"....more like a cemetary than an avenue...."

Just as I finished the first book of Roberto Bolaño's posthumously published last work, 2666, my lending time form the library ran out and it was recalled. Someone else had placed a hold on the work and I will have to wait another month before I can enact my revenge, perpetrating the same grievous act against them.

I am left with a hauting feeling from the opening book of 2666, The Part About the Critics. It was a strangely interesting and obsessing read. Although for the most part while reading the book, carrying the massive 900 page slab from place to place with, trying to fit in a few minutes of reading and rumination whenever I could, I felt that the work was slow and retarding I could not keep myself from reading more. Unlike so many books that have presented themselves to me as being nearly plotless and void of direction of plot The Part About the Critics was strangely, and borderline upsettingly, obsessing. The story is about four German literature critics and scholars from all over Europe (England, France, Spain, and Italy.) Each is considered an expert in their field of study and on the work of the mysterious German author, held to be the greatest German author of the 20th century (with the exception of Franz Kafka), Benno von Archimboldi. As the four scholars become friends a love triangle develops within the group, Norton and English woman in her late 20s, and two of her male companions, Pelletier, a Parisian, and Espinoza, a Spaniard. As their private lives take over their work and daily tasks the critics find themselves suffer as a result of one another. The stroy windingly leads out of Europe and into a Mexican boarder town, Santa Teresa in Sonora, where, among a mystery concerning hundreds of young women's deaths, the critics hope to find the seemingly mythical figure of their mutual lives, Archimboldi.

The book reads like a Francisco Goya painting. Some figure like his Colossus or Saturn, devouring his son, hangs over the writing. The language is baroque and gothic but without the added weight of romanticism. So much of the story is interrupted by the dreams of the characters of their false memories of such that entire sections of the work feel surreal and unread after a time. As the characters slowly lose all connection to their own lives so does the reader and eventually you find yourself reading without purpose or direction or concern. The work is so disconcerting and unnerving that its easy to forget what you are reading and why. Some of its most stylish,stunning, memorable, and enjoyable lines and passages are constructed with such a dichotomy of grotesque beauty, of clarity juxtaposed with insanity that its hard to not feel upset reading them. Like when Norton, Pelletier and Espinoza, stopping their car along a Mexican highway leaving the city look out across the desert and into Arizona and "the sky at sunset looked like a carnivorous flower."