The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Roberto Bolaño · a novel in five parts · Anagrama, Barcelona, 2004, after the author’s death · scored on Bolaño’s Spanish in the five parts as published in 2004, read from knowledge, with Natasha Wimmer’s English (2008) for sense; no text in hand, Spanish and French quoted only where their words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and no translation quoted
Mode
Total novel as a record of atrocity; comedy of the academy, novel of breakdown, crime report and war novel in five parts
Mythos
The quest for an absent centre, the Grail inverted: the sought author never found by those who seek him, and the waste land found instead; the border city as an underworld where the dead accumulate unjudged; the boy who belongs on the sea bed
Phase
From Hans Reiter’s birth in Prussia in 1920, through the war on the Eastern Front, to the critics’ search and the killings of women in Santa Teresa in the late 1990s
Presentation
Fiction; five parts, each with its own centre and its own manner, under an epigraph from Baudelaire; published after the author’s death as one novel
Register
From the deadpan comedy of the academy and the associative run of a mind coming loose to the flat forensic report and the plain, almost fabular narration of a life
Scale
Five lives and a city of the dead; Europe and the Americas across the century, from Prussia and the Crimea to Detroit and Sonora
Governing Proposition
Four European critics in search of a hidden German novelist follow his trail to Santa Teresa, a city on the Mexican border where women are being killed by the hundred; an exile comes apart there, an American journalist passes through, the killings are set down one by one in the language of the police, and the last part tells the life of the novelist himself, from a Prussian childhood through the Eastern Front to the old man who sets out for Mexico. The wager of the novel is that a modern order can kill the poor and absorb the killing as routine, that the murders of Europe’s century and the murders of the border are one subject, and that a book of record which refuses every solution can make its reader feel the indifference it indicts.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Une oasis d’horreur dans un désert d’ennui”
“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” The line is Baudelaire’s, from “Le Voyage”, and 2666 sets it, in Spanish, over the whole. It is the book’s own account of its form. The horror is not set apart from the boredom but found inside it, and the reader comes to it only by crossing the desert, page after page, as the people of the book come to the desert of Sonora. The title is never explained. The book is in five parts of very unequal length, each with its own centre and its own manner, and each named for what it holds: “La parte de los críticos”, “La parte de Amalfitano”, “La parte de Fate”, “La parte de los crímenes”, “La parte de Archimboldi”.
The first part follows four critics from the universities of Europe, bound by their devotion to a German novelist, Archimboldi, whom none of them has seen. They read him, argue over him at conferences, and fall into a love triangle among themselves. The register is a deadpan comedy of the academy, ironical and never contemptuous, and it runs long. Once, in London, in a taxi, the critics beat a Pakistani driver. The violence erupts, and it is not spoken of again. Its place in the book is exact: it is the first thing the book shows being forgotten, and the critics forget it as a city will later forget its dead.
The search leads them at last to Santa Teresa, a city in Sonora on the border with the United States, modelled on Ciudad Juárez. They wait there for an author who does not come. One of them, Norton, leaves. Around the others, in the desert and on the waste ground at the edge of the city, women are being killed, and the critics, who have crossed an ocean for a writer, do not look at what lies under their feet. Then the book lets them go. They do not return, and their search is not resolved. The man they came for is not where they are looking; the reader will find him, and find him on the road to this city.
Movement II
Amalfitano is an exile who lives in Santa Teresa with his daughter Rosa. The family is a father, a daughter, and the absence of Lola, the girl’s mother, who fled. In the yard of his house he hangs a book on the clothesline, Dieste’s Testamento geométrico, a treatise of geometry, and leaves it to the sun and the wind, after Duchamp. A book of rules is put out in a desert city to learn what the weather will do to it. The book never says what the gesture means, and its readers still argue it.
At night he hears a voice. The part is written in the long associative sentence of a mind coming loose: it follows his thought from figure to figure and memory to memory, and the reader cannot tell at what point reasoning has become something else. It is the most inward of the five parts. The book gives his breakdown the same calm it gives everything, and that calm is what makes it frightening.
Of all the people in the book Amalfitano is the one who cannot stop seeing. The critics look away from Santa Teresa, the police close their files, the city goes to work; he lives among the killings with a daughter, and his mind gives way. The book does not say that the city has done this to him, and it does not need to. His madness is the mind of one man in whom the city’s law, horror under boredom, will not stay under. The part is the hinge of the book: the European visitors leave by one door, and the city’s own life comes in by the other.
Movement III
Fate is an American journalist. His part begins in his own country, in New York and Detroit, among the matters of race and class that the book will find again on the border, and it sends him to Santa Teresa for a boxing match. The register changes again: the comedy of the first part and the inwardness of the second give way to the movement of a reporter, a man who arrives, observes and is expected to leave. The book carries an American gaze to the border, and lets it see the city as a visitor would.
In Santa Teresa he hears of the killings. He goes into the prison where Klaus Haas is held, and puts questions to him. He meets Rosa, Amalfitano’s daughter, and drives with her out of the city at night. The drive is one of the book’s heights: the car on the road, the city behind them, the sense of escape from a place that kills its women, and no certainty that escape is possible. The part leaves it there.
It is the loosest of the five parts. The pages in Detroit and on the boxing match could go with little loss, and the interview with Haas opens a thread the book does not follow. But the part does work no other can. It brings the reader into the prison, and it gives the city to someone who belongs to neither the European academy nor the border, so that the indifference of the place is seen from outside before the next part sets it down from within, one case at a time.
Movement IV
The fourth part sets down the killings of women in Santa Teresa in the 1990s. One case follows another, well over a hundred of them, in the manner of a police or forensic report: the date, the place where the body was found, its position, the cause of death, what the police did, and the file closed. The language is flat, and it stays flat for hundreds of pages. There is no pathos and no climax. The first case is followed by the next, and the next by another, in the same words, and almost every one ends without a culprit.
The women are left in the desert, on waste ground, at the edges of the city. Many of them work in the maquiladoras, the assembly plants that make goods for the market on the far side of the border, and the book knows their shifts and their buses. The police fail, the press fails, the state fails, each at its own level. Around the catalogue the city’s other life goes on: the Penitent, who desecrates churches; the seer Florita Almada, who speaks of the killings on television; Klaus Haas, who holds a press conference from prison. None of it brings the killing to an end.
The repetition is the argument, and the epigraph has named it in advance: the oasis of horror is reached through the desert of boredom. A selection of cases would offer the reader a story, with a pattern, a suspect and an end; the catalogue refuses one. The reader grows numb, as the city has, and then is ashamed of the numbness. Solve one murder and the book becomes a thriller; it solves none, and its knowledge is of impunity. The women are names, dates and places, kept as the record keeps them, and the book turns its charge on the police, the press, the state and the culture that looks away.
Movement V
Hans Reiter is born in Prussia in 1920. As a child he is drawn to the sea floor, a boy who belongs on the sea bed more than on land, and the book sends him through the century as a diver goes through water, seeing everything and touched by little. The register is the plainest in the book, almost the narration of a fable. The hero the critics sought from the first page appears only now, in the last part, and the book tells his life from its beginning.
He goes to war on the Eastern Front, through Romania, the Ukraine and the Crimea. In a village of the Ukraine, in a hiding place, he finds and reads the notebook of Ansky, a man who has recorded the Soviet purges. And he hears an official, Sammer, tell how Jews were sent to his Polish village and how, not knowing what else to do with them, he had them killed. It is the administrative calm of murder, the same calm the fourth part found in Santa Teresa, and Reiter kills Sammer. The book makes no speech about it. It sets the two calms side by side, across half a century and an ocean, and leaves the reader to see that they are one.
After the war Reiter becomes the author the critics will seek, published by Mr Bubis, his life joined to Ingeborg’s. His sister Lotte’s son, Klaus, is the man held in the prison of Santa Teresa. On the last page the old author sets out for Mexico, to go to his nephew. The critics never found him; the reader has, and found him on the road to the city of the dead. The book has a phrase for its own wager: “las grandes obras, imperfectas, torrenciales”
“great works, imperfect, torrential.” Left unfinished at its author’s death, the book stakes itself on that kind of greatness and pays its cost.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it is hard on a book of more than a thousand pages left unrevised. The core holds. The crimes part must keep its length: its argument is that the killings are numberless and that the city, the police and the reader grow used to them, and three cases chosen would make a thriller of what the book shows as routine. The Archimboldi part carries the European half of the horror, the Eastern Front and the killing of Jews in a Polish village, and the critics’ convergence on Santa Teresa is required. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is permitted rather than compelled: the critics’ love triangle and their London episodes run long; the Fate part spends pages in Detroit and on a boxing match that could go with little loss; several dreams and digressions repeat rather than turn. Perhaps a tenth to an eighth of the whole is slack the author did not live to cut.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a modern order can kill poor women by the hundred, in a city that makes goods for the richest market on earth, and absorb the killings as a fact of life, while the police, the press and the state fail and the culture of Europe looks elsewhere. The catalogue shows the women left in the desert and on waste ground, many of them workers in the maquiladoras, and case after case closed without a culprit. A second disclosure joins this to the European century: an official has Jews killed because he does not know what else to do with them, the administrative calm of murder that Santa Teresa repeats. Over both, the critics, devoted to an author, never see what lies under their feet. Held off the top because the link between the two halves is shown by juxtaposition more than articulated, and because the women stay records by design.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Elevation comes often, and it is the dreadful kind, built by accumulation more than by the single sentence. The crimes part reaches a sublime of quantity: case after case in the same flat words, until the flatness itself is terror. Against it stand the heights of the other parts: Amalfitano hanging Dieste’s Testamento geométrico on the clothesline and hearing a voice in the night; Fate’s night drive with Rosa out of the city; the Penitent who desecrates churches; the seer Florita Almada on television; Klaus Haas’s press conference from prison; Reiter as a child drawn to the sea floor; Ansky’s notebook read in a hiding place in the Ukraine; Reiter’s killing of Sammer. Held below the higher reaches because the prose is rarely lifted at the level of the line, by intent, and the critics’ part runs long in a comic, academic register that does not rise.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, and the building is in the structure. The book is a quest for an absent centre: four critics seek a hidden author, and the quest leads them not to him but to the edge of a desert where women are killed. The pattern of the Grail is inverted: the sought thing is never found by its seekers, and what is found is the waste land. Santa Teresa is built as an underworld, a city at the border where the dead accumulate and no one is judged, and the last part brings the sought author himself there, an old man going to his nephew in prison. The epigraph frames the whole as Baudelaire’s voyage, ending in horror. Reiter is built as a creature of the deep, a boy who belongs on the sea bed and walks through history like a diver. Held near the bar because the archetypes are often evoked through dreams, seers and the Penitent rather than borne by a figure, and the centre is left empty by design.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the total novel of the Latin American boom, Rayuela, Cien años de soledad, Terra Nostra, and behind it Borges, Kafka and the encyclopedic novels of Europe and the United States. The turn is away from the boom’s magic toward a realism of record: the crimes part sets down well over a hundred murders in the language of the police report, a wager that risks boring the reader into the very indifference it indicts, and takes the risk on purpose. Five books that barely touch, a centre never reached, a hero who appears only in the last part, crimes never solved, a quest that fails: each refuses a promise the novel makes. The stake was absolute, a dying writer’s last years spent on a structure he could not finish. Held below the top because the instruments, Kafka’s withholding, Borges’s invented authors, Perec’s lists, are inherited, and the swerve lies in their combination and their matter.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Five parts approach one city from five distances, Europe’s academy, an exile’s breakdown, an American journalist, the police record, a German life across the century, so that Santa Teresa is reached by every route and explained by none. The crimes part’s repetition is the instrument of its knowledge: the reader learns numbness, then is ashamed of it. The critics never find Archimboldi and the reader does, so the book knows something its seekers do not: the author they want is not where literature lives but where the killing is. The withheld solution is the book’s knowledge of impunity; solve one murder and it becomes a thriller. Held off the top because the parts are semi-autonomous, each able to stand as a book of its own, and because the Fate part’s form serves the whole less closely than the others.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and twenty-two years supply some. A large criticism has gathered in Spanish and in English, among it Chris Andrews’s Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe (2014), Ignacio Echevarría’s own essays, and a body of work on the novel and the killings of women in Ciudad Juárez. The questions it plants are still argued: what the title means, since the book never says; who tells the story; who killed the women, or whether that is the wrong question; what joins Reiter’s war to Santa Teresa beyond his nephew; what the geometry book on the line means; whether the crimes part is witness or exploitation. The book is reread differently as violence in Mexico has grown. Held below the top because twenty-two years is a short test, and part of the yield is mystery left by an unfinished book rather than depth designed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the novel in Spanish at the turn of the century and, with the translation, the world novel of the early twenty-first. The force: it ended the hold of magic realism as the form expected of the Latin American novel abroad, showed that the total novel could be written as a record of atrocity rather than a fable of a people, and put the killings of women on the border at the centre of world literature. Held below the top because part of the turn began with Los detectives salvajes (1998), and because the span is short. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Natasha Wimmer’s English of 2008 made Bolaño, with that earlier novel, the most discussed foreign novelist in English for some years; the book is ranked in many surveys among the most important novels of this century; and the younger Mexican and Latin American novelists of violence write after it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The case for survival at twenty-two years rests on a presence as wide as any book of that age shows: in print without a break in Spanish and in English, translated into the major languages, taught in universities in Latin America, Spain and the English-speaking world, and read well beyond them. The form survives whole as published; the joining of the five parts in one volume after the author’s death costs little, since the parts are his and the arrangement is the one the structure asks for. Its surface will not date it: the 1990s of Santa Teresa are history now, and the war half a century before that. The span alone holds the figure where it is: twenty-two years cannot show whether the book outlasts the turn of taste that raised it, or the season of attention to its author’s life.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on Bolaño’s Spanish, with Wimmer’s close and plain English beside it for sense and nothing charged to it. The command is of register and of the long sentence. The critics’ part is written in a deadpan academic comedy, ironical without contempt; the Amalfitano part in the long associative sentence of a mind coming loose; the crimes part in a flat forensic Spanish of dates, positions of the body, causes of death and closed files, sustained for hundreds of pages without a slip into pathos; the Archimboldi part in the plain, almost fabular narration of a life. Dreams and monologues are told with the same calm. The book has a phrase for its own manner, “las grandes obras, imperfectas, torrenciales”, great works, imperfect, torrential. Charged: the unrevised state, with its repetitions, slack stretches and loose ends, above all in the Fate part.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law: horror lies under boredom, and those who could see it look away. Take the two most distant elements, the critics in a London taxi beating a Pakistani driver, and a girl’s body found on waste ground in Santa Teresa with the file closed. They obey the same law: the critics’ violence erupts once and is forgotten, as the city forgets. Reiter’s war and the border city obey it; Amalfitano’s madness is the mind of one man who cannot stop seeing. The range runs from comedy through the forensic to fable, and holds. Charged: the unrevised book leaves threads whose law is never tested, Fate’s interview with Haas, Norton’s departure, the critics simply dropping from the book; and the seer and the Penitent run on a looser physics than the police record.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure by Santa Teresa. History: the Eastern Front, the killing of Jews in a Polish village, the Soviet purges in Ansky’s notebook, postwar Germany, the border in the 1990s. The state and its police, failing at every level. Labour: the maquiladoras, their workers, their shifts and buses. Class and race on the border, and in Fate’s Harlem. Journalism, the academy, the publishing house of Mr Bubis. The family: Amalfitano and Rosa, Lola’s flight, Lotte and her son Klaus, Reiter and Ingeborg. Consciousness, in Amalfitano’s breakdown and Reiter’s long life. The sacred, in the Penitent, the seer and the churches. The natural order, in the desert and the sea. Literature itself, as vocation and as blindness. Integrated, not listed: all meet in one city and one century’s violence. Held off the top because the murdered women, the centre, are held from outside, as the record holds them.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Encompassed at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2 and The Swerve at 9.0. Many orders, from the Eastern Front and the maquiladoras to the academy, the family and the sacred, held in one city and one century’s violence; a disclosure that holds, that a modern order can kill poor women by the hundred and absorb the killing as routine while the culture of Europe looks elsewhere; and a turn from the boom’s magic to a realism of record, staked on a structure its author did not live to finish.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0, held by what is permitted rather than compelled: the critics’ love triangle and London episodes, the pages in Detroit and on the boxing match, dreams and digressions that repeat rather than turn, perhaps a tenth to an eighth of the whole. Next above it, The Imperishable at 8.4: twenty-two years of survival as wide as that span allows, which cannot yet show whether the book outlasts the taste that raised it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Swerve at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. The work stands in the tier at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, published by Anagrama, Barcelona, in November 2004, after the author’s death in July 2003. It is scored as the five parts as published in 2004, “La parte de los críticos”, “La parte de Amalfitano”, “La parte de Fate”, “La parte de los crímenes” and “La parte de Archimboldi”, under the epigraph from Baudelaire. Bolaño left the book unfinished and unrevised in its last state; his heirs, advised by his friend and literary executor Ignacio Echevarría, published the five parts as one novel, and Echevarría’s note to the first edition explains the choice. The text was assembled from finished parts and completed by no other hand, and it is weighed as it stands, its repetitions and loose threads with it. Every axis is judged on Bolaño’s Spanish. No text, Spanish or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotation is confined to words known with certainty: the epigraph, in Baudelaire’s French, which the book gives in Spanish, and one Spanish phrase on great works; each is followed by plain English that is the desk’s own, and events are paraphrased. Translation · Natasha Wimmer’s English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), issued also as a set of three paperback volumes, read beside for sense: it is close and plain, and keeps the long sentences and the flat forensic register. It is not quoted, and no shortfall of it is charged to the book. The sound of Bolaño’s Spanish beyond the words known with certainty, and counts of its words, sentences and dialogue, are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count of the first edition, the lengths of the parts, the years of the killings the fourth part covers, the wishes the author left for the book’s publication, a note on its narrator, the source of the title, the context in which the phrase on great works is spoken, and particular debts of later novelists, are not given. Citations are by part.