Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About Fate (tr. by Natasha Wimmer)

 (Blogger's note: I am devoting a blog post to each of the five parts of this giant doorstop of a novel. My coverage of Part 1: The Part About the Critics is HERE and of Part 2: The Part About Amalfitano is HERE)

While I was heckling the 2 Month Review Podcast's live recording last week, I accidentally developed a whole new ridiculous theory of what's really going on in 2666 that I'm going to have some fun with in this entry.

The third part of 2666,"The Part About Fate:, concerns a writer for a Harlem magazine with the arresting and bizarre name of Black Dawn. The writer, a youngish Black man, writes under the arresting and somewhat bizarre name of Oscar Fate. We spend a good third of this part looking back on his career to date with the magazine, writing profiles of human curiosities who are also figures of former prominence to the African American community, such as a former Black Panther leader who is now known mostly for a cookbook he compiled of recipes for barbecued pork, or the last member of the Fourth International in Brooklyn. We thus get a very clear idea of what this magazine is all about even before Oscar explains it to someone as a Harlem magazine written almost exclusively by and for Black readers. "Black Dawn" thus refers to a hopefulness, a notion that a new day will eventually come when its readership and Blacks everywhere have an equal stake in the dreams of equality and opportunity that we all cherish.

But, when Oscar first names the magazine to an interlocultor in a diner, that person doesn't see the name in those terms at all. He thinks it's a pretty messed up name for a magazine. His reaction, in fact, made me notice the name more than I otherwise might have in a 900+ page novel full of strange and interesting things. But yeah, because I'm above all else a reader of Weird Fiction, "Black Dawn" evoked a certain set of associations for me. I imagined it having pentacles and goats heads secretly embossed into the cover or something, and that its articles would include secret texts explaining 35 ways to use up the meat from the black rooster you sacrificed for Samhain or tips on removing bloodstains from your ceremonial robes or...

Meanwhile on the latest 2 Month Review, Chad, Brian and Katie were all struggling to describe the almost supernatural pull the growing urban nightmare of Santa Teresa is exerting on the characters of 2666, and I suddenly decided that Black Dawn is 2666's "The King in Yellow" only instead of being a play that drives its audience immediately crazy, Black Dawn marks them out for a slower and sadder doom: being drawn to Santa Teresa and its horrific milieu of femicide on a massive scale. So I imagined that at some point Black Dawn printed a long lost short story by Benno von Archimboldi that somehow fit its apparent as well as secret scheme, and that sucked in the Critics. And maybe also published something by The Poet that snared Amalfitano, possibly via his wife. And now it's ensnared Oscar who, as an employee of the magazine, was a priori doomed anyway, by yanking him off his beat covering notable Black eccentrics and sending him to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match between a promising Light Heavyweight boxer from New York, Count Pickett, and a Mexican upstart named Merolino Fernandez. After the magazine's full-time boxing correspondent was murdered.

Drama button.

Things get much less Weird and Eldritch once Oscar reaches Mexico, though. He falls in with a group of locals he's met via the other sportswriters in town to cover the boxing match, meets Merolino Fernandez's two sparring partners including one Omar Abdul who keeps showing up and being enigmatic around town and no I'm not thinking of Abdul Alhazred you're thinking of Abdul Alhazred shut up.

Anyway, once in Mexico this Part reminds me of nothing so much as a certain variety of 1990s movie (and movies are a concern in this part, as one of Oscar's new friends, Charley Cruz, owns a video store and a house he's done his best to turn into a movie theater of his very own*) best exemplified by Doug Liman's Go (1999), in which a drug deal goes sideways and an array of attractive young people scramble to save their skins from higher level dealers and a predatory Amway salesman in a series of hilarious and vaguely hallucinatory scenes. Similarly, once the boxing match that is Oscar's ostensible reason for being there is over (so over), Oscar and his new friends begin chasing a good time for what feels like reasons more important than just the good time itself but are still haunted by the Santa Teresa killings even before Oscar meets two women: Guadalupe Roncal**, a cub reporter from a big newspaper in Mexico City who has been pretty much forced to come and cover the killings all on her own and, being both young and attractive herself, is scared to death to do what she needs to do which includes interviewing the prime suspect at a nearby jail; and Rosa Amalfitano, Part 2's innocent and studious daughter-figure, who seemed mostly to be there to take care of her father (also named Oscar) but here revealed as a drop-dead gorgeous beauty whom all the guys, including Oscar, want to sleep with. Guess we know now why she's coming home late all the time in Part 2.

The male characters in "The Part About Fate" can barely be bothered to even acknowledge that the killings are occurring, and so it is only via Guadalupe and Rosa (and a friend of Rosa's, also named Rosa) that Oscar learns what's going on. Immediately he decides this is way more interesting and important than a stupid boxing match but his editors in New York strongly disagree and tell him to hurry up and file his story and get his ass back to New York. Only he's sort of promised to help Guadalupe survive her interview with a tall and terrifying man who speaks several languages including German (!) and, upon meeting his namesake and Rosa A's father, has promised that Oscar that he will get Rosa Amalfitano the hell out of Santa Teresea and onto a plane for Barcelona, to put lovely Rosa an ocean away from the killer's or killers' reach. But if Oscar Fate has been marked by the Black Dawn, Rosa and Guadalupe were born in its dark light, and their company does not seem like a guarantee that he'll escape his, hurr hurr, Fate.

Not that we get to find out in this book.

On a more serious note, "The Part About Fate" still feels, on a second reading, like the weakest part of the novel overall, though it briefly approaches the serious and ominous nature of the other parts now and then, and occasionally pauses to ask us interesting questions like, at what point does Oscar Fate (real name Quincy Williams) cease to be an African-American and become, simply, an American? Is it merely crossing an international border? Or is it only when he starts hanging out with native born Mexicans and White-Spanish Rosa Amalfitano? Does it happen within his new circle of peers, or is it merely a phenomenon of his relations with strangers in Santa Teresa? Oscar can't figure this out and neither can I. Bet that would be a great essay for Black Dawn...

*Because of this we are treated to discussions of the work of two cult directors, Robert Rodriguez and David Lynch, with more than a little extra attention paid to Lynch's Twin Peaks, also concerned with at least one dead girl and the high weirdness surrounding her murder, though the general plot and themes of Twin Peaks is pretty much a complete inversion of the situation in Santa Teresa in that there is only one victim, she is a white girl whom everybody knew and loved, and the whole close-knit community in which the murder took place is obsessed with the murder. Hmm.

*I remember on my original read of 2666 that I was all about Oscar and he loomed large in my memory as a favorite character because I've been a journalistic fish out of water just like he is, but this time around, this time I find that I'd really rather there had been a Part About Guadalupe. Maybe there is, somewhere, and Roberto's kids just haven't found it yet? Hey, a girl can hope...