The Publisher’s Weekly pundit played ’96 Tears’ on his review. The displaced author believed differently. Antwerp is Bolaño at his Lynchian best IF you think Bolaño is at his best when miming Lynch’s Lost Highway. The hunchback nodded to the passenger in the passing train. The sergeant was smoking. Is this about murder or a dead girl in Belgium? Is this real or a facade? Was the dying author only saying what he said to sell books to provide income for the daughter and wife he was leaving behind? Only David O. Selznick knows for sure and he ain’t telling. He’s as dead as the girl in Belgium. But Antwerp is about the lies the cinema tells in its back rows. Burroughs is quoted too. As is Selzick. Sophie Poldolski apparently killed herself in Belgium, triggering this book. Antwerp is a city in Belgium in case you’re wondering. I thought it was in Germany when I started reading Antwerp. There’s a campground and I wondered if the night watchman from The Savage Detectives would be in Antwerp too. Yes, he is: in Chapter 43. There are also samples of Cesárea Tinajero’s poetry before Bolaño created her. I found that worth the while. There’s a scene of sex like in 2666 too. Quivering occasionally. I think Chapter 20 is the key except it doesn’t mention the kaput girl. “Love is mix of sentimentality and sex." … “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me." …"Doomed to have all of his scribblings published.”

Give Antwerp a 10 if you understand this review (or enjoy Burrough’s The Wild Boys).

Give Antwerp an 8 if you believe everything Roberto Bolaño wrote contributes to a deeper appreciation of his work.

Give Antwerp a 6 if you agree with the Publisher’s Weekly pundit.

“Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are lakes ….” - Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño planted a lot of literature in the last decade of his life: novels, novellas, short stories, as well as years of uncollected poetry. But it wasn’t until he was diagnosed with a liver disease - a virtual death sentence – that he consciously decided to dig a lake called 2666. It would pick up (sort of) in the same region (the Sonoma Desert) where his previous novel The Savage Detectives had left off. It would have similar theme too, at least initially: the search for a mysterious author.

(And strengthening the linkage is the fleeting appearance of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (Detectives’ leading characters). While searching for the Visceral Realist poetess Cesárea Tinajero, they make a wrong turn and drive onto page 558 of 2666, stepping out of Mr. Font’s beat up Camaro long enough to meet and eat and sleep with María Expósito; fathering Lalo Cura, one of 2666’s many minor major characters.)

The English translation of 2666 runs to 893 pages divided into five parts; each part (except for ‘The Part About The Crimes’) is about the major major characters: the critics searching for an elusive German author; the madman named Amalfitano; the black journalist named Fate (never satisfactorily explained); and finally Benno von Archimboldi, the German author the critics are looking for. The critics’ search leads several of them to Santa Theresa: a fictional Mexican town near Mexico’s border with Arizona, where, it is implied, Archimboldi resides and is a mass murderer.

Stylistically, 2666 owes a lot to cinema. It is curious how at the beginning of the last century, film – then in its infancy – often turned to literature’s rich history for source material beginning with Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1906) and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1910). But then a funny thing happened while sitting in the film forum: the popularity and influence of the art forms swapped places to such an extent in the artistic pecking order that it is now - at the turn of the new century - novelists who raid film for stylistic pointers and plotlines.

By structuring his novel in five parts, 2666 feels as if it could have been written by Quentin Tarantino. Only the subject matter is more ominous than that of Reservoir Dogs or Inglourious Basterds. The content of 2666 is more suited to the cinematic oeuvre of David Lynch, an author who is actually mentioned in ‘The Part About Fate.’ (Fate’s favorite Lynch movie turns out to be Elephant Man while Charly Cruz - a video store owner who may or may not have a role in the mass murder of hundreds of young Mexican women – prefers Twin Peaks.) And like Lynch originally intended to not reveal who killed Laura Palmer until Twin Peaks ended its run, it as if Bolaño does not want to reveal who is behind the murders. There is any number of suspects and that is part of the fun of reading 2666: determining who you think is truly the mass murderer.

But let me focus on the critics and their search for Archimboldi because I suspect that most potential readers of 2666 are drawn to it because of its thematic similarity to The Savage Detectives, a polarizing novel: you either love it or hate it. (And isn’t that the true sign of an original work of art: disagreement among the aficionados?) Except 2666 shies away almost entirely from journal entries and interviews that comprised The Savage Detectives. Instead Bolaño skewers the golden cow of post-modern literature: show, don’t tell. All Bolaño does is tell and tell and tell some more. And I admire him for daring to do so.

There are hundreds of stories told here. And if critics found fault with The Savage Detectives because of Bolaño’s lack of gift for dialogue on par with William Gaddis, the chief complaint with 2666 appears to be endless number of supplemental stories tucked into the narrative. Surely, they insist, if he had lived to finish 2666, Bolaño would’ve edited out much of what it posthumously contains. The same has been said of Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time. Don‘t you believe it. If Proust had lived to see his lake completely filled, I’m certain The Fugitive volume would’ve been a few hundred pages longer. And Bolaño, if he had lived, would’ve added more stories. Substantiating rumor: the emergence of an unfinished sixth Part to 2666 in the author’s papers!

‘The Part About The Critics’ is Bolaño poking fun at the literary intelligentsia: those scholars and academics who pontificate on authors’ works but are unable to pen anything worthy of their own. Four scholars – each from a different European nation - are drawn together by their interest and so-called expertise in Archimboldi’s work. Over the course of their researches, published papers and conference appearances, the three male critics become rivals for the love of the female Archimboldian. The elusive German author’s importance swells over this same time period and by the 1990s he is often mentioned as being the likely recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. And yet, little is known about him. Nobody even knows what he looks like. Could a Swabian met at a conference in Amsterdam be Archimboldi? Was Archimboldi even still alive? He hasn’t published a new novel in years.

Which is what makes the final part – ‘The Part About Archimboldi’ – such a fine conclusion: the reader learns what these four critics have devoted their lives to learning without much success. The reader is told Archimboldi’s real name (hans Reiter), of his childhood with his one-legged father and one-eyed mother, his devotion to his younger sister, his infatuation with seaweed, his life during wartime, his discovery of a Russian’s journals that influence him to become an author, his lengthy climb from poor sales to literary prominence.

Through an old man who rents Archimboldi a typewriter and Bubis the publisher we have stirring passages on literature, passages that will please anyone with more than a passing interest in literature. Moving passages that every young person should read in the hopes it will instill an abiding affection for literature. Because what was Bolaño if not literature’s latest eminent messenger? To read 2666 or Nazi Literature in the Americas or The Savage Detectives is to read the work of a man who gave his life over to literature and its cause.

So what do I make of Bolaño’s lake? It is one I encourage each of you to journey to just as I intend to revisit every few years to take a dip in its deep, murky, rejuvenating waters, if only to be reminded why I love literature and the works of those willing to dare to contribute to its vast forest.