I don't get anything about this book, called 2666, heralded as a "masterpiece" here, and also here. It's by Chilean-born author, Roberto Bolano, and published posthumously, and translated from the Spanish, after his death at 50 in 2003.
First of all, I don't get why this is such a magnificent work of fiction. Surely, it is long. Surely, it is
hypnotic, with its 800-word sentences and endless endless endless lists. For instance:
"Then, too, she was against cults and healers and all those despicable people who tried to swindle the poor. She thought botanomancy, or the art of predicting the future through plants, was trickery. Still, she knew how it worked, and once she explained to a third-rate healer the different branches of the divinatory art of botanomancy, namely: Floromancy, or the study of the shapes, movements, and reactions of plants, subdivided in turn into cromniomancy and fructomancy, the reading of sprouting onions or fruits, and also dendromancy, the interpretation of trees, and phyllomancy, the study of leaves, and xylomancy, or divination using wood and tree branches, which, she said, is lovely, poetic, but has more to do with...."
This goes on and on and on; the paragraph is 10 pages long! Ten. Pages. Long.
Some of the list-y descriptions are short, but also hypnotic. And incredibly boring:
"All four were put up at the same hotel. Morini and Norton were on the third floor, in rooms 305 and 311, respectively. Espinoza was on the fifth floor, in room 509. And Pelletier was on the sixth floor, in room 602. The hotel was literally overrun by a German orchestra and a Russian choir, and there was a constant musical hubbub..."
Uh, and this matters, because?
The book contains five parts, called "Parts," some of which are vaguely connected, but mostly, not. The hotel room list is from "The Part about the Critics," describing four academics who specialize in the study of Archimboldi, a mysterious German writer. There's "The Part about Amalfitano," who's a Mexican academic. "The Part about Fate" is about a black newspaper reporter, and is set in Mexico but not really relevant to anything else. Then, there's "The Part about the Crimes," an endless digressive list of women who are murdered in Santa Teresa, a city in the north of Mexico. Finally, there's "The Part about Archimboldi," who turns out to be a pseudonym of a World War II German soldier who lives all over the world, and sometimes in Mexico.
Trust me when I say this: None of this makes any sense. Whatsoever.
I don't get the title, either. What the hell does it mean? There's no explanation in the nearly 900-page text. Maybe that's the year when readers might finally understand what this book is about. There are some great books that are difficult to understand, like Ulysses, say. But I can tell that it's a work of genius. This book is impossible to understand. But I can't tell anything else about it, whatsoever.
I mean: Whatsoever.
(But, maybe, if you have trouble falling asleep, just start reading, from page one. I guarantee a Trance-like State, or your money back!)