2666

An Oasis of Horror in a
Desert
of
Boredom

- Charles Baudelaire

For Alexandra Bolaño and Lautaro Bolaño

2666

English translation by
by
Natasha Wimmer

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR’S HEIRS
.
6

1 THE PART ABOUT THE CRITICS
.
7

2
 
THE PART ABOUT AMALFITANO
..
68

3 THE PART ABOUT FATE
.
93

4 THE PART
ABOUT
 
THE CRIMES
.
142

5. THE PART ABOUT ARCHIMBOLDI
242

NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION
..
344

A NOTE FROM THE
AUTHOR’S HEIRS

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

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

2666

By Roberto Bolaño

1 THE
PART ABOUT THE CRITICS

The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier
read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in
Paris
, when he was nineteen years old and
studying German literature. The book in question was
D'Arsonval.
The young Pelletier didn't realize at the time that the
novel 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 lapse
or bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing
to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.

From that day on (or from the early
morning hours when he concluded his maiden reading) he became an enthusiastic
Archimboldian and set out on a quest to find more works by the author. This was
no easy task. Getting hold of books by Benno von Archimboldi in the 1980s, even
in
Paris
, was
an effort not lacking in all kinds of difficulties. Almost no reference to
Archimboldi could be found in the university's German department. Pelletier's
professors 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 the
person his professor had in mind was the Italian painter, regarding whom he
soon revealed himself to be equally ignorant.

Pelletier wrote to the
Hamburg
publishing house that had published
D'Arsonval
and received no response. He
also scoured the few German bookstores he could find in
Paris
. The name Archimboldi appeared in a
dictionary of German literature and in a Belgian magazine devoted— whether as a
joke or seriously, he never knew—to the literature of
Prussia
. In 1981, he made a trip to
Bavaria
with three friends from the German
department, and there, in a little bookstore in
Munich
, on Voralmstrasse, he found two other
books: the slim volume titled
Mitzi's
Treasure,
less than one hundred pages long, and the aforementioned English
novel,
The Garden.

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

He completed the final draft of the
translation in 1984, and a
Paris
publishing house, after some inconclusive and contradictory readings, accepted
it and published Archimboldi. Though the novel seemed destined from the start
not to sell more than a thousand copies, the first printing of three thousand
was 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 books
by the German writer, translated two others, and was regarded almost
universally as the preeminent authority on Benno von Archimboldi across the
length and breadth of
France
.

Then Pelletier could think back on the day
when he first read Archimboldi, and he saw himself, young and poor, living in a
chambre de bonne,
sharing the sink
where he washed his face and brushed his teeth with fifteen other people who
lived in the same dark garret, shitting in a horrible and notably unhygienic
bathroom that was more like a latrine or cesspit, also shared with the fifteen
residents of the garret, some of whom had already returned to the provinces,
their respective university degrees in hand, or had moved to slightly more
comfortable places in Paris itself, or were still there—just a few of
them—vegetating or slowly dying of revulsion.

He saw himself, as we've said, ascetic and
hunched over his German dictionaries in the weak light of a single bulb, thin
and dogged, as if he were pure will made flesh, bone, and muscle without an
ounce of fat, fanatical and bent on success. A rather ordinary picture of a
student in the capital, but it worked on him like a drug, a drug that brought
him to tears, a drug that (as one sentimental Dutch poet of the nineteenth
century had it) opened the floodgates of emotion, as well as the floodgates of
something 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 in
words but in painful images, the period of his youthful apprenticeship, and
after 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 brilliant
career was opening up before him, and that to maintain its glow he had to
persist in his determination, in sole testament to that garret. This seemed
easy enough.

Jean-Claude Pelletier was born in 1961 and
by 1986 he was already a professor of German in
Paris
. Piero Morini was born in 1956, in a
town near
Naples
,
and although he read Benno von Archimboldi for the first time in 1976, or four
years before Pelletier, it wasn't until 1988 that he translated his first novel
by the German author,
Bifurcaria
Bifurcata,
which came and went almost unnoticed in Italian bookstores.