Even as I was reading 2666 the first time, I knew I would need to read it again. Roberto Bolaño’s five-part beast of a novel calls for some amateur detective work. At the center is a series of unsolved murders around Santa Teresa, a mythic city on the Mexican border, much like Ciudad Juárez. Everything else—and there’s a lot—unspools backward and forward in time, leaving a trail of cryptic clues across two continents. As the web of evidence spreads, the search for the serial killer gets tangled in the search for a reclusive novelist whose bio bears a curious resemblance to the author B. Traven.
The second time around, I think I understood why 2666 is a Big Book That Matters. The size and scope of it force you to think globally. But for all the heavy lifting, it still reads like a page-turner. It has everything you want in a crime novel—hardboiled detectives, a seedy underworld, rampant corruption—minus the big reveal. Bolaño keeps the murder mystery intact, and with good reason. Most of the real cases he used as sources, a string of rapes and murders in the late 90s, remain unsolved. One thing is clear: a breakdown in law and order fuels the killings. Behind the curtain lurk the drug cartels and the drug war. Add to that thousands of migrants and a booming industrial sector. Throw in the largest consumer market in the world, and you have a system that uses Big Money as a cover for murder and savagery.
Having given it a third go-round, I now think there are secrets buried in these pages—hidden facts and clues waiting to be uncovered. “In one of his many notes for 2666,” according to Spanish critic Ignacio Echevarría, “Bolaño indicates the existence of a ‘hidden center,’ concealed beneath what might be considered the novel’s ‘physical center.’ There is reason to think that this physical center is the city of Santa Teresa.” The question of the “hidden center” only adds to the intrigue. Even more intriguing is the possibility that the novel’s secrets and the enigmatic Traven are somehow connected. Call it a hunch, but I’m convinced that the story of this forgotten writer holds the key to solving the crimes in 2666.
The Part About the Authors
Before we examine the clues, we should untangle the myths behind two authors with similar backgrounds, each with a desperate need to protect his anonymity. In 1925 a socialist newspaper carried a short story under the name B. Traven, and thus was born a mystery that has puzzled readers ever since. The facts about Traven are few and wildly disputed. One theory held that he was the president of Mexico. Another identified him as the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Still another insisted Traven was the secret identity of Ambrose Bierce, who, (not) coincidentally, disappeared in Mexico. Two hard facts: Traven published his books in German (his best-known is probably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), and he lived, for a while at least, in Mexico.1 Most agree that the man later known as Traven was at one time called Ret Marut. Though his origins remain hazy, Marut started as a journalist in Munich during the First World War. His radical leanings as a writer and activist led to his arrest on charges of treason. Aided and abetted by two officers, he escaped and fled overseas, never to be seen again. While still alive, Traven denied having any connection to Marut. After his death in 1969, his widow confirmed, at his request, that B. Traven had once been Ret Marut.2
Sound familiar? That’s because the arc of 2666 is built with the bones of the Traven legend. In the novel, Benno von Archimboldi turns out to be an alias for Hans Reiter, a reformed Nazi soldier and fugitive writer. As his stature grows, so does “the mystery veiling the figure of Archimboldi, about whom virtually no one, not even his publisher, knew anything: his books appeared with no author photograph on the flaps or back cover; his biographical data was minimal (German writer born in Prussia in 1920).” His stint on the Soviet front as a young infantryman fills in part of his backstory. The turning point comes when he discovers the diary of a Jewish intellectual who fell victim to the purge. A passing reference to an obscure Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, appears in the journal as well, and at long last we have the origin of his mysterious pen name. Flash forward to the surrender, and Reiter is interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. There he meets a man guilty of killing a trainload of Polish Jews. When the man is found strangled to death, Reiter is a prime suspect in the murder (that we later find out he committed) and disappears soon after.
Traven must have held a certain allure for a nomadic writer like Bolaño, who more or less took the same path in reverse. Born in Santiago in 1953, Bolaño came of age in Mexico City, where he moved as a kid. At the height of the Pinochet coup, he slipped back into Chile and landed in prison, an incident about which much has been said but little is known. One story goes that he escaped after two guards recognized him as their old classmate. The gang of rebel poets he joined in Mexico City passed into the realm of myth with The Savage Detectives. Like the hero of that novel, Bolaño left Mexico in 1977, eventually settling in coastal Spain, where he would enter the post-Boom lore of Latin writers.3
The only solid proof of a link to Traven, as far as I know, shows up in a deleted scene, later packaged in Woes of the True Policeman. In a letter to a university professor, Archimboldi pens “a long defense of B. Traven.” All the same, the parallels are hard to ignore. Both men flee war-torn Europe after busting out of prison. After that, they disappear, only to reemerge in Mexico, living and writing under assumed names. A second clue raises the possibility of a deeper connection: “all his stories were mysteries, they were only solved through flight, or sometimes through bloodshed (real or imaginary) followed by endless flight, as if Arcimboldi’s characters, once the book had come to an end, literally leapt from the last page and kept fleeing.”4 This also fits the description of the elusive writer himself. Archimboldi is a man without a country—a global hero, if you will—fleeing the horrors of his time. So what happens once he flees the pages of the book? Make that leap—you’ve come this far, you might as well—and the mysteries behind the murders start to unravel.
