Roberto Bolano - 2666: A Novel

Also by RobertoBolao

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DistantStar

By Nightin Chile

Farrar,Straus and Giroux

Copyright 2004 bythe heirs of Roberta Bolano

Translation copyright 2008 by NatashaWimmer

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canadaby Douglas & Mclntyre Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America

Originally publishedin 2004 by Editorial Anagrama, Spain

Published in the United Statesby Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Americanedition, 2008

Publishedsimultaneously as a hardcover and a three-volume slipcased paperback edition

Anexcerpt from "The Part About the Crimes" first appeared in Vice.

"Canto nottorno di un pastore errantedell'Asia," by Giacomo Leopardi, is quoted in Jonathan Galassi's translation.

Endpapers: Sea sponges, from Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, courtesyof the National Library of the Netherlands.

Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication Data Bolano, Roberta, 1953-2003.

[2666. English]

2666 /Roberto Bolano ; translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. p. cm.

ISBN-13:978-0-374-10014-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-374-10014-4(hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-13:978-0-374-53155-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-374-53155-2(pbk. : alk. paper)

I. Wimmer,Natasha. II. Title.

PQ8098.12.O38A122132008 863'.64dc22

2008018295

Designed by JonathanD. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

This workhas been published with a subsidy from the Directorate-General of Books,Archives, and Libraries of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and with assistancefrom the National Endowment for the Arts in the form of an NEA TranslationGrant.

An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom

- Charles Baudelaire

For Alexandra Bolao and Lautaro Bolao

2666

English translation by byNatasha Wimmer

A NOTE FROM THEAUTHORS HEIRS

Realizing that death might be near,Roberto left instructions for his novel 2666 to be published divided into fivebooks corresponding to the five parts of the novel, specifying the order inwhich they should appear, at what intervals (one per year), and even the priceto be negotiated with the publisher. With this decision, communicated daysbefore his death by Roberto himself to Jorge Herralde, Roberto thought he wasproviding for his children's future.

After his death, and followingthe reading and study of his work and notes by Ignacio Echevarria (a friendRoberto designated as his literary executor), another consideration of a lesspractical nature arose: respect for the literary value of the work, whichcaused us, together with Jorge Herralde, to reverse Roberto's decision andpublish 2666 first in full, in asingle volume, as he would have done had his illness not taken the gravest course.

2666

By Roberto Bolao

1 THEPART ABOUT THE CRITICS

The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletierread Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old andstudying German literature. The book in question was D'Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn't realize at the time that thenovel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English-themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D'Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapseor bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothingto diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.

From that day on (or from the earlymorning hours when he concluded his maiden reading) he became an enthusiasticArchimboldian and set out on a quest to find more works by the author. This wasno easy task. Getting hold of books by Benno von Archimboldi in the 1980s, evenin Paris, wasan effort not lacking in all kinds of difficulties. Almost no reference toArchimboldi could be found in the university's German department. Pelletier'sprofessors had never heard of him. One said he thought he recognized the name.Ten minutes later, to Pelletier's outrage (and horror), he realized that theperson his professor had in mind was the Italian painter, regarding whom hesoon revealed himself to be equally ignorant.

Pelletier wrote to the Hamburg publishing house that had published D'Arsonval and received no response. Healso scoured the few German bookstores he could find in Paris. The name Archimboldi appeared in adictionary of German literature and in a Belgian magazine devoted whether as ajoke or seriously, he never knewto the literature of Prussia. In 1981, he made a trip toBavaria with three friends from the Germandepartment, and there, in a little bookstore in Munich, on Voralmstrasse, he found two otherbooks: the slim volume titled Mitzi'sTreasure, less than one hundred pages long, and the aforementioned Englishnovel, The Garden.

Reading these two novels only reinforcedthe opinion he'd already formed of Archimboldi. In 1983, at the age oftwenty-two, he undertook the task of translating D'Arsonval. No one asked him to do it. At the time, there was noFrench publishing house interested in publishing the German author with thefunny name. Essentially Pelletier set out to translate the book because heliked it, and because he enjoyed the work, although it also occurred to himthat he could submit the translation, prefaced with a study of theArchimboldian oeuvre, as his thesis, and why not?as the foundation of hisfuture dissertation.

He completed the final draft of thetranslation in 1984, and a Parispublishing house, after some inconclusive and contradictory readings, acceptedit and published Archimboldi. Though the novel seemed destined from the startnot to sell more than a thousand copies, the first printing of three thousandwas exhausted after a couple of contradictory, positive, even effusive reviews,opening the door for second, third, and fourth printings.

By then Pelletier had read fifteen booksby the German writer, translated two others, and was regarded almostuniversally as the preeminent authority on Benno von Archimboldi across thelength and breadth of France.

Then Pelletier could think back on the daywhen he first read Archimboldi, and he saw himself, young and poor, living in achambre de bonne, sharing the sinkwhere he washed his face and brushed his teeth with fifteen other people wholived in the same dark garret, shitting in a horrible and notably unhygienicbathroom that was more like a latrine or cesspit, also shared with the fifteenresidents of the garret, some of whom had already returned to the provinces,their respective university degrees in hand, or had moved to slightly morecomfortable places in Paris itself, or were still therejust a few ofthemvegetating or slowly dying of revulsion.

He saw himself, as we've said, ascetic andhunched over his German dictionaries in the weak light of a single bulb, thinand dogged, as if he were pure will made flesh, bone, and muscle without anounce of fat, fanatical and bent on success. A rather ordinary picture of astudent in the capital, but it worked on him like a drug, a drug that broughthim to tears, a drug that (as one sentimental Dutch poet of the nineteenthcentury had it) opened the floodgates of emotion, as well as the floodgates ofsomething that at first blush resembled self-pity but wasn't (what was it,then? rage? very likely), and made him turn over and over in his mind, not inwords but in painful images, the period of his youthful apprenticeship, andafter a perhaps pointless long night he was forced to two conclusions: first,that his life as he had lived it so far was over; second, that a brilliantcareer was opening up before him, and that to maintain its glow he had topersist in his determination, in sole testament to that garret. This seemedeasy enough.