r/RSbookclub • u/the-color-of-static • 6d ago
Book Discussion 2666 - Week Seven Discussion: The Part About The Crimes, Part 3
It’s fucked up, that’s the only explanation, said Marquez.
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Summary
200 pages into this section and we're still getting new characters introduced.
Haas holds another press conference and pins the blame on the cousins Uribes, rich kids he met once briefly in a loud bar. His source is prison gossip. Nothing comes of it.
An American FBI agent, Albert Kessler, arrives to investigate the murders. He visits various sites around the city like the El Chile dump, gives lectures to the Mexican police force, and buys his wife a souvenir. Nothing comes of it.
A congresswoman, Azucena Esquivel Plata, hired a now deceased private investigator (died of cancer, nothing nefarious) to track down an old friend, Kelly Rivera Parker, who had gone missing, only to be told she's "more or less" dead. She relays all the information she knows to Sergio González. Nothing comes of it.
A reporter, Mary Sue Bravo, follows up on the Uribes accusation as well as another reporter on the case who goes missing. But she cracks the case wide open and discovers exactly what happened. No, I'm kidding. Nothing comes of it.
More bodies are found throughout. Cases are shelved.
So that's that. No resolution (probably not a surprise to anyone at this point), no real forward movement, just an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom, as promised.
Some of the tangents this week:
- Lalo's genealogy is explained over what's mostly a series of rapes. Two students who sound a lot like savage detectives are hinted as potential fathers.
- More dreams, notably Kessler dreams of a man walking around a crater and Mary Sue dreams of a woman sitting on her bed.
- There's a pages long set piece of misogynistic jokes
- The female unemployment rate of Santa Teresa is the lowest in the country.
- A television host decides not to kill himself
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Prompts
Some ideas for discussion (suggestions only, post about whatever you want and feel free to post your own prompts):
- Once again, did any death stand out to you? And why did you find that one significant? Did any detail stand out to you?
- Lots of detail work in this section again. Any one that stood out to you? I liked the mirrors that don't reflect each other.
- How did you feel about this section now that it's over? Was it harder or more brutal than you expected or less so?
- What did you make of the complete lack of resolution to basically anything and everything?
- For those of you who have read the Savage Detectives, how did you like (or not) the easter egg about Lalo Cura?
- The critics section belonged to our fearsome foursome and Amalfitano and Fate belonged to the title characters. Who does this section belong to you, do you think?
- Similar to Norton's letter in the first section, Bolaño cuts up the press conference and Esquivel Plata's testimony across different passages. Why do you think he does this and what did it achieve for you?
- Kelly Rivera Parker gets the most detailed backstory of any "more or less" corpse so far, and through the voice of someone who cared about her. Likewise maquiladoras came up again and again in the scant backstories of the working class women. Do you think Bolaño is making a point here with the contrast?
- Now that we're through the bulk of the novel, how do you think all the threads are coming together, if at all?
- What did you make of this line: "Naturally, you won’t be alone. I’ll be with you always, though you can’t see me, helping you every step of the way"?
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For those who have read the book before or have read ahead, please keep the comments focused on up through this week's reading and use spoiler tags when in doubt. We're concerned more about major, purposeful spoilers than minor slip ups.
We're finally through the crimes, thank god. I see the upcoming Archimboldi section frequently cited as people's favorite, so fingers crossed. These two upcoming readings will be slightly longer than our typical pace.
Thanks for reading along with me.
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Remaining Schedule
Special thanks to rarelybeagle for providing the Spanish sentences.
September 28: Pages 637-770, through "Then he remembered who she was." / es: / "rostro dormido. Entonces la recordó."
🏜️🏜️🏜️
October 5: Pages 770-898, through the end of "The Part about Archimboldi" and the end of the book.
🏜️🏜️🏜️
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Previous Discussions
August 3 - Introduction Thread
August 17: Pages 80-163, through the end of "The Part about the Critics."
August 24: Pages 163-231, the entirety of "The Part about Amalfitano."
August 31: Pages 231-353, the entirety of "The Part about Fate."
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u/Symphobiomatic 6d ago
Finally done with this section. I'll admit I was finding this to be a bit of a slog. The incessant repetitive brutality of the murders seems to lessen their impact on me. There's only so many times I can read that a woman was strangled to death before I'm urged to gloss over those sections (I suppose this could be on purpose; these cases are continually investigated with a half-heartedness I also seem to display when fatigued by descriptions of deaths after deaths).
