Men's Journal

2666

Roberto Bolaño takes five narratives and the murder of hundreds of women to weave a posthumous masterpiece.

Bad news first: Bolaño’s final novel is long. As in, one sentence spans nearly five of the book’s 912 pages. The Chilean author had wanted 2666 printed as five distinct novels to earn more money for his family, but his heirs published the linked stories as a single work. The result is a sprawling novel as structurally (and psychologically, politically, linguistically) complex as replacing the chassis on a Ford F-350 in the dark, by yourself, with twine and a pair of pliers.

Now the good news: The book is a masterpiece you won’t be able to put down. Bolaño, author of The Savage Detectives (a sleeper hit in 1998), was in his 40s when he started writing 2666. But there was a hitch: His liver was failing. He wrote furiously to finish before time ran out, researching extensively and drawing on his experience in a Chilean jail. But in 2003, at age 50, Bolaño lost his battle, leaving behind the 1,200-page manuscript that would become 2666.

A hard-boiled page-turner and darkly hilarious farce, the tome is a study of violence so horrific it turns your stomach, comprised of five narratives that subtly or explicitly relate to the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (“Santa Teresa” in the book). There’s a group of lascivious scholars looking for a reclusive German writer hiding in Mexico; a widowed Chilean father who lives with his daughter and slowly loses his mind; and an African-American journalist who stumbles onto a possible link between the Mexican police and the murders. A catalog of the crimes covers almost a hundred pages, allowing the reader to empathize with the victims as well as those who find their bodies: “[The woman’s] head was buried in a hole.… As if [the killer] had thought by covering the head with earth the rest of the body would be invisible.” Think Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez meets Don DeLillo meets that drunken genius who told you all those weird stories at the hotel bar in Mexico. The voice and characters lodge in your skin like shrapnel and haunt your dreams like a friend taken too soon. —Bret Anthony Johnston

 

Also Noteworthy:

Killing Bison To Save Them

Steven Rinella braves grizzlies and hypothermia to bag an American Buffalo.

 

Ninety-six percent of the buffalo roaming America today are on ranches, where some can be “hunted” for a price, tourist-style. But in Alaska, a protected wild herd that lives near the Copper River, in Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, can be hunted with a special license available through lottery. After winning that lottery in 2005, outdoorsman, roadkill master chef, and MJ contributor Steven Rinella ventured through the Alaskan wilderness on a buffalo hunt, and his account is one part Hemingway sparseness, and one part anthropological history of buffalo hunting over the past few thousand years. Rinella’s mission, which ends with him successfully tracking, killing, skinning, and eating a wild buffalo, is a survival story reminiscent of Into the Wild, minus the tragic ending (well, the buffalo might disagree). Peppered with side treks to Oxford DNA research labs and archaeological digs, the book is a wildly entertaining journey of self-discovery, as well as an adventurous and educational tribute to a great American animal that still lives in the wild, however barely.—Scott Stein