“If the word ‘unflinching’ didn’t exist I’d invent it to describe these nearly 300 pages,” he wrote. “Yet [author Roberto] Bolaño never completely abandons those reserves of lyricism and irony that make the sequence as transporting as it is grueling.”

Bolaño describes, with vicious detail, the unsolved murders of Ciudad Juárez (thinly veiled as Santa Teresa). The novel’s grueling 300-page fourth section comprises 2666‘s most ambitious, challenging, and successful moments.

Though the murders of Juárez have gained some attention in Western media, the city is still considered by many metrics of development to be a success. In 2008, Foreign Direct Investment magazine, owned by the Financial Times, named Juárez the “City of the Future.” Over the past ten years, the average annual growth of its industry has been an impressive 5.3%. It’s the place where output and efficiency are the highest. Even though workers are aware of the dangers of the city — not just from homicides, but frequent drug cartel-related violence — the relatively high maquiladora wages encourage a steady flow of women across Mexico to move north to Juárez.

The situation of the city, both prosperous and menacing, sustains a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. Though most of the 400 cases remain unsolved, the current leading theory is that the murders are committed by a number of different people. The consistent negligence of the police to investigate the crimes successfully has nurtured an environment where rape and murder go unpunished. The woman of Juárez have no choice but to endure. From the perspective of postmodern development, it’s a zone of social abandonment. In a literary sense, it’s a place devoid of moral consequence.

So what point does Bolaño want to make here? Just to bring attention to Juárez among fiction readers? Perhaps, but I believe his pursuit is more demanding.

Adam Kaufman wrote an article comparing 2666 to The Wire — HBO’s sociopolitical crime drama set in Baltimore. It’s an inexact parallel, but the ways that Bolaño and the show’s creator David Simon establish their locales as zones of abandonment speak to the strengths of both. According to Simon, The Wire is an untraditional Greek tragedy:

The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason.

But The Wire is all about examining the motives behind “postmodern institutions.” The show’s story lines are carefully interconnected to illustrate the convoluted ties between Baltimore’s social, political, and economic factors, rather than chalking it down to simple cause-and-effect relationships. Simon is also able to make certain fictive leaps that a documentarian couldn’t. It’s one of the reasons why The Wire works so well.

Still, both Simon and Bolaño defy tragic convention in the sense that most of their “lightning bolts” are not ethical repercussions. Tragic heroes traditionally meet an inevitable yet foreseen end, always at the hand of their own shortcomings. The victims of Juárez are killed for no moral purpose, and even in Bolaño’s literary construction of Santa Teresa, the same emptiness pervades each of their deaths. They are victims of real-life Olympian powers — globalization, poverty, foreign investment, corrupt police, and so on.

Some have criticized “The Part About the Crimes” for the way it fetishizes each murder to the point of perversion. The graphic, violent nature of each description is unsettling, yet after 300 pages, it becomes desensitizing. Bolaño repeats the phrase “vaginally and anally raped,” mimicking the language of the police report with discomforting formality. Murder becomes tedious, to those who live in Juárez, the “fictitious” Santa Teresa, and surprisingly, to the reader.

It’s this self-awareness that makes 2666 a postmodern tragedy, and it’s how Bolaño ties “The Part About the Crimes” to the rest of the novel. The academics of the first section, Amalfitano in the second, and journalist Oscar Fate of the third are all drawn to the violence of Santa Teresa. But when we’re actually confronted with the murders, Bolaño doesn’t grant us the literary meaning of each death. We just see the evil of it.

Sociology and political science classes often teach globalization as a force with trade-offs. While foreign manufacturing demands exploitation of its labor, it’s more efficient and less expensive to produce goods abroad, and the workers themselves earn higher wages than they would otherwise. But this justification imbues an ethical rationale behind the motives.

In Santa Teresa, Bolaño gives us a more one-sided picture, where the maquiladoras sustain a realm of violence. 2666 frees itself early on from literary conventions — narrative, structure, theme, and as we discussed, moralizing. Juárez may be a real place on Earth where genuine evil exists, and in the grandest sense of irony (literary irony, mind you), the only way we can even begin to believe it is through fiction.

Strick designs about ten book covers over the course of three months. She spends most of her time reading, though in the case of 2666, only two-and-a-half of Bolano’s five books had been translated to English while she was working on the design. Strick’s approval process at Farrar, Straus and Giroux involves emailing jpegs of the design to her editors, who in turn send it off to the author for comments. I asked her if writers ever criticize her ideas.

“The goal is to try and satisfy everybody as much as possible, and certain authors have a track record that gives them a louder voice than others. I don’t mind redesigning, as long as it’s pushing the design forward, and really, it’s their baby before it’s mine,” Strick said.

When an author is deceased, his/her estate has to approve the design, which can prove more frustrating since extra voices must weigh in. For 2666, Strick only needed approval from the FSG office, and the later stages of the process mostly involved crunching numbers to make sure the design wasn’t too expensive to produce.

