Monthly Archives: February 2026

2666 IV: A Snowball in the Sun

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All roads lead to Santa Teresa: is that the “fate” of the “Part of Fate,” which inexorably leads us ever closer to “the killings in Sonora” first glimpsed by the critic Morini in an article in the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. That article was written, we were told, “by an Italian reporter who had gone to Mexico to cover the Zapatista guerrillas.” On reading this, it had 

struck [Morini] as odd that she had gone to Chiapas, which is at the southern tip of the country, and that she had ended up writing about events in Sonora, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, was in the north, the northwest, on the border with the United States. [. . .] He imagined her in the Mexican capital. Someone there must have told her what was happening in Sonora. And instead of getting on the next plane to Italy, she had decided to buy a bus ticket and set off on a long trip to Sonora. (64/43)

Something similar happens to Oscar Fate, the protagonist of this, the third part of Bolaño’s novel. He, too, finds himself waylaid (in fact, repeatedly so) and inexorably drawn towards the US/Mexico borderlands, and the terrible crimes that seem to have impregnated the entire landscape there. He, too, arrives in Mexico for another purpose but ends up equally fascinated and horrified by these killings that hide (we are told, almost at the end of this section) “the secret of the world” (439/348). Perhaps, as the novel proceeds, we will come to have a better idea of the nature of this secret.

In the meantime, we continue to fumble our way onwards. Fate is a New York journalist, who writes for a magazine called Black Dawn, based in Harlem. His normal beat is “political and social issues” (354/279)–we are told that the first story he had published in the magazine was the last Communist left in Brooklyn, a story which resonates with a dream that Amalfitano has had about the “last Communist philosopher” (290/227). This sense that it is the end of the line for a politics of liberation, or at least that the forms in which such a politics took in the twentieth century are now almost unimaginable, resonates with the vision with which Bolaño’s Amulet ends. Politics seems to be in abeyance. No wonder that the Italian journalist turned from covering the Zapatistas. Nor is it too surprising that Fate is shifted abruptly to covering sport, and sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match between a promising heavyweight from Harlem and a Mexican counterpart.

Once in Mexico, however, various sources tell Fate about the murdered women. Tired of pretending to be a sports reporter–and in any case, the fight turns out to be a dismal washout–Fate contacts his editor back home to pitch him the story: “This is more important,” he tells him. “The fight is just an anecdote. What I’m proposing is so much more. [. . .] A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world [. . .] a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck’s sake” (373/294–95; translation modified). Yet the editor turns the proposal down, on the basis that this is a story about Mexicans rather than the Black men that are the magazine’s principal preoccupation. If there are no “brothers” involved, the editor is not interested.

Fate describes the boxing match as an “anecdote.” The irony is that 2666 itself often feels like a book of anecdotes, with its countless stories within stories. Here, for instance, we are reintroduced to Rosa Amalfitano, Oscar’s daughter, who meets Fate at a party and who subsequently tells him tales she herself has been told by a friend who was also at that same party, or recounts conversations between her father and her lover about a “magic disk” that, thanks to the brain’s habit of persistence of vision, can make two unrelated images appear to overlap. All these stories no doubt have some bearing on the novel’s broader theme (it is hardly a coincidence that the example given of a magic disk involves a “little old drunk [. . .] laughing because we think he’s in prison, [. . .] laughing at our credulity” [423/335]), but still they are surely anecdotal in nature, and they sometimes feel as though they were taking up time and space, postponing “the part of the crimes” that is yet to come.

At the end of this part, however, even though Oscar Fate has failed to convince his editor that he should be writing about more than a boxing match, he accompanies another (Mexican) reporter, who is writing about the killings, as she visits Santa Teresa’s jail to meet a putative author of the crimes, imprisoned awaiting trial. The suspect turns out to be a German-speaking “giant”–shades, in short, of the mysterious literary author, Archimboldi, of the “part of the critics”–who sits down in front of the journalist and tells her: “Ask whatever you want.” But as the very last words of this section recounts, “she couldn’t think what to ask” (440/349). All that suspense, but when we finally think we may be at the very heart of this Mexican darkness, words fail us.