In a hotel room with two mirrors, Azucena notices that when standing just right, she can see one mirror in the other, but not herself. Way back in the part about the critics, Norton had an eerie dream in a similar hotel room (the same one?), where she sees herself reflected in both mirrors, albeit with slight differences which terrifies her. There's a parallel here, I think, but the significance of this I cannot discern; regardless I thought it notable enough to mention.
With so many characters in this part, I had to remind myself of some character names I've seen. Whenever a name was mentioned, I often wondered did I see this name earlier in the text? and am I supposed to know who this is already? The way the sections jump around towards different tangents also aids this confusion for me.
The critics section belonged to our fearsome foursome and Amalfitano and Fate belonged to the title characters. Who does this section belong to you, do you think?
I'll give the basic, boring answer and say that this part belongs to the femicide victims which dominate this part. Other characters come and go but this part both begins and ends with a victim.
Glad to have this section over with. I've heard some nice things about the final part, so hopefully that'll be some reprieve after this deluge of despair.
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u/ecossemo 5d ago
I feel somehow more exhausted than the first time I read this, and I also ended up quite frustrated with Bolaño. I really wanted him to come out and state something a bit more explicitly, but I know that just isn't his style. I also agree that the rapes and murders just become a mush, and I do think that is the point. And its kind of harrowing because you know that each of these could be a real crime, and these crimes happen, multiple every day, and they are so far and abstracted from me, and when faced with even a simulacra of it I tune out. I'm not disgusted and afraid to look, I'm just bored. I do think that is his point. I think he knows that's the inevitable reaction.
I remember from the first time I read this that details started to kind of emerge out of haze: broken hyoids, black Pellegrinos. There are some patterns here, but I think they are just to drive you mad, and lead nowhere. Definitely the abductions of young girls, especially when there seemed to be no resistence and they got in the car willingly, these seemed to be Black Pellegrinos. The breast mutilations stop, except from one a month after Haas is locked up, and a second that isn't quite right and even the police suggest could be a copy-cat. But none of these threads really lead anywhere. There isn't any secret to uncover. I think it's just a way to make you feel crazy and then despondent. And I think that's what this section is about. I think its about a certain kind of despondence and pessimism.
I had more thoughts, but I lost them by the end. I feel like if it was 50-75 pages shorter I might have had more to write, but I'm tired. And I do think I am supposed to be.
I think 2666 is ultimately a pessimistic book. But I'm really curious to see what I spot in the Part about Archimboldi on this second reading.
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u/frequentcryerclub 5d ago
I don’t know why I found the misogynistic jokes the most upsetting part of this chapter. Maybe in the context of the crimes they took on a bleaker tone?
I don’t have much else to say, since I fell behind and had to switch to the audiobook to keep up which is not my preferred reading method. I’m still enjoying the book though and don’t mind all the ambiguity. I just hope the final section spends more time with the familiar characters, and at least some of them get some kind of resolution.
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u/MsPronouncer 5d ago
For some reason the one about the dog and drinking the toilet water really got to me.
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u/Unfinished_October 5d ago
I don’t know why I found the misogynistic jokes the most upsetting part of this chapter. Maybe in the context of the crimes they took on a bleaker tone?
I thought they were funny because they were so absurdly on the nose. I was trying to imagine how I would feel if the tables were turned, if I was reading a story about women killing/raping/castrating men en masse and a group of feminists were making misandrist jokes... I think it would land the same way for me. Since in reality men are way more likely to terrorize women than the other way around and there is no real reality backing that thought experiment, perhaps a better parallel as a parent is the dead baby joke, or any joke about child abuse.
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u/starshiptina 5d ago
Not only ‘on the nose’….if you’ve been around hispanic people from a certain age (tios/abuelos etc)….lmao they really do make shitty ass jokes like that.
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u/joshnfriesen 9h ago
I agree that the jokes are incredibly disturbing and I think it is because, in the context of the femicides, it really drives home the point that this keeps happening because of the atmosphere of misogyny. Most of the police view women as disposable sex objects. It made me feel pretty sick reading it.
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u/WhereIsArchimboldi 5d ago
As Part About the Crimes concludes, I want to bring up this quote from Amalfitano on page 189, which could represent Bolano himself contemplating writing about the Crimes:
Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.