Most striking is 2666‘s first book. It features 18th-century painter Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele, which Bolano references in the novel’s first section. Strick explained that the choice to feature Moreau’s oil painting came from her editor, Lorin Stein.

“The Moreau painting is apocalyptic and kind of insane,” Strick said. “Lorin [Stein] thought Bolano and Moreau would be an interesting pairing. Both were brilliant artists with fantastic views.”

The second book bears the abstract work of Cy Twombly. The sparse, chaotic aesthetic of Twombly’s calligraphic scribbles speaks to 2666‘s most disturbing yet ambitious chapter, “The Part About the Crimes,” which details the unsolved murders of Ciudad Juárez (named Santa Teresa in the novel). For the last book, Strick picked Albertus Seba’s hand-colored Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, based on one character’s fascination with seaweed.

Perhaps the most impressive feat of Strick’s design is how all three covers are distinct yet work together tonally, forcing readers to contemplate their differences and similarities, much like the sections of Bolano’s text. The title, which appears on the spine in elegant woodcut type, ties the designs together as the numbers move down vertically with each volume.

Unlike the hardcover edition, which presents only the eye-catching Moreau painting on its dust jacket, the brown cardboard slipcase that houses the three paperbacks is the set’s least attention-grabbing feature.

“I kept thinking about Juárez and abandoned landscapes, so I stripped the slipcase down as much as possible,” she explained. “I wanted the experience to be like pulling precious things from an old paper bag.”

According to Strick, hardcover and paperback editions usually try to appeal to different audiences. Hardcovers, in general, are geared toward older readers, while paperbacks attract younger, thriftier buyers. Paperbacks are often redesigned to reach an audience the previous cover didn’t. But FSG decided to do something different with 2666: they released the hardcover and slipcase paperback editions at the same time, both set at the same price.

“I thought the paperback design would appeal to Bolano’s underground audience, but when I last checked, the hardcover was selling better,” Strick said. “I asked my editor, who thought that because the slipcase had to be shrink-wrapped, people felt more comfortable buying the other edition.”

I was surprised. Anyone could see that the paperback edition was more attractive, more ambitious. Was I overestimating the average reader’s appreciation of book design? Fittingly, our conversation led to discussion of electronic book formats. Strick talked about FSG’s recent (and somewhat ironic) adoption of Sony e-Readers to review manuscripts internally.

“We waste a tremendous amount of paper, and on top of that, carrying around hundreds of pages of manuscripts is kind of a hassle,” she said. “Playing around with the e-Reader has been an unexpected joy, but I suppose it could signal the end of my industry.”

Strick laughed, and I asked her if she was serious.

“I certainly don’t think it’s going to disappear, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens to book design in the next decade.”

After our talk, I went on Amazon to compare the sales ranks between editions of 2666. Even online, where customers can’t see the shrink-wrap, the hardcover was clobbering the paperback version. Though Strick had predicted it earlier, I was still surprised that anyone would choose the traditional hardcover over the gorgeous slipcase design. In the case of 2666, it seems impossible to think of the book separate from its design.

And for some reason, I took comfort in the fact that 2666 wasn’t available for the Kindle.

See more from Reading “2666.”

Critics also seem to agree that the novel is messy. Scott Esposito’s write-up in The Quarterly Conversation was the most negative review I could find, but I think he rightly identifies the novel’s most convoluted features:

2666 is huge, and the form sometimes feels like a clumsy one for the author. Some novelists, Pynchon for example, so revel in abundance that the spillage of words feels like an absolute necessity. For them, the huge novel is their one true form. [Roberto] Bolaño, whose books rarely grew to more than 200 pages, whose books, when they did grow larger than that, tended to do so by piecing together smaller, self-contained sections, seems at times unable in 2666 to distinguish the necessary from the ornamental, or worse, the banal.

In some ways, I refuse to believe that 2666 is perfect, especially considering that Bolaño only finished four and a half of the book’s five parts before he died. As brilliant as he was, all great works of fiction, especially one of this magnitude, demand months and months of editing and rewriting.

I would never call 2666 “banal,” but I think Esposito is right to call it “ornamental.” Bolaño’s epic is full of fascinating details that often meander and resolve to nothing.

This is particularly the case in the book’s third section, “The Part About Fate.” It follows Oscar Fate, an American journalist sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match for a black interest magazine. The central plot of Fate’s story—recognizing the unreported murders of Santa Teresa and the bizarre love story—are strong, but there are plenty of digressions that come across as unfocused and unnecessary.

Take, for example, the fictitious pre-fame background on Mexican filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who, in the world of 2666, was always drunk and high, lived in a bordello, and worked for a pimp. There’s even a brief mention of Woody Allen’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan. What any of these stories or the Hollywood motif in the section mean is ambiguous, if they even mean anything at all.