Not that words fail Bolaño: by this point we have read plenty of them, and we are still not even halfway through the novel. (In fact, almost two thirds of it remains.) Elsewhere, when Fate first learns of the killings, he is told that “Every so often the numbers go up and it’s news again and the reporters talk about it. People talk about it too, and the story grows like a snowball until the sun comes out and the whole damn ball melts and everybody forgets about it and goes back to work” (362/285–86). Presumably therefore the question is how to produce words (sentences, pages, books) that will not simply melt once the sun comes out, words that will stick in the mind and perhaps even change something somehow. Does a longer book have more weight and heft? Or is it no more than a larger snowball, that will merely leave a bigger mess once it melts? And once it does, it flows back into what the novel elsewhere, in a critique of metaphor, calls a “sea of appearances” (322–23/254; translation modified). Is this every novel’s fate?

The Savage Detectives III: A Joke Covering Up Something More Serious

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A little over half-way through The Savage Detectives (on page 369 of 648), it feels as though things may be starting to come together. According to Luis Sebastián Rosado, it is Luscious Skin who at last outlines the structure of this “unlikely story”: “Everything had begun, according to Luscious Skin, with a trip that Lima and his friend Belano took up north, at the beginning of 1976. [. . .] they’d gone to look for Cesárea Tinajero” (369). This, of course, is the journey with which part I of the novel concludes. At last we understand why Lima and Belano were heading out of town. And our knowledge (or our knowledge of Lima and Belano’s knowledge) of Tinajero is bit by bit being filled in as we read Amadeo Salvatierra’s testimony (which opens most if not every chapter in part II) about his drunken night with the boys, digging into the archive of the Mexican poetic avant-garde. We may be beginning to see why Lima and Belano should be drawn to track down Tinajero. But it seems as though something must have gone wrong somewhere in the Sonora desert.

As Luscious Skin puts it, “After that trip they both went on the run. First they fled to Mexico City together, and then to Europe, separately.” This, too, we have seen, as reported through the various interviews or testimonies that comprise part II, and which relate the traces of the two friends as they pass through variously Paris and Barcelona, campsites and caves in rural Catalonia (which may turn out to be “the last time [they] see each other” [279]), then in Lima’s case Israel and Vienna before he is arrested and then returns to Mexico. In Luscious Skin’s account, Lima comes back home because he thinks the coast is finally clear: “Maybe he thought the whole thing had been forgotten, but the killers showed up one night after a meeting where Lima had been trying to reunite the visceral realists, and he had to run away again.” Hence it is that Lima takes a solidarity trip with other Mexican writers to revolutionary Nicaragua, only to disappear almost as soon as he gets there.

But can there really be “killers” on the trail of Lima and Belano as a result of whatever happened in their search for an aged avant-garde poet? Rosado doubts it, and pushes back on Luscious Skin’s convoluted and conspiratorial story: “When I asked Luscious Skin why anyone would want to kill Lima, he said he didn’t know. You didn’t travel with him, did you? Luscious Skin said he hadn’t. Then how do you know all this? Who told you this story? Lima? Luscious Skin said no, it was María Font who’d told him (he explained who María Font was), and she’d gotten it from her father. Then he told me that María Font’s father was in an insane asylum” (369). This is a much-mediated story whose original author, it turns out, is certified insane. This sends “a shiver up [Rosado’s] spine. And I felt pity too, and I know I was in love” (370).

But we of course know (as certainly as we can know anything in this book) that someone did indeed accompany Belano and Lima on their trip north: García Madero and Lupe, of whom we have still heard absolutely nothing in any of the proliferating accounts that have taken up now 250 pages (what would otherwise be a full novel in itself) of part II. If we could hear from them, perhaps more light would be shed on things.

What we do get, thanks again to Salvatierra’s accounts, is a better sense of Tinajero, as we finally read a visceral realist (at least, a first generation visceral realist) poem… “her only published poem” (397). Still, the fact that we can read her poem does not entirely dispel the suspicion, voiced also by Luscious Skin in an earlier passage from Rosado, that “Belano and Lima might have made her up” (373). For the poem, “Zion” (though the title here is untranslated: “Sión”), is wordless and looks rather more like a child’s drawing than a poem. It consists of three horizontal lines, in each case with a little rectangle attached. The first line is flat. The second is gently undulating. And the third is a zig-zag.

“It’s a joke,” the boys comment to Salvatierra. “The poem is a joke covering up something more serious.” “But what does it mean?” (398) insists Salvatierra, even though Belano and Lima have just told him that “a poem doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, except that it’s a poem, although this one, Cesárea’s, might not even be that” (397). Readers push for significance even when they are warned not to.

Might similarly Bolaño’s novel also be “a joke covering up something more serious”? If so, what is it covering up? And might it, too, not “necessarily have to mean anything”? If not, what is it doing?