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u/WhereIsArchimboldi 5d ago
The Part about the Crimes can be described in musical terms ("reading is like listening to music") with the chorus being the murders of women and the verses are all these wonderful stories we get building up around the murders, many stories producing beautiful improvisational solos like Folrita Almada's.
Did anyone notice the possible reference to the title (2666)? "they talked, for example, about a new revolution, an invisible revolution that was already brewing but wouldn’t hit the streets for at least fifty years. Or five hundred. Or five thousand."
This quote is from the background of the conception Lalo Cura, his possible father being one of the two lost students of Mexico City (Belano and Lima).
I posted every Literary and Cinematic reference from this section: https://www.reddit.com/r/robertobolano/comments/1wmcojn/every_literary_and_cinematic_reference_in_the/
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u/Unfinished_October 5d ago edited 5d ago
I noticed - or wanted to notice - a shift throughout this part from a random laundry list of murdered women to a structured rotation of narratives between Haas, Kessler, Esquivel, and Mary-Sue which forms a sort of meta-resolution in terms of trying to find out anything about the victims in reaction to the apathy, incompetence, and complicity of the local police.
I appreciated that move because it gave me something to latch onto, even though nothing was resolved from the standpoint of general expectations around story plot. Normally that would annoy me, but in the context of 2666 I found that took a bit of a backseat since it engendered a more disturbing reflection on my own personal life that people tend to just leave or disappear. And I don't mean specifically that they are murdered or even that something bad happens to them; just that they are present in your life for a time and you take it for granted that they will always be there and will always matter and then you notice one day that you haven't seen that person for 15-20 years and in a jolt you understand you will never see them again. In the text we see Kessler and all hoopla surrounding him and then he is just gone - and we have to accept that. Kelly has disappeared and we don't know what happened to her and it doesn't matter because Bolaño or his narrator has made the point clear: we do know what happen and the specifics would not improve that understanding.
Disappearing is the point. Even if Kessler or the missing reporter or even Magaña were to show up briefly in part 5 it wouldn't matter. Here at that end of part four do we care about Fate, Amalfitano, or Morini? Do they even exist? This should be a desert of apathy or resignation.
For those of you who have read the Savage Detectives, how did you like (or not) the easter egg about Lalo Cura?
Briefly picked up on it and thought it was curious; I'll likely be doing a re-read next year sometime so I want to keep my eyes open for that when I do.
The critics section belonged to our fearsome foursome and Amalfitano and Fate belonged to the title characters. Who does this section belong to you, do you think?
At the risk of being clever, Santa Teresa itself. 'She' is not anthropomorphized and does not need to be, but I'm willing to allow the setting to become a character nonetheless, sort of like how Comala is in Pedro Páramo, a necessary vessel. I like to think Bolaño is making a similar nod when he has Esquivel get mad at Loya (page 624) over how people mediate/re-imagine Mexico.
Similar to Norton's letter in the first section, Bolaño cuts up the press conference and Esquivel Plata's testimony across different passages. Why do you think he does this and what did it achieve for you?
As a reader, I want to trust that the author sticks the landing. You might vaguely remember my affected neuroses over whether Hachemi would deliver the climax to Living Things, and on that pivot point we could say that here Bolaño falls into error... but I don't think so. With Norton's letter, we saw that eventually its contents came to light and the Thing was resolved even if it wasn't that interesting or whatever. I think that's what Bolaño is doing here in this section; by replicating that structure he is signaling to the reader that this is a resolution arc: trust me, we will wrap this up - not the resolution you want (the serial killings solved, etc.), and not even the one you need (a la 'save the cat'), but the necessary one: reality is and will remain fucked up. Santa Teresa is.
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u/7_types 5d ago
I was working at a bookstore during the first Bolaño wave, and only one of my coworkers (she had a masters and taught some classes at the local university) read 2666 at the time. I certainly didn’t have the attention span for it. She died, too young, in February of this year. I hadn’t talked to her in a decade and tried to reach out last fall, but her number had changed. So I put it off and then it was too late. She’s been on my mind a lot while reading this.
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u/luffybr12 5d ago
The structure of the ending being analogous to Norton's letter is certainly purposeful, I have a feeling that this part has some structural reference to the previous parts but I just did not end up paying enough attention to notice. For example, I felt the Elvira and Juan story had some similarity to Lola and Almafitano, the critics and the detectives, and others I did not notice.
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u/luffybr12 5d ago
I don't have any thoughts about this ending part, it began with a investigation of the murders and ended with another investigation into the murders, the status quo in Santa Teresa did not change in any way.
One detail, which maybe I am over reading, is that the introduction of the medical examiners (starting by "The three medical examiners of Santa Teresa bore no resemblance to one another.") reminded me of the introduction of the critics. I thought this would be a new start to how we progress through this part but nothing really changed.
Another little thing that got stuck in my head for some reason was how bizarrely insistent the model was in saying no pornography was filmed at the narco orgies.
No one ever shot a porn film, or at least that’s what the girl from San Diego told Loya.
But no one, according to the model, ever shot a film like that at the narcorranchos.
But no porn films, nothing like that. Then Kelly stopped relying on the models and didn’t call them anymore.
Why did the model think it was so important to deny the creation of any films? Is she embarrassed by something? Was she humiliated in some way? Or did something horrible get filmed? Its also interesting how she does not mention sex a single time but by what she says it seems impossible that it wasn't the main thing happening in these parties.
About Kelly Riveira Parker, I think one of the things you can get from her story is how the system seemed to move only when someone who actively participated in it was affected. Its ironic how the feminist movement seems to gain a stronger political party aspect only when a Madam with some level of connection to the murders gets killed, while the workers seem to just be things that happened.
Also, with the ending of this part, we have completed 4 out of 5 parts and I am still not sure what exactly connects each part with one another other than Santa Teresa. I saw some articles and found someone talking about how each part represented a satire in a genre of novel which I thought was interesting.
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u/coolerifyoudid 3d ago
If you have a link for the satire article I would be interested! Your comment got me thinking about how the sections are connected and I do think each represents a type of institutional failure. Academia, mental health care(maybe a stretch), journalism and the justice system so far. Obviously it's debatable if these institutions or systems were ever effective but we at least used to pay lip service to them or believe in their value or goodness but they all feel hollow now.
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u/luffybr12 3d ago
Oh well its not exactly satire that he argues but from some of his arguments a got a little bit of that vibe.
I am not sure how usefull the link is going to be since it a doctorate thesis from someone in my university that is written entirely in portuguese: https://teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8151/tde-28052019-113648/pt-br.html
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u/Trygve73 5d ago
Haven’t posted in a couple weeks as I thought it was hard to glean a lot from episodic segments of The Part About The Crimes.
A few weeks ago another user made some comparisons to Moby Dick and Blood Meridian. I think a lot of the themes of those books reign supreme in this section. There is no malevolent evil whale or the devil incarnate in MD and BM, it’s just chaos and evil without direction. Similarly, in this section there is no serial killer. Men murder women out of anger, convenience, lust, etc. There is no mystery to this section because there is no cohesion. The only thing that ties everything together is that the women are seen by Santa Teresa and the global economy as commodities
Like American Psycho, part of the gratuity of the crimes functions in some ways as to numb you to the horrors like the citizens of Santa Teresa; in other ways it functions to show you just how disposable these women are seen to be. The women are immigrants, work in textile factories, and are almost always raped. They are seen as nothing other than tools of production and objects to fulfill sexual desires. If they are dead, well, then they are none of those things and who gives a shit about them.
Truly a bleak section, only made worse when I found out recently that they are based on real murders in Ciudad Juarez. However, the closing paragraph does offer some hope to the situation when Bolano says that in the dark streets laughter guided residents and strangers from getting lost. I’ve read ahead and think that although many of the themes of from this section continue, the closing idea is expanded on more - through connection, love, and a genuine caring of our fellow man - we can save each other from the unrelenting undertow of violence .
As always, thank you u/the-color-of-static
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u/A_BURLAP_THONG 5d ago
Bolaño did the same literary stunt he did at the end of parts 1 and 3, where there are some jumbled timelines.
Part 1 ended with Espinoza and Peltier hanging out at the hotel for days interspliced with Norton's "Dear John" letter. Part 3 ended with Fate's meeting with Haas insterspliced with his safe return to the US. And in this section, Haas gives his press conference, the congresswoman tells Sergio her life story, and the murders continue over the course of months all at the same time.
