In the New York Times, Steven Millhauser recently wrote about the distinctions between the genre of the short story and the novel. These distinctions are very well classified, although Millhauser manages to infuse some fresh poetic verve into the discussion. But there’s just as much difference between the compact, 300 page novel and the loose baggy monster 1,000 page novel as between the short story and the novel.
I call this type of massive novel the Novel Novel, a redundancy in debt to Robbe-Grillet’s New Novel and New New Novel. I suppose we could also call it the Mega-Novel, or the Tome Novel, or the Epic Novel but the fact remains that books of this size are not just larger than their novelistic counterparts, any more than a short story is just smaller than a novel. No, they bear distinct structural differences. When a novelist has that much room to play, they splay out. In three sections of this novel, Bolano rips off on a seemingly tangential — wait, no, actually tangential — streak of esoteric terminology that stretches on so long it would beg for editing in a 300-400 page novel. But what’s 3 pages out of 900?
In one section characters wax on about abstruce forms of fear: Gephyrophobia, clinophobia, gynophobia, phobophobia, optophobia, necrophobia, ballistophobia, tropophobia, agyrophobia, astrophobia, peccatophobia, sacraphobia. And that’s not even all of them. In the book, it’s not a list, it’s an actual discussion between characters. Only two fears actually apply to the story at hand. Sacraphobia, fear of sacred things, because a man is visiting churches to destroy altars, and gynophobia, because Bolano touches on the deeper cultural problems of misogyny behind the systematic disappearances of all these women. (There’s also a section on all the ways to predict the future using plants, which occupies a few pages.)
But more importantly, the structure of this novel allows for what’s been called Bolano’s chorus technique. Just as in The Savage Detectives, the visceral realist Font sisters pipe up with some regularity, in book four of 2666 the story of various detectives is interspersed with the clinical autopsy reports on women’s bodies found across the Sonora desert in Mexico. Other than that, composing five semi-related novels/novellas lets Bolano tell a story of massive implications and weight. It’s messy, it’s far-reaching, it casts a massive web with complex character connections over a global sphere, as it shift between more than ten countries. The allusions alone create a kind of labyrinth of relations.
Bolano himself makes the difference between the novel and the Novel Novel in this quote from the Second book in 2666, called “The Part about Amalfitano”:
What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing; they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
Now granted, 2666 was supposed to be published in five separate novels, not as one, but this was mainly because Bolano thought it would earn the publisher and his family more money after his death. And since it is being published in English as singular work, it makes sense to read it as one massive novel rather than five novellas/novels. Besides, while each of the five sections could conceivably standalone, the shared characters and plot make their unified whole much more than the sum of their parts. But if you really want, you can buy it as a beautifully designed three-volume boxed set.
UPDATE: All BookFox posts on 2666.
