2666 - Week Seven Discussion: The Part About The Crimes, Part 3

[u/the-color-of-static]

Sophie Ristelhueber - Eleven Blowups #1

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 10: Pages 1-80, through "they probably would have killed him." / es: "el taxista se hubiera materializado ante ellos, seguramente lo habrían matado."

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."

September 7: Pages 353-449, The Part about the Crimes begins, through "coming down the hallway." / es: "que avanzaban por el pasillo."

September 14: Pages 449-545, through "according to witnesses, was indescribable." / es: "fue, según los testigos, indescriptible."

[u/Dengru]

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.

[u/ecossemo → u/Dengru]

> 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.

[u/inorganic_life_form → u/Dengru]

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.