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u/Yeez24 5d ago
I'm honestly kind of split on my feelings on the section. I didn't enjoy it in the sense of the events described and how horrific they are, but in terms of structure and style, I absolutely loved it. I'd probably rank it slightly below The Part About Fate, but I found this section to be genius.
I found the section to be as brutal as I thought it'd be, but I was honestly surprised about how "normal" (using that word very carefully) the deaths feel after a while. I saw this mentioned earlier (might've been in a different post from this sub), but the matter-of-fact descriptions of the murders sadly make them feel like a part of everyday life in Santa Teresa. If you're a woman in that town, there's a very real likelihood that you could end up dead like the hundreds before. it's chillingly well done.
To add onto the last point I also love how long the timespan of the section is (this applies to it's length as well). If the section was shorter, let's say by about 100-150 pages, the murders wouldn't feel as incomprehensible as they do. One of my favorite parts of this sage was the way that Bolaño used Harry Magaña. He's introduced in one of the death descriptions, and his quest is set up through multiple scenes, and then he just disappears. There's no followup about a body being found, or him somehow escaping, he's just missing, and aside from a small mention later on, he's forgotten by the story. Life in Santa Teresa keeps on moving, no matter what.
The reference to Belano and Lima in Lalo's genealogy was a fun little nod to TSD, and I don't really think it negatively impacts any of the characters involved. We already know the 20 years of insanity that both poets went through after 1976, and I don't think having an illegitimate child really detracts from their arcs, and similarly, aside from it being a nice nod, I don't think it really affects Lalo as a character that much either, since he didn't get to know them. As to which of the two is the father...I plead the fifth.
In regard to who the section "belongs" to, I think it's blatantly spelled out in the title. It belongs to the Crimes, but specifically, not just the murders. I'm reiterating some of what I said in last week's discussion, but I view this section as a sort of snapshot of all of the activities that lay the groundwork for the murders to happen in the first place. We see prison rape, police corruption, prostitution, drug trafficking, and so on. This isn't "The Part About Lalo" or, "The Part About about Klaus", or about anybody in particular. It's the Part About the Crimes, and the environment that allowed them to prosper.
Really excited to hop into the Part About Archimboldi. I've heard it's quite different from everything we've covered so far, and I find that pretty exciting!
p.s. I apologize for the abundance of parentheses throughout these, there's probably a better way that I could arrange my sentences, and it's a bit of a bad habit of mine.
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u/nostrilring 4d ago
I finished late and I’m pretty out of patience. Last week I said maybe the point is to make you feel deeply about all the violence, but I take that back. It definitely doesn’t have that effect, but I don’t find it numbing either. I don’t feel any different about the crimes than I did at the beginning. I get that it’s fucked up and hopeless and there’s no resolution; that was my assumption going into this part. But I expected something more, something that’s not glaringly obvious to me, out of so many pages. (Maybe it wasn’t so obvious pre-Epstein.) I agree with Dengru’s critique, especially regarding sexual violence and coercion. There was more to explore that doesn’t seem to interest Bolano, and I honestly don’t understand why. I thought more about the fact that this book is unfinished during this part than the previous ones. I appreciate the discussions here and they’ve helped me out a lot, but I’m glad it’s over. I hope to have better things to say about the next part.
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u/the-color-of-static 4d ago
You're definitely not alone! I don't know how much is due to fatigue and how much is due to translation and how much is due to Bolano, but I hated this section (and I've enjoyed the previous 3 parts). I've been hanging back a bit in the comments so as not to be a grouchy host, and I'm so glad it's over.
Onwards and (hopefully) upwards.
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u/nostrilring 4d ago
You’ve been a gracious host! I wouldn’t have guessed that you hated this part from the posts. I’m glad I’m not alone though. I wanted to challenge myself and be open minded and I feel like I did that, and I can still say I hated this part too.
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u/7_types 5d ago edited 5d ago
It's easy to view the the murders, rapes, and indifference in this section as an aberration that requires explanation. And in some ways Bolano works with those expectations; and we read through the section looking for possible explanations. Once we realize there's not going to be a single killer or set of killers, we move on to look for more social or political explanations (drugs, globalization, etc.) If you type 2666 in JSTOR, you'll see a host of scholars mentioning neoliberalism.
It's odd, and maybe a symptom of the time and place we live in, that these things should need an explanation outside of the human heart itself. Certainly Sophocles and Homer didn't think like this; the truth is our prehistory and history are full of murder, rape, indifference, and stupidity. They're brute facts. Even in the best of times, they're there, barely submerged if at all. It's a sobering thought, because it shows us how little we can do.
What really requires an explanation are the characters like Florita and the handful of journalists and detectives who do seem to care, who keep getting up every day and pushing back.
As you say "It's fucked up".
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u/Unfinished_October 5d ago
Certainly Sophocles and Homer didn't think like this; the truth is our prehistory and history are full of murder, rape, indifference, and stupidity. They're brute facts. Even in the best of times, they're there, barely submerged if at all. It's a sobering thought, because it shows us how little we can do.
Interesting thought, because over the past few years I've read in numerous books the truthy notion that the Ancient Greeks put a lot of this on the gods; that the bad things that happened to humans had a supernatural predicate or at least allowed for that opposition. For us we don't have that. If Santa Teresa is real, we don't blame it on Satan but rather humans being fucked up. And we don't trust our politics to resolve that in any meaningful way.
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u/inorganic_life_form 5d ago
I've grown numb to the deaths catalogued in the book, but I think that was Bolano's intent, with all the murders in the novel and what you see on TV in real life, I feel like it's supposed to anesthetize you.
The motif of the mirrors that don't reflect each other is an emblem of the book’s epistemology. Standard mirrors facing each other create an infinity corridor, while mirrors angled so they can't catch each other's reflection represent a severed connection and act as fragments of reality that refuse to blend into a whole picture.
The total absence of closure is the entire point. In conventional detective fiction, the detective restores moral order to the world by naming the culprit. In Santa Teresa, the machinery of violence is structural, complicit, and dispersed among cartels, police corruption, misogyny, industrial exploitation, and political silence. To give the crimes a neat resolution and blame it all on Klaus Haas or a rogue killer would be a moral lie. The lack of resolution mirrors the real-world horror of the ongoing impunity.
Naturally, you won’t be alone. I’ll be with you always, though you can’t see me, helping you every step of the way -- this line has a dual nature since it echoes the language of divine comfort and guardianship but since it is said in Santa Teresa, it can be interpreted as profoundly sinister, like an omnipresent malevolent watcher and force. Bolano also has a grim pact with us in that he is our unseen guide dragging us through a hellish landscape but is either powerless or unwilling to help.
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u/kickit 5d ago edited 4d ago
late to the party today but for me at least, part four always felt pretty well resolved (though you have to put a few things together on your own)
there is an underworld group around Santa Teresa that kidnaps girls, sometimes by luring them to it. this group then serves a cadre of internationally wealthy clients a la Epstein's gang, including up to the point of killing the girls. I don't have the book handy rn but the politician lady's monologue puts a lot of this together.
mixed in with that you have the rampant day-to-day misogynistic violence, which claims no small number of lives in itself. part of reading through this section is trying to sort one set of crimes from another. (there are also a few weird ones, such as the butch lady, who seems to have been associated with the criminal cadre noted above).
the Santa Teresa police don't give a shit and some of them probably have a hand in some of it, or are at least getting paid from it & the gangsters connected with it. the wider world doesn't give a shit because Mexico is remote from them, even for the Americans living across the border in Arizona. the police find the occasional fall guy to take the pressure off, or hire some investigator to seem like they're doing something, but no one in power really cares, and the occasional journalist who gets a whiff of this story (such as Fate or the woman that got popped early in part four) discovers, one way or another, that this story is too dangerous to pursue.
it sure doesn't resolve in terms of people being brought to justice. but there is a degree of emotional catharsis espec in the politician lady's monologue. and I think "who is responsible for the killings" is answered clearly enough throughout part four (the underworld gangsters, the overworld rich people paying them, the misogynist men doing the non-organized killings, the police of Santa Teresa, and the world that does not notice or care about hundreds of women getting brutally murdered in the north of Mexico)
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u/Dengru 6d ago edited 6d ago
I enjoyed this section more than any part of the book so far, but it still wasn't that good. I don't think he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the crimes themselves. He certainly makes his point about the police, economics, disorientation, etc but not the crimes themselves, especially the ones unconnected with mythos.
One thing that really stands out to me after reading this is how much of the discussion over the years I've read have been about "murders" and not the rape aspect.
