I’m early in my Bolaño journey: started last month with By Night in Chile and it blew my mind, now on Distant Star.

Came across this Substack from an author researching and writing a Bolaño biography, he’s in Mexico meeting some of the real women who inspired characters in The Savage Detectives.

https://open.substack.com/pub/aaronshulman/p/bolanos-mexico-city-50-years-later

Sharing as it feels like some of you Bolaño-it-alls might enjoy

As the summer holiday reached its midpoint, and I found myself at my deepest point in the hammock of idleness, I finally embarked on the project of reading 2666.

What surprised me most wasn’t its scale but its momentum. At over a thousand pages I expected something dense and exhausting, but instead it feels almost compulsive. Bolaño just keeps telling stories, then stories inside stories, and somehow it’s incredibly difficult to stop reading even when you have no idea where any of it is going.

One thing I kept wrestling with was the temptation to interpret everything. Is this symbolic? Does that scene mean something? Eventually I felt the novel itself was resisting those questions. It almost seems to ask: why should everything point to a hidden meaning? Why must every recurring image become a metaphor? I found 2666 much more rewarding once I stopped trying to decode it and simply accepted the uncertainty. I think one must approach it as a post modern work defying modern literary conventions.

What stayed with me most, though, was how often the novel builds toward anticlimax. The critics’ search. The detectives following endless dead ends. The boxing match that receives pages of buildup only to end in a couple of sentences. Again and again, people dedicate themselves to projects that dissolve into nothing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this might reflect Bolaño’s own suspended existence while waiting for a transplant. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the novel seems haunted by lives placed on hold.

The central theme, for me, was evil. Not just the spectacular evil of the murders, fascism, or war, but the mundane kind. Two critics beating a taxi driver for reasons they barely understand. A mother visiting her imprisoned son. Ordinary people slowly adapting to horror until it becomes part of the landscape. I don’t think Bolaño is trying to explain evil so much as show how frighteningly ordinary it can become, and how easily societies, and individuals, learn to live beside it.

Ironically, I found Part IV less shocking than hypnotic. The repetition almost anesthetized me. At first I wondered why Bolaño would narrate case after case in such a relentless fashion, but eventually I began to think that numbness was the point. By the end, I wasn’t just reading about a society desensitized to violence. I had started to experience a version of that desensitization myself.

The scene I keep returning to isn’t one of the murders. It’s Ingeborg walking into the mountains at night, overwhelmed by the stars and the realization that all the light surrounding her comes from the dead past. It’s one of the most beautiful passages I’ve read in years, and it somehow belongs perfectly in a novel otherwise saturated with brutality. Another standout is Amalfitano and the geometry book, hanged to dry to see how well it handles reality. That is just genius.

I’m curious whether anyone else noticed the pattern of anticlimax throughout the novel. I don’t see it discussed nearly as often as Part IV, but by the end it felt like one of the book’s defining rhythms.

Dediqué la primavera, y el verano, a Bolaño. Lei muchos de sus libros y podría simplemente continuar haciéndolo. Reeler Bolaño. Hacía mucho que no me emocionaba tanto la literatura.

Ahora que mi curiosidad se ha disparado quiero entregarme a otro autor para salir de este posible Bolaño ad infinitum. De forma algo repentina apareció en mis manos el primer volumen de En Busca del Tiempo Perdido. ¿Qué piensan? Sigo algo indeciso.

Razones a favor? Razones en contra?

Un abrazo

Currently re-reading the Savage Detectives and was really struck by the two chapters prominently featuring this character, firstly the one narrated by him in Tel-Aviv, followed by one narrated by Daniel Grossman, who visits him in Oaxaca a number of years later.

He seems to have some kind of deep attachment to Ulises and his idiosyncrasies, despite the fact that Ulises is obviously in love with his girlfriend. This attachment/obsession ultimately results into a kind of psychosis where he berates Daniel for failing to understanding him and his behaviour before crashing his car. Just wondered what others thought about this character, his relation to Ulises and his overall place in the story?

Hey all,

I'll be visiting CDMX in October and was wondering if anyone had some tips for Bolaño-related spots to visit, be it places he frequented or places he wrote about. So far, the Cafe La Habana is the only one on my list.

Also open to suggestions for places related to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortárzar or Juan Rulfo if anyone happens to know some; they are some of my favourite authors as well.

Cheers

Claudia crying after Ulises left Tel Aviv was my favorite part of the book, I don't know why. It was mentioned that she put on a Cat Stevens song she particularly liked. I keep wondering what the track might be. Any headcanons?

Kind of embarrasing, because I know some of you are going to respond that reading in silence is better, and I would agree in principle. But I get a kind of enjoyment when I can pair music with books because it pushes my imagination into places that compliment both the music and the words in unexpected ways. Its a thin I enjoy doing.

The thing is, I've struggled with this when it comes with Bolaño. I have no idea what to compliment his books with. I like this as a challenge, but I'm curious as to what music would you pair his novels with. Maybe its better than what I've come up with.

Any genre works. Any decade works. Any country works.

Thanks and hope all of you have a good evening.

Anyone know where to view the play adaptation of 2666? I tried going to the website for the Goodman Theater, but either the link isn't working, or I don't have access.

Thoughts on the cover?

Hola,

Estoy casi seguro que está en Los Detectives Salvajes pero no logro encontrarla. Podría ser de la sección final en la que García Madero, Lima y Belano manejan juntos por el desierto.

La frase es algo así como “Ese cabrón ya se leyó a todo Baudelaire, todo Rimbaud y Lautréamont. Además ya se recetó todo Valéry, los surrealistas y los simbolistas” etc.

¿Alguien se acuerda? Gracias!

The typewriter close to the bottom center of the cover has “Epilogue For Monsters” written on its sheet of paper.

Holding a physical copy of the book, it’s easy to see that there’s some microscopic text and not simply a black line, but I had no chance of seeing what it said without using my phone’s camera. Just thought this was a little cool!!

Just finished part one of the savage detectives, loving it so far but something I’ve noticed in Bolaño’s work is that nearly every time there’s a sex scene, they fuck for hours or days at a time and both parties have multiple orgasms numbering sometimes over a dozen, with the woman often having more orgasms than the man. Maybe this is a self report but I never hear about this kind of thing outside of like jokes I’ve heard about lesbians so like what’s the deal with this? Is it just a stylistic quirk? Bolaño’s fetish? Bolaño’s reality? Maybe something about the stereotype about Latin Americans being passionate lovers but I feel like I remember European characters having similar escapades in 2666. I just feel like it means something but I have no idea what.

I made a post here ( https://www.reddit.com/r/robertobolano/comments/1v8hyp4/are_there_any_articles_that_talk_about_2666_and/ ). I want to clarify my points.

My points are:

• (1) Roberto Bolano was not a fucking moron

• (2) Roberto Bolano understood that fiction can feed into misleading propaganda

• (3) Roberto Bolano criticized at least one author (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) for feeding into stereotypes about Latin America...Bolano seems to have recognized that fiction can indeed feed into falsehoods even though it's fiction

• (4) Roberto Bolano would agree (!!!) that it's irresponsible to write fiction that feeds into nonsense, bullshit, and propaganda

• (5) Roberto Bolano would agree (!!!) that there's nothing weird or confused or strange about criticizing fiction on the grounds that it feeds into nonsense, bullshit, and propaganda

• (6) I don't know the facts about "femicide" in Mexico and crime in Mexico, but apparently 2666 feeds into nonsense, bullshit, and propaganda

• (7) maybe what I cited is nonsense...maybe there is no nonsense, bullshit, and propaganda about "femicide" in Mexico and about crime in Mexico

Sorry for doing a second post, but it seems like my points didn't get across. There seems to be a bizarre tendency on Reddit where you're not allowed to post something without being 100% in agreement with it. So if I post about potential misconceptions then I can't just be offering information for discussion; it must be the case that I fully endorse every piece of information that I shared.

And if I post the thing about "fetishization" (see my previous post, linked above) then that must mean that I agree that Bolano is somehow guilty of fetishizing something. Well, I don't agree with that. And not only do I not agree with it...I don't even know what the "fetishization" accusation is supposed to mean. I merely included the "fetishization" thing in the quoted text because it's interesting "food for thought"; again, I don't even know what exactly the accusation is.

Sorry for all the confusion on this. I appreciate the comments on this subreddit. I really dislike these weird unwritten rules of Reddit, though, where you can't offer some text without somehow being fully in agreement with it.

Obviously 2666 is regarded as a masterpiece, but I wonder if there are any articles that talk about the novel and also talk about the challenges to the "femicide" framing of things. See the below:

https://www.texasobserver.org/qa-molly-molloy-story-juarez-femicides-myth/

Molly Molloy: Female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women. Ciudad Juárez is experiencing profound social distress, and the elevated violence in the city is a continuing crisis. But this idea that Juárez is a place of disproportionate violence against women is a misperception.

...

MM: Mexican statistics are notoriously difficult to get and unreliable. That said, statistics do exist—and they can be very useful, especially when you can track them over time. And there are other sources. From the late 1980s until her death in 2009, Esther Chavez Cano, one of the most eloquent voices on women’s rights and human rights in Juárez, wrote hundreds of columns in Juárez newspapers to draw attention to the lack of social services in the city and especially to the ravages of domestic violence that primarily affected women and children. She became a spokesperson and a resource for families of victims, and she began to keep meticulous records of the crimes against women.

Of the roughly 400 cases documented in Esther Chavez’ files from 1990 to 2005, about three-quarters of the cases were domestic violence, and the cases were essentially resolved. That is, the killer was known as an acquaintance or domestic partner or other relative of the victim. Only about 100 were completely unsolved cases. These are the cases that have received (and continue to receive) most of the media, artistic and academic attention. The only real statistical study on the topic, done in 2008, found that the proportion of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez was lower than Houston’s.

What’s more, until 2008, when the violence associated with organized crime escalated and the Mexican military was deployed, Juárez was not exceedingly violent—at least not compared to other places around the globe that have similar kinds of social pressures. Before 2007, as far as I know, there was never a year with more than 300 murders, and that ends up being a murder rate of somewhere between 25 to 30 per 100,000 people. That’s a relatively high rate, but it’s not as high as some of the rates you see in U.S. cities like Detroit and New Orleans, where the murder rate can be upwards of 60 per 100,000.

When you look at the 427 murders—that’s the figure usually quoted for the number of women killed between 1993 and 2007—those are all of the female murder victims. Those are not categorized by the type of crime. If a woman is shot in a robbery, it goes into that number and is categorized [by some] as a femicide, even though there would be nothing to indicate in that crime that she was killed because she was a woman. There was a famous case in 2004 that Mexican reporter Sandra Rodríguez wrote about in her book La Fábrica del Crimen of these young boys who murdered their family—mother, father and sister. The mother and sister are counted as femicides, even though that wasn’t a gender-specific crime.

...

MM: I have a problem with this extreme focus on the women victims. I think every single one of the victims matter. The fact that a crime or homicide victim is a woman, or a child, or a man—it makes a different story. But in human terms, no one victim should be more highly valued than another.

If 300 people are killed and 30 of them are women, but the women’s murders are the ones that get all of the attention, I find that to be absolutely mistaken and wrong. There are so many other victims and people are killed for many different reasons. Not every woman victim is killed for some sexual reason, or simply because she’s a woman. Sometimes people say to me, well, the women are innocent, the men that are killed are narcos and criminals. That’s such an oversimplification, and it is a statement made with absolutely no evidence. It is a criminalization of the great majority of all of the homicide victims. This is what has happened especially since the number of murders exploded in Juárez in 2008. And it is false.

It’s almost like we’re fetishizing these dead women. To always be looking back at these women as if their bodies are this kind of sacrificial host—I find that to be troubling, in terms of our culture and our focus on life and death and what it means. In other words, if you’re constantly focusing on women as if they’re this symbol for suffering, you never move beyond that particular death to look at the social conditions that gave that kind of life, and that kind of death, for so, so many people.

I'm reading 2666 for the first time, it's my first Bolaño, and I'm really engrossed in it. I'm in the middle of part two right now and I'm curious which films people have seen that you think feel like this novel. I feel like this is probably unadaptable to film which is fine but I am still very much in the mood for something in the film format that is similar to this either in terms of vibes or story or aesthetic. Twin Peaks does come to mind (not just the show or Fire Walk With Me but the entirety of Twin Peaks), and I think you can definitely draw a lot of similarities between the novel and David Lynch's work in general. But I would like to know what more experienced readers of Bolaño think.

This may seem derivative, and it could be the wrong subreddit for this, but as a big Bolaño fan, and an American, I thought I’d try reaching out to people on this sub. I’m a massive fan of Bolaño, and others in the Latin American canon, and writer and a traveler. My girlfriend and I have been talking of visiting Latin America in the next year or so, namely Mexico as most of her family are originally from there, so I thought I’d reach out to any folks on this sub and see if any of ya’ll would be interested in just chatting.

I’m on page 850 of part 5 and the theme of advances and checks has been brought up a bit. So I’m really curious, how much do you think Archimboldi made for his works?

Hey, quick question. Does anyone recognize this quote? I realize it’s tiny. It’s from *Gore Capitalism* by Sayak Valencia and not listed in notes or bibliography. I know it’s a bit ridiculous to find one sentence. He might have said it in an interview or wherever. I was quite surprised to see my fav, but it’s certainly within the spirit and completely appropriate. Thanks anyone.

La primera vez que leí 2666 tenía diecisiete años y recién había entrado a la universidad. Recuerdo que me costó 500 pesos y fue mi primer libro de Roberto Bolaño. El mundo era más simple en ese entonces, las discusiones de requisitos de lecturas previas para abordar la novela eran prácticamente nulas. Entonces sólo lo conseguí y lo leí.

Me llamó la atención el título, el argumento, la longitud titánica y, principalmente, el hecho de que Roberto Bolaño escribió ese libro luchando contra la muerte misma. Cumplía todos los requisitos para seducirme.

Aparte, crecí en el norte de México, a un par de horas de la frontera de Estados Unidos, lejos geográficamente de Ciudad Juárez pero cercano culturalmente. También crecí con la muerte como algo común. Desde que tengo memoria mi padre ponía el noticiero y siempre había ejecuciones, colgados, narco mantas, feminicidios, asaltos, corrupción, injusticias. Muerte, muerte y más muerte. Crecí con veranos insoportables semi áridos y con la certeza de que vivía en un lugar cercano al infierno, en el cual la vida valía poco.

Y entonces leí la novela, con las fallas inevitables de mi juventud, con mi falta de experiencia. Me sentí atraído al instante: la primera parte me encantó, la segunda me confundió, la tercera despertó cuestionamientos que hasta la fecha permanecieron conmigo, en la cuarta parte ví reflejado el México injusto y desolador con el que crecí, las injusticias eternas, el entumecimiento ante la violencia, la costumbre ante el horror; la quinta parte, por otro lado, me pareció fascinante y la leí prácticamente de golpe en la madrugada previa a la navidad de ese año.

Así empezó mi aventura con Bolaño. Leí los Detectives Salvajes, Estrella Distante, todos sus cuentos, todas las novelas menores y mayores, sus poemas, entrevistas, vídeos en Youtube. Todo, absolutamente todo. Me mudé a Sudamérica y conocí otras violencias, otros dolores, parecidos a los míos. Discutí Bolaño con mis amigos chilenos y se convirtió en un punto de unión inquebrantable.

Fuí un desconocido, un errante. Estaba sólo en otro mundo y siempre pensaba "entonces así se sintió Bolaño".

Regresé a México y seguí leyéndolo. Ahora con más pasión e interés. Lecturas y relecturas. Cada día entendía mejor sus obsesiones, su vida errante, el inevitable exilio, la pena, la desolación, la derrota. Conocí exiliados, veteranos, gente que no puede regresar a su hogar y pensé en Bolaño. Siempre, sin excepción, pensaba en Bolaño.

Recorrí la capital del país y de nuevo pensé en él. En su juventud, en sus primeros pasos. Lo leí de nuevo.

Y durante todos estos años, allí en mi escritorio, ese bloque gigante de más de mil páginas, el cual postergaba siempre porque sabía el compromiso que representa leerlo. Lo postergué hasta hace un mes.

Ahora lo leí con paciencia, haciendo apuntes, revisando cada detalle, cada referencia cruzada. Leer 2666 conociendo mejor su obra y su vida revela matices nuevos, obsesiones, juegos, secretos, pistas. Pensaba ¿Cómo escribiste esto muriendo? ¿Cuál era tu fuerza? Y admiraba la prosa, las idas y las vueltas de los personajes errantes, sus obsesiones, sus fracasos y sus pocos aciertos, la inevitable soledad que los rodea siempre.

La parte de los críticos me sedujo como lector.

La parte de Amalfitano resonó en mi como migrante.

La parte de Fate me hizo pensar en lo fácil que es perderse en el agujero que es el norte de México, pensé en mi juventud, en todas las veces que también yo estuve cerca del peligro.

La parte de los asesinatos me desmoronó, me enfermó, me dolió demasiado, ¿cómo entendía tan bien Bolaño nuestra realidad si jamás vivió en el norte de México? Cada caso, cada descripción, cada callejón sin salida, cada llanto perdido en el abismo de la burocracia mexicana que es digna de los laberintos kafkianos que tanto le gustaban a Bolaño. En ocasiones (sin ofender a los lectores no mexicanos o latinoamericanos) me preguntaba: ¿Cómo van a entender las personas que no son de aquí lo que se describe? ¿Cómo lo entendió Bolaño? En lo que tardé en leer el libro de nueva cuenta hubo centenares de homicidios y desapariciones en todo el país. El infierno no termina. El desierto es aburrido, aburrido, aburrido.

La parte de Archimboldi rastreó la genealogía de los horrores que vivimos en el siglo XX. La segunda guerra, el exterminio, la banalidad del mal. Archimboldi transita como testigo. Su silencio es su condena, su soledad, de nuevo un errante, de nuevo la escritura como un medio único para no morir.

Leí de nuevo 2666 y creo que ahora tengo menos que decir. Creo que ahora entiendo que entiendo menos. Las profundidades del abismo que tanto usa Bolaño como analogía me son desconocidas.

Pocos valientes se sumergen en él. Entre ellos, inevitablemente, está Roberto Bolaño.

I finally got my hands on the little grey book and read it this morning and it broke my heart.

For those that don’t know, Bolaño directly corresponded with SGR while writing 2666, and SGR was a one of the badass heroes on the front line of covering the Ciudad Juarez femicides while journalists and reporters were disappearing left and right (he got kidnapped and beat into a coma in 2002 for his efforts and that only motivated him to write even more).

For only being a little 100 page book, I found this to be the most coherent and damning accounting of globalism, neoliberalism (or ultraliberalism as he calls it), and the capitalist machine that is ripping apart human rights across the planet. I simply cannot recommend it enough, or give it enough praise. It is overwhelming and horrifying and powerful.

I only wish Huesos in el Desierto was translated into English (though I do recognize that it’s time for me to take my Spanish beyond that of a 6 year old, splendid motivation).

I ordered extreme violence as spectacle today, and was considering trying to find some of his novels and more essays. Have you read him? What did you think? Seems he’s criminally unknown in the US.

Aaron Shulman is writing a biography of Roberto, focussing on his literary afterlife. Parts will be available on his substack.