Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About the Crimes (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

Blogger's note: I'm covering this giant doorstop of a novel part by part. This post is the fourth of five. To read prior entries in order, start with The Part About the Critics" HERE, then "The Part About Amalfitano" HERE, then "The Part about Fate" HERE.

We just passed the twelfth anniversary of the internet publication of the greatest book review ever written, and I was today years old when I realized that yes, in fact, "The Part About the Crimes" is the A Feast for Crows of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially as rendered in audio format by the talented but exhausted-sounding Scott Brick, whose habit of giving every sentence a rapid rise and quick plunging fall in pitch to convey a certain kind of drama just drives home the repetitive, almost liturgical quality of so much of this part of the novel, by far its most depressing and demoralizing oh my god too many hours, which, its title tells us right away we should not be expecting a walk in the park, but even by the standards of something explicitly about the tidal wave of femicide that is the primary thread in this big fat tapestry, this is grim stuff. I think this whole damned city of Santa Teresa must all be the kind of paid up subscribers to Black Dawn (see my post about "The Part About Fate") that drop everything when the new issue arrives in the mail and don't do a damned thing until they've read the whole magazine cover to cover. Or at least, that's what the cops do. When they're not relentlessly trading dated and exhaustingly horrible and sexist "what's the difference between women and X" jokes, anyway. Yuck.*

The stuff between the repetitions isn't much better, either. For instance, about midway through this part, a side character from "The Part About Fate", a Mexico City sportswriter named Sergio, pops up again, now back in Santa Teresa to write about its seemingly dual crime wave (we'll talk about about the Penitent later) in his new role as a crime reporter, takes a prostitute to bed and has a weird conversation with her that still kind of makes me want to scream.

Smoking a post-coital cigarette**, Sergio starts demanding to know what the unnamed prostitute knows about the murders, and gets pretty shitty when she tells him she has a "vague idea" about them. He berates her for not having solidarity with all these other whores who have been murdered since she is one herself, then she reponds, not by expressing sympathy or regret or concern or fear, even for herself, but by pointing out that Sergio has made a category error. The women being murdered in Santa Teresa have not been prostitutes, but, mostly, workers, employees of the maquilladoras. She emphasizes the word "workers" and just generally conveys the idea that as far as she is concerned, what she does for a living is not "work." Again, I'm kind of applying 21st century standards to a book set and largely composed during the 90s, but even back in those far off days, before we all as a society (or at least the left-leaning half of society) agreed that "sex work is work" we did refer to prostitutes as "working girls," so, uh, no.

I mean, I know I'm being picky and even a little precious about this scene in a novel section that basically exists to drive home that the failure to regard women as fully human has big social and individual costs that disproportionately (and often fatally) are paid by those same women, but hey, it's also an illustrative passage of how grim this part can be. But this is "The Part About the Crimes" at its lightest.

Overwhelmingly, "The Part About the Crimes" is about repeating one archetypal scene over and over and over and over again (I think the official femicide body count for this novel is 109, but I can't remember where I saw that and might be too lazy by the time I've written this post to track it down), just like Brienne of Tarth repeating Sansa Stark's description to every character she meets, except way more grim. It mostly goes something like this:  In (a month of a year), a (woman or a teenager or, a few times, a tween), who may or may not have a name, is found dead and unceremoniously dumped somewhere -- in a field, alongside a highway, etc. -- where she won't necessarily be noticed right away but (with a few grim skeletal exceptions) but is likely to be noticed after a reasonably short period of time. We get a description of her clothes. We learn whether she has been shot or stabbed or strangled. We get the important information as to whether or not she was raped and in what orifices. We find out which of Santa Teresa's Finest gets assigned her case. We get a half-assed account of his half-assed efforts. We are then told that the case was "closed" or "shelved", but here these two terms are basically interchangeable for verisimilitude; in real life, cops don't just say "we gave up."

Over and over and over again.

And while not every murder victim gets a name -- either because by the time she is found she is no longer identifiable, or simply because nobody ever shows up to claim or identify her -- every cop does, and gets a little vignette about as detailed as Stephen King's slapstick death stories midway through The Stand, usually with cameo appearances by other cop characters, but ultimately the cops' stories blur together and fade from the reader's  memory exactly as the murder victims have from the city's, because 2666 is not a whodunnit. There is not going to be a hero detective who puts it altogether and solves the crime spree.