There’s also a messiness to the 2666‘s structure. The second section, “The Part About Amalfitano,” is about a philosophy professor who’s slowly going insane. In this part, Bolaño elected not to use a single paragraph break. There are still section breaks, but for the most part, you’re forced to squint through large chunks of text. Even the dialogue is set inline. The fourth section is also styled like this.

The second chapter of 2666 is by far the shortest, coming in at only 68 pages long, but in many ways, feels like the longest. In the same that February is insufferable despite its 28-day span, “The Part About Amalfitano” was an undertaking to finish.

Clearly, this divergence in structure and style from the first section is a deliberate choice the late Bolaño made. He must’ve understood the implications of designing something so hard to read. In that same way, an author as accomplished as Bolaño must have recognized the danger of all the loose ends and deviations as well.

I think it comes down to how much you trust an author. While I might not understand what everything signifies, 2666 is self-assured, even at its most peculiar.

Literary conventions believe that style, narrative, and even moral are necessary elements to fiction, but Bolaño challenges our conceptions of what exactly a novel is. 2666 is, perhaps, intentionally baroque, and I think there’s something brilliant in its imperfections. Even while I identify elements that I would consider flaws, they are just as likely to be things that I’m not used to or just make me uncomfortable. The only thing that seems to tie the book’s five distinct sections together is a continued doom-laden subtext, and who would expect the apocalypse to be anything but messy?

My favorite review of the novel comes from Sarah Kerr of The New York Review of Books. Quoting from the book, she says 2666 is “a world of ‘endless shipwreck’… met with the most radiant effort… [is] as good a way as any to describe Bolaño and his overwhelming book.”

See more from Reading “2666.”

The decision didn’t feel like a noble undertaking. Instead, it was an impulse buy (propelled by Amazon’s dangerous 1-Click feature), more akin to the time I bumped Iron Man to the top of my Netflix queue over the classic Akira Kurosawa films I’d been meaning to watch for ages.

Reading 2666 seemed destined to join the ranks of other empty self-promises, like running regularly, eating healthy, and other New Years resolution fodder. But it did make me consider why I would even bother trying.

While exercise and eating well have obvious benefits, pleasure reading doesn’t. Sure, there’s the pure enjoyment of it, but in a world where we’re swamped with homework, more reading is the last thing anyone wants to do. Is it a mark of cultural enrichment or intelligence, or merely a way of convincing ourselves that we’re intelligent?

Honestly, we don’t prove anything by pleasure reading. Instead, I think the reason is entirely personal. There’s a certain feeling you get after finishing a great book that rarely comes from other mediums. As hackneyed as it sounds, great books make you wish the story never ended (which, I think, is the premise of The NeverEnding Story). I’ve heard people rave more enthusiastically about epic-length novels like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Stephen King’s The Stand, or even Harry Potter than I have any other book.

But I don’t think this feeling has as much to do with the book itself, but the way we come to expect profundity from novels, especially long ones. The commitment to a book is unlike any obligation to other art forms. With albums and films, you can sit back and take in the experience as intensely or passively as you choose.

Books, on the other hand, demand your full concentration for their entirety. Sure, some novels ask more of their readers than others, but you can’t leave the book on while you do homework. The reward is greater because you’re so invested.

But let’s talk about 2666, or at least as far as I’ve read.

Some background: 2666 was published posthumously. Bolano died of liver failure in 2003, after becoming an internationally celebrated Chilean author and poet, most famously for The Savage Detectives (which I haven’t read). 2666 is divided into five distinct parts, only one of which I’ve finished.

The first section section of the book, self-consciously titled “The Part About the Critics,” explores the lives of four literary academics and their single connection—an underrated, mysterious German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi (who, of course, does not exist in our world). The semi-omniscient, semi-smart ass narrator refers to the protagonists collectively as the Archimboldians, each one the top Archimboldi scholar from his or her home country—France, Spain, Italy, and England. Through conferences and symposiums, they become close friends, and their relationships escalate into a love triangle (or perhaps a love tetrahedron).

But the central idea of “The Part About the Critics” is the dynamic of human relationships and their connection to literature. Archimboldi is the crux of the critics’ friendships, rivalries, and love affairs. Maybe Bolano intentionally mirrored the characters connection to Archimboldi with the reader’s connection to the novel, or even to Bolano himself.

Already, 2666 is far from perfect–there are some silly psychoanalytic dream sequences and some clumsy dialogue, perhaps from poor translation–but few novels, especially long ones, are without their blemishes. What I’m looking for in 2666 has little to do with the story itself. In many ways, I decided I’d liked Bolano’s work before I’d read the first page. Maybe it was the effusive critical praise or merely the handsome three-piece book design.

Or maybe I just wanted to love this book.

See more from Reading “2666.”