Word: archimboldi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first section tells the story of four European critics bound together by a fascination with the elusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. Shallow globetrotters with a surplus of luxury time, they combine and couple in various permutations of the three male critics and their single female colleague, endure bizarre and horrifying dreams, and plunge stoically into the breach between art and madness. Their search for a trace of the living author leads them to Santa Teresa, where a brush with the Spanish professor Oscar Amalfitano gives way to that character’s own section. Of all the protagonists throughout...
...novel’s final section, “2666” explores the life of Archimboldi, who up until now had diminished from the novel entirely. Instead of a faithfully causal chain of events (which Bolaño already showed signs of eschewing in “The Savage Detectives,” and even earlier in “Nazi Literature in the Americas”), “2666” plots the five circles of a sort of literary hell. Beginning with criticism, then academia, journalism, police detection, and finally fiction, the structure of the novel...
...consequence, the reader approaches “2666” as a sort of museum of humanity, with triumph and atrocity laid bare and placed side by side: never equivocated, but inextricable from one another. The novel’s end comes suddenly, without reflection or resolution, as Archimboldi prepares to depart for Santa Teresa—the novel’s first cause. “2666” begins with an epigraph from Charles Baudelaire (“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”) and for many of the book?...
...pages of 2666 are divided into five parts. The first concerns four literary critics--three men and a woman, all friends, all Europeans, all authorities on a mysterious German novelist named Archimboldi, whom none of them have ever met. Eventually they get a tip that Archimboldi has been seen in a backwater town in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa. But by the time they get there, the trail has gone cold...
...swabs, along with the stories of the victims and the investigating detectives. It is a police procedural straight from the precinct of hell. It is also as bravura a display of novelistic mastery and as devastating a reading experience as you are likely ever to encounter. By the time Archimboldi does show up in Part 5, a belated Godot, we are very far past the possibility of any redemptive epiphany...