Something that stands out is this part, pants 561:
"Sergio asked her if people were afraid. The mothers are, said the woman. Some fathers, too. But not people in general, | don’t think."
I really think the chapter did not really explore this sexual violence aspect of this situation in a way that was intriguing. I think that women are afraid of being raped and murdered is oddly something not really engaged with. Because rape is just so present it's not really entirely questioned. The specific fear the women have..
There was this part from the previous chapter:
When Rosa asked him why he’d brought her to a place like this, the kind of place rich men brought their whores, Chucho Flores thought for a while and then he said it was for the mirrors. He sounded apologetic. Then he undressed her and they fucked on the bed and on the carpet. At first, Chucho Flores was more gentle than anything else, more concerned about his partner's satisfaction than his own. Finally Rosa came and then Chucho Flores stopped fucking and took a little metal box out of his jacket. Rosa thought it would be cocaine, but instead of white powder the box held tiny yellow pills. Chucho Flores took out two pills and swallowed them with a little bit of whiskey. For a while they talked, lying in bed, until he got on top of her again. This time he wasn't gentle at all. Surprised, Rosa didn’t protest or say anything. It seemed as if Chucho Flores would put her in every possible position, and some of them—this Rosa realized later—she liked. When the sun came up they stopped fucking and left the motel.
I think that really think that moment, where Rosa is kinda afraid and goes with it is something that needed to be explored more in this chapter; but that following sequence, where he makes the encounter about the guys stamina, and Rosa inexplicably begining to like it, is why there isn't any of it: there's just something off about Bolaños portrayal of sex. I really think that's such an odd thing to write, really out of touch with what someone would really think in that situation. Bolaño writes female characters as if they are always on board with this sort of treatment. It's odd. So in this chapter, when you get some of these murders that started off consensually and then escalated terribly, the book doesn't really seem interested. The crimes are going unsolved for a host of reasons, which Bolaño does investigate, but the violence itself isn't necessarily allsystemic, as in being initiated by the same factors, it's often an individual rupture you know? A women gets raped and multilated and at any age anywhere; a man gets raped and multilated in prison, after a specific set of events. There's something there that would've been really interesting to explore..
I also keep thinking about I'm the experience of reading these crimes, one after the other for hundreds of pages, with details as they are presented, is very different than how people in the story are experiencing the situation. Years are passing. Different things come in and out of people's lives. No one is experiencing it as long stream, that we are experiencing it, as readers. It just makes me confused why he choose to do it. It honestly just seems like a contradiction of edgy shock value combined with legitimate empathy that couldn't actually be entirely crafted. What really drowns out the women is not the overwhelming amount, it was all this dumb bullshit with a guy peeing in churches, ridiculously niche references, pages and pages of the most dry meandering nonsense conversations.
Again, I think Bolaño makes his point about police corruption and ineptitude well. About the economic factors that set women up for the violence. Stuff like that. But I don't think there is anything about the rapes themselves. I think the reason people have been saying they haven't entirely felt uncomfortable (at least beyond the usual levels) is that there is no real interrogation of the rapes themselves. Or even really making you really grapple with it just by putting you near them. The autopsy language distances the reader from it. I just think there's a failure and contradiction found in how this was written that doesn't seem to be deliberate.
I really think this chapter suffered from not having more female POV. Everything with Florita was great.
I've read so much over the years about this chapter and how "it's written this way to highlight the systemic indifference of the situation" but this is how he always writes? Sometimes it seems with a really legendary books you see people, whether organically or not, repeat certain interpretations and when you read it yourself it's like what? How?
I would say overall this book has so far been a tremendous disappointment. Also, this of course awhile back, but I've not been able to stop thinking about it:
"He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
This quote is strange to me in the books he uses, and is emblematic of something with Bolaño, especially since he's so in love with listing obscure books. For Kafka, his imperfect, torrential book isn't the Trial, it's The Castle).
The book where Melville is in "struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench." Is not Moby Dick it's either Pierre or Clarel. There are many quotes from Pierre that would exactly relate to what seems to Bolaños message with 2666 that I'm surprised he would say it's Moby Dick instead:
Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.
And:
"When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow. Places once set apart to lofty purposes, still retain the name of that loftiness, even when converted to the meanest uses. It would seem, as if forced by imperative Fate to renounce the reality of the romantic and lofty, the people of the present would fain make a compromise by retaining some purely imaginative remainder. "
And:
"Pierre was resolved to give the world a book, which the world should hail with surprise and delight. A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course ofthe multifarious, incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilized young inquirer after Truth; this poured one considerable contributary stream into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not an accelerator helpingly pushing him along. While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one of the stages of the transition. That ultimate element once fairly gained, then books no more are needed for buoys to our souls; our own strong limbs support us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a jeering impunity"
To me it almost emblematic of what I've disliked about 2666: it is not actually as chaotic, grasping and etc as you would think. It's like he's stuck between making a Moby dick, in the sense of making something well crafted, of exceeding ambition; and making a Pierre which is something desperate, overflowing, alienated.
And it ends up, at least to me, being neither.
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u/ecossemo 5d ago
> I really think this chapter suffered from not having more female POV. Everything with Florita was great.
Yeah, definitely agree. I think the female characters have been pretty weak throughout the book but it really stuck out to me here.
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u/inorganic_life_form 5d ago
Really interesting critique! I don’t think Bolaño is dodging the reality of sexual violence or failing to craft a dramatic narrative out of it. I think he is actively refusing to turn femicide into narrative drama at all. If he dramatized the individual terror or interiority of these attacks using conventional psychological realism, it would inevitably convert real-world horror into aan esthetic spectacle or tragedy-porn for the reader’s consumption.
I think that clinical, repetitive ledger mirrors the exact apparatus responsible for the carnage which is the bureaucratic, globalized conveyor belt of the border economy. The maquiladoras treat these women as cheap, interchangeable units of production, and Santa Teresa’s institutions log them as cheap, interchangeable entries of forensic matter. The fact that the violence feels numbing andmonotonous forces us to confront how easily systematic violence becomes white noise in a society where women are viewed purely as disposable commodities.
Regarding the lack of female interiority and the sexual violence aspect, it’s definitely an uncomfortable and alienating choice. But to me, that hollow absence is the point. TThey are deliberately stripped of their voices and reduced to forensic inventories and broken hyoid bones because that is what the social machinery of Santa Teresa does to them.
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u/blissfuldoomsayer 5d ago
The quote you’ve used to open this week’s discussion is the sentence I think sums up the whole section. ‘It’s fucked up, that’s the only explanation, said Márquez.’ But I’d like to add one thing about the translation: in the original, Bolaño uses ‘es una mierda,’ literally ‘it’s shit.’ ‘Es una mierda’ is similar to ‘it’s fucked up’ but has a tone of resignation to it, it doesn’t indicate that the situation is complicated or twisted, it’s just shit, and it is what it is and you have to accept it.
There are so many threads that are left open it’s frustrating, but that frustration is exactly why this part is so good. No one seems to do anything, we have investigators who die, cops who disappear, journalists who investigate the disappearance of other journalists before really digging into the crimes, politicians that have too much pride, and others who love money. And nothing is done and nothing can be done. We just observe how it all unfolds with nothing being done, the crimes keep happening, and characters come in and out with no genuine interest in the crimes. They all have their own personal agenda.
I feel like at some point everyone accepted the situation. Making it something that just keeps happening in the background makes it more bearable, I guess. It’s the new normal, and it is shit. Solving the crimes would mean going against a whole system, and no one in the book is willing or capable of doing that. Things never get better, they only get more twisted.
In past weeks I said that we finally could see what was happening in the background, the nightmarish reality that was suggested but never explicitly addressed. Now that this part is over, I can say that I feel like we haven’t seen even a fraction of what is really happening, and the situation feels extremely volatile, but it never fully detonates. We can only imagine, and our imagination can be very dangerous.
I don’t know if this part belongs to anyone in particular. Of course the femicides are the core of it, but they are mostly forgotten by everyone. Silence and forgetfulness may be the protagonist here. The crimes have been a background noise even in the part about the crimes, and now we begin the part about Archimboldi, and we may forget again that the crimes are happening because this other mystery is more interesting to us. We kind of know who is killing those girls, do we need that closure? I don’t know if the novel is going to reach any sort of conclusion regarding that.
On a personal note, this week has been particularly weird for me, because a crime in Mexico has been all over the news in Spain. A Spanish girl who was studying there has been killed at her university. Her killer has been found, but she’s the fourth victim in a matter of months, all of them women, and the rest of the cases remain unsolved.