The Part About the Novels
Some people think 2666 belongs to an entirely new genre. Adam Kirsch has a chapter on Bolaño in his world-spanning survey, The Global Novel. Today’s avant-garde, he argues, is interested in “the question of what it means to write across borders.” Maybe so, but if you ask me, the best way to read 2666 is for pure pulp pleasure. After all, the story doesn’t begin with the murders—it arrives at them. The trail goes cold in the hunt for the writer near the end of part one. Hundreds of pages later, the narrative doubles back on itself, before picking up where it left off. In the final part, “The Part About Archimboldi,” patterns emerge, clues to the whereabouts of the book’s “hidden center.”
Bolaño rarely displays the work of his made-up authors. In The Savage Detectives, the visceral realists shake up the poetry scene, but the poems themselves never appear on the page. With Archimboldi, we at least learn the titles and a thing or two about what goes down inside the covers. We know, for instance, that The Black Sea is told in dramatic form. We know The Fathers profiles a serial killer and The Leather Mask toys with horror tropes. We know, too, that the scale is vast, given The Lottery Man tells “the life of a crippled German who sells lottery tickets in New York.” Formally adventurous, genre hopping, worldwide in scope—all this says as much about Bolaño as it does about his fictional double. One title in particular—The Endless Rose—stands out like a sweaty perp in a police lineup. It just so happens Traven wrote a novel called The White Rose, and it just so happens that novel deals in some of the same border traffic as 2666.
For all their similarities, the two books are worlds apart. Traven’s 1929 novel resembles less the pulp thrillers of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon came out that same year) than the muckraking polemics of Upton Sinclair. The White Rose leaves little mystery about the identity of its villain. Tension builds between a wholesome rancher, Don Jacinto Yañez, and a dastardly oil magnate, Chaney Collins, but the outcome is never in doubt.
Much of The White Rose scans as unsubtle and dated—Traven hammers away at his message about greed, though this is something we get right away—but just as often it is downright prescient. The Mexican countryside at La Rosa Blanca harkens back to a simpler time, far away from the modern world and its tentacular growth. For Don Jacinto selling the hacienda comes down to this:
And never before had he felt so strongly that he was the heart of the whole thing here, that if he should be released from his responsibility, then everything would collapse. The families would destroy themselves, ancient ties would be ruptured, the son would no longer know his father, the nephew his uncle. Rose Blanca would no longer be the ancestral home of a people . . . Rose Blanca would be like the factory in the city . . . something necessary, but something to which one has no personal connection.
If Bolaño needed a bridge between Santa Teresa and the world at large, Traven offered a model. The sale of the centuries-old hacienda involves much more than cows and hogs, woods and pastures: it breaks down an entire social order.
What makes The White Rose ahead of its time—and what makes it a juicy forerunner to 2666—is that neither the wolfish oilman nor the soulless corporation winds up being the bad guy. The true villain here is a system slow to give the local people a chance.
For in this system today all values and products that mankind has created are so involved and interwoven that a change in the value of oil immediately brings about changes in the value of products that have no relation at all to oil. A decrease in oil prices can generate an immense increase in the price of wheat or cotton or the shares of railroads and steamship lines.
The rise of a New Order ties the hacienda to the ups and downs of a distant market. The rewards of rising to the top are greater, and so are the costs of sinking to the bottom. In this grim future, La Rosa Blanca is one more cog in an ever-churning machine.
And so the story leads to a predictable finish with—you guessed it—a murder. Collins’s shadiest of shady deals lures Don Jacinto to Los Angeles. Sure enough, his body is found a short while later. A halfhearted investigation quickly and all too carelessly concludes with the case unsolved. Meanwhile, back at the proverbial ranch, efforts to investigate his disappearance lead nowhere. As one Mexican official puts it, “What does a poor Mexican worker amount to up there? They’re slaughtered by the dozens and no one wants to hear about it. Here in Mexico, if one American is killed by bandits, the whole world hears of it immediately and everyone becomes indignant over the instability of Mexico.” Inflated rhetoric aside, The White Rose lays bare an unthinking, uncaring attitude toward people south of the border. This same indifference, this casual sense of neglect, hangs over the unsolved murders in 2666.