Very few people, apart from the odd journalist (and what about Guadelupe? The female journalist? Who had an appointment with a locked up tall German towards the end of "The Part About Fate" but whom Oscar just leaves behind to drive to America with Rosa A?) even see that there really is a crime wave, let alone of the scale that it is. A few cops put their heads together about a few murders they're working on that share some grisly signature details and speculate about a serial killer, but that's only for a few of the murders, ignoring the vast number of dead women who did not have one breast sliced off and the nipple bitten off the breast that's still attached. Some of the individual murders do get solved, kind of by accident, in that they turn out to be the sadly predictable final outcomes of domestic violence, but on the whole, only we, Bolaño's readers, ever see the really big picture.

And really, this pretty much tracks for how murder investigations work in the real world. Real Cops don't solve crimes.

But anyway, this part, about the crimes, isn't just about the femicides (the recitation of which kept making me think of the sad but wistful continuing Roll Call of the Dead in Sjon's amazing CoDex: 1962). There's also a serial church desecrator on the loose! And his crimes are bizarre and spectacular and the closest thing to almost kind of funny that "The Part About the Crimes" gets.

Well, except for this one bit, when the femicides, in attenuated form, briefly have come to the attention of the powers that be in Santa Teresa, which is, I think, Natasha Wimmer making a smart and amusing choice in presenting in the sing-song of a children's book rather than the hard boiled no-nonsense crime talk we're expecting in such a scene:

Life is hard, said the mayor of Santa Teresa. We have three clear-cut cases, said Inspector Angel Fernandez. Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass, said the man from the chamber of commerce. I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight, said Pedro Negrete.

Pretty much the whole rest of the novel handles dialogue in the conventional, subject-verb forms of English prose, in which the scene would have looked like this:

"Life is hard," the mayor of Santa Teresa said.

"We have three clear-cut cases," Inspector Angel Fernandez said.

"Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass," the man from the chamber of commerce said.

"I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight," Pedro Negrete said.

The fact that this exchange is followed by a remark from the mayor that "the important thing is not to stir up any shit" may shatter the stylized children's book feel but drives home the real point being made, that this whole scene is a rote performance of professional concern, rather than a genuine attempt to communicate anything. It's the only time I actually smiled in this whole section. Thanks, Natasha!

But I haven't even got to what passes for the protagonists of "The Part About the Crimes", if there can be said that there are any. I reckon on two of them: Klaus Haas, a big tall German guy arrested on flimsy and circumstantial evidence for one of the 109 murders, who has various adventures in the Mexican jail where he awaits sentencing for so long that he eventually just calls a press conference to try to point the finger at another party for the killings; and the magnificently named Congresswoman Azucena Exquivel Plata, who has a disappeared friend, Kelly (real name, Luz-Maria), Kelly being linked, of course, to a series of orgiastic parties out on the ranches outside of Santa Teresa, to which many young and/or underage women are brought to be debauched. Hmm. The former gets involved in all kinds of inmate scuffles and, though he is himself so tall as to almost count as a giant, portentously keeps announcing to his fellow prisoners that The Giant is coming and they'd best be scared; the latter burdens us with the story of her insanely privileged life and her friendship with Ghislaine Kelly while she interviews/interrogates a private detective she's hired to find her friend.

Can these characters be protagonists, though, when one is only barely there and the other isn't even mentioned in passing until about the last 20% or so of "The Part About the Crimes?" Well, there's nobody else who comes close to qualifying, so, yes?

Speaking of that last 20% or so, it really veers off in its own weird direction, cutting up four different narratives into very small pieces and layering them on top of each other like so many jenga blocks to really drive home how much reader/listener annoyance Bolaño and Brick are going for. The Klaus Haas narrative bits start feeling like they're leading to a shaggy dog story, but you're never sure because just when they get interesting, you're torn away to another piece of Azucena's story, then to a bit about a figurant, Kessler (an American law enforcement consultant who is just sort of touring the scenes of all the crimes and letting everybody cater to him), then to another bit of corpse porn, then back to Klaus. Who, yes, sounds like he bears a more than passing resemblance to another absurdly tall German guy, whom, 700 years or so ago, three literary critics traveled to Mexico to find and bring back to Europe to accept his Nobel prize, Benno von Archimboldi. But Klaus is, of course, too young to be Archimboldi. Isn't he?

This brings me to the one thing that I'm still really impressed by in this section of 2666. Bolaño is playing a lot with the ideas of detective fiction, and several times seems on the verge of setting up one of his many interchangeable cop-or-journalist*** characters as the Detective Who Will Solve It All, only to Lucy-yank away the football from our Charlie Brown expectations. But I'm a Gene Wolfe girl, so I became convinced right away on my first reading (and still believe it on my second, here) that we, the readers, are meant to be the Detective. If this was Gene Wolfe's 2666, I'd be sure of this, confident that if I took the time to read this book six or seven times and make careful notes of which of the bodies got which treatment and was associated with which model of car, and, probably, drew myself a detailed map of Santa Teresa and its environs, and made a careful study of the onamastics employed, I could accurately solve every single one of these murders, which, of course, have not all been committed by the same guy, or even the same guys. Factor out the domestic violence/honor killings and you're left with, I think, three, possibly four parties (depending on if Klaus Haas is guilty of anything besides slightly knowing one of the victims and standing out as a ridiculously tall German in this city of maquilladoras and nightclubs.)

BUT I'M NOT SURE. This is still the only Bolaño I've read. Is he a craftsman on Gene Wolfe's level? None of my Bolañeros and Bolañeras seem to have read Gene Wolfe (it's a mission of mine to get them to one day, when they're ready. They're getting there), and I don't think any of my Solar Cyclists have read Bolaño, so I'm the only one in a position to compare them that I know of. And I want to be sure, before I start reading Bolaño like Wolfe, that it would be worth the effort. I'm not a young woman, my TBR pile is huge, I've already given up television in the interest of reading as much of it as I can before I join the Roll Call of the Dead, and I'm longing to re-read all of Dorothy Dunnett again before I punch out, too.

Anyway and otherwise, man, all I can say is that Roberto Bolaño must have been thinking a lot about Dunbar's Number while he was writing this. This is best illustrated by one of the cop stories, the account of the sheriff of Huntsville AZ, Harry Magaña, summoned to Santa Teresa by a citizen of his fair city who was recently in Santa Teresa with a friend, only to lose track of that friend until she turned up murdered. All excited to play white knight, Harry comes barreling into Santa Teresa fixin' to investigate the hell out of this one murder, with or without the cooperation of the local constabulary. He catches the situation's brutality like a virus and meets a mysterious fate in Tijuana and could now be the Santa Teresa PD's poster boy for Not Getting Too Hung Up on One Case, punished for caring about a single person among 109. Gulp.

And so, onward to the fifth and final "Part About Archimboldi." Which I only dimly remember, and might not remember accurately at all because I'm starting strongly to suspect that "The Part About the Crimes" may have made me lose patience with this doorstop. Did I finish it, or did I not?

Watch this space, true believers.

*Which, I grew up in a law enforcement family and turned around and took employment for ten years with that same law enforcement agency (as a dispatcher, not a sworn officer) and this is the most accurate depiction of cops I've yet found in literature. When I say yuck, I mean yuck. I was still eyeball deep in my own law enforcement career when I first read 2666 so I thought maybe this time around it wouldn't hit me as bad but, nope. I'm still projectile vomiting in my head at this.

**And man, do all of these characters smoke in this novel. I know it was the 90s and whatnot but WOW. Of course, I've been reading lots of other international literature in which this keeps featuring. Everybody in Drive Your Cart over the Bones of the Dead smoked. The very freaking pages of The Morning Star were sucking on coffin nails, etc -- and those are both novels written and set in this century -- so I'm maybe more sensitive to this than usual but man, oh man, this novel brought to you by the international tobacco industry.

***One of these is a late entry in the contest to become my favorite character, the hilariously named Mary-Sue Brava, a reporter from Phoenix who gets hung up on the disappearance of another journalist who was one of only like four people to show up for Klaus Haas' press conference. I would like more of her, please, but nobody cares what I want. Anyway, I don't care that your name is Mary Sue, Mary Sue, I still love you.