So far, the English reader will feel confident that he knows what sort of book this is. We have become accustomed, in recent years, to books which take the reader through a succession of episodes, each attached to another by only the thinnest of narrative connections. Before you start to think, however, that this is a sort of long-winded Hispanic parallel to David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas, Bolaño sets off on something I don’t believe any English novelist would contemplate, and the fourth book is a monumental, terrifying, unprecedented stretch. It sets out, in simple sequence, the Santa Teresa murders, and the panicked attempts of the police to do anything about them: it is unadorned by any of the usual blandishments of fiction, and it comes down on the reader like a block of granite falling from the sky. Once you set the book down it is difficult to pick it up again, to face the furious rain of blood, flesh and sex-murders: on the other hand, Bolaño now has the reader firmly in his evil gaze, and it is hard to put it down in the first place.

The fifth book, about the childhood and upbringing of Archimboldi, offers some explanations, though not many. I think, too, that there are some signs of authorial exhaustion towards the end, as though Bolaño was racing against time.

This is an unlikely bestseller, I must say: it is often very hard-going, deliberately frustrates the reader’s wish to discover, and challenges his ability to recall the details of plot and character at every point. It begins with a student buying a novel by chance, and ends with the descendant of an inventor of an ice-cream sundae. In between, Bolaño asks us to sup full of horrors, and then some. Does he have enough subject-matter to sustain his huge fictional design, or is he one of those writers who turn to exhibitions of the extreme to disguise a fundamental poverty of observed human experience? The question goes unanswered, but I will say that the wild chaos of 2666 held me from beginning to end — reminding me, above all, of The Man Without Qualities — and sent me back to read all Bolaño’s other novels. You will want to experience this one.

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