The year of the beast evokes a far-off time when civilization has collapsed, law and order are perverted, violence and anarchy reign. Except, the future proves to be a hellish return of what the past has already given us. The “physical center” of the 2666 universe, strange as it may seem, is a mass grave for people living on the margins.5 Yes, Santa Teresa teems with criminals, working both sides of the law, but there is more to the border than lawlessness and corruption. It’s home to ordinary folks too, including lots of young women trying to make ends meet without selling their bodies to strangers. Many are migrants from other countries in Latin America. Some are looking for work in the foreign-owned factories, known as maquiladoras. Others come hoping to cross the border through the supply routes of the cartels. Seen from afar, Santa Teresa gushes money like a busy and vital artery. Up close, however, the picture dims.
The real crisis at the border is systemic, in the turmoil of mass migration, unchecked growth, incompetent governments—all the flashpoints of our global moment, in other words—and its remorseless toll at the street level. Amid all the vice and corruption arrives an American journalist assigned to cover a boxing match. A hardboiled hero in the classic mold, Oscar Fate is a lonely crusader with a keen sense of what’s right, and especially what’s wrong. The night before crossing the border, he dozes in a hotel room while watching “a report on an American who had disappeared in Santa Teresa. The reporter talked about the long list of women killed in Santa Teresa, many of whom ended up in the common grave at the cemetery because no one claimed their bodies.” Notice how the reporter leads with the missing American and treats the Mexican women as an afterthought. For more on this, cut to a scene at a Mexican diner the next day. Fate overhears two detectives discussing the case at length.
Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it’s because polite society was so small back then. I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the women killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible.
The serial killings in Santa Teresa—as did the criminally underreported cases in Juárez—fit this same pattern of crime. Fate pitches a story on the murders, but his editor doesn’t bite. Worse still, the Mexican press makes few inroads reporting from the border. That Fate picks up a book on the Middle Passage while traveling is no accident. One reason mass atrocities get ignored so easily is that the stories of the victims are buried, as the women are buried, without proper mourning, without bearing witness to grief.
It took awhile, but I no longer wonder whether combing the crime scenes will unmask the lone killer. At nearly three hundred pages, “The Part About the Crimes” is the longest of the five sections. As in Juárez, the dead pile up in droves. Page after page lists the injuries in cold fleshy detail, every bit as gory as that other slaughter in the Southwest, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The first thing that strikes us is how little we know about the victims—and as Kirsch explains, that’s the point.
This section of the book is difficult to read, in a double sense: Its monotony repels attention, and its subject—the rape, torture, and murder of women and girls—repels imagination. In this way, Bolaño enacts, and even makes the reader complicit in, the psychological mechanism that allows Santa Teresa to go on ignoring the murders, even as they grow into a terrifying epidemic.
The scenes of carnage make us feel uncomfortable because we should feel uncomfortable. Then, as the body count rises into the triple digits, fatigue sets in. Yet to look away, either in boredom or disgust, is to turn a blind eye to the moral issues at hand.
Preachy as that might sound, Bolaño smuggles his message inside the drama of a good mystery. And though there are losses that come with leaving the murders unsolved—the satisfaction of having caught the culprit, of restoring law and order—the loose ends imply a deeper, more urgent truth about The Way We Live Now. The term “globalization,” when used in economics, divides the world into centers and margins. The winners of globalization are at the center, along with a concentration of wealth and power. The bigger share of the population lingers at the margins, struggling to catch up. Bolaño sums up the horrors plaguing Santa Teresa when he has someone tell Fate, “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”
The “hidden center,” in the end, isn’t the headquarters of criminal masterminds, international drug lords, or even the worst corporate crooks, but the busy intersection of global commerce. Which brings us, finally, to the identity of the killer. In the typical whodunit, we’re surprised by the killer’s identity. The same is true of 2666, and the surprise here is especially shocking, even by the standards of the genre. The bad guy in this book is the savage system of global capitalism—its wheeling and dealing, its production and consumption, the local damage it inflicts while calling it growth. Bolaño turns the genre on its head, casting the everyday business of buying and selling, a system most of us take for granted, as the all-encompassing villain of our time.
At last the novel reveals itself as a nightmare of globalization run amok. Just as no single suspect can be fingered for the murders, