Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: First Reflections

I remember once walking through downtown Portland when it was minutes before I recognized that I was completely alone. It was late (I had just come back from a punk rock show) and the weather was awful, so that I could scarcely tell whether the sleet was falling down or rising up from the ground, like I was walking in a world of ash upset by an explosion. The streets were deserted, even the homeless had found somewhere else to go. When I realized this I started to sing loudly and every once and a while the buildings that looked like skyscrapers to a young punk from Eugene would alter my voice, echoing it back on pitch. 2666 is like that, a deserted city, a dry canyon, a canvern, relentlessly dark until a sliver of something beautiful slips in and reflects back not diffused and dim but more brilliant. These moment’s are rare in Bolaño’s final work (the belief in justice that still lives in one policeman, the dreams a little girl has of her lost brother as a giant, and more importantly, alive) but shine as real miracles when set in a world that starts with the death of hundreds, then thousands and perhaps millions, an apocalyptic world, a real one, our own. The book meanders, it drags, its digressions would test the patience of David Foster Wallace if he were alive to read them, but you are never tempted to put it down, reading feverishly for the next of the elegies that the dead sing back.

The Lewd – Fight: This song is from a mix CD Sally Eiler made in 2001. She was murdered in Mexico last year.