Bolano’s 2666 packs more names per square foot of text than a Pynchon novel. It’s especially dense in the fourth book of the novel, “The Part About the Crimes” as Bolano relates the stories of the mysterious murders of women in the Sonora desert of Mexico. These women are occasionally anonymous, but usually have names, full names, from two to four: Marisol Camarena, Paula Sanchez Garces, Maria Sandra Rosales Zepeda. Their full names, relayed with clinical detachment, match the detached description of their bodies at the crime scene: height, autopsy report, and state of attire (clothing or unclothed).
Bolano names are exactly the opposite of Pynchon names. Pynchon names stretch the boundaries of imagination and alliteration, ranging from the highbrow to the lowbrow: Chick Counterfly, Deuce Kindred, Nicholas Nookshaft. These implausible names seem more like words affixed on for a joke or to label a character who will leap through hijinks of Pynchon’s latest hypothetical scenario and then promptly disappear. At best, they reflect Pynchon’s playful sensibilities with text and characters; at worst, they reflect a kind of heavy-handed authorial control inhibiting the authenticity of characters.
While Bolano, on the other hand, attempts to use the most natural names, as if he trolled through a directory or phone book and mixed and matched to get the most common given names and surnames. Their naked commonplaceness induces pity, as well as testifying to the historical reality of hundreds of women disappearing in the 1990s. What’s more, these bodies are usually described as being vaginally and anally raped, plus strangled. The repetition of that line — strangled, vaginally and anally raped — hammered throughout the course of book four, begins to take an emotional toll on the reader, in the same way that name after name after name begins to add up into a substantial weight.
UPDATE: All BookFox posts on 2666.
