bolano takes the reader through the stunningly Aryan boy's obsession with seaweed (the sea as a symbol of purity), his stint as a thief's apprentice, his blossoming from a boy into a man as a tortured and wounded soldier in the desolate and ravaged eastern Europe where he finds his inspiration for everything literary, crucifixion, cathartic homicide, a life altering love, and prophesied, but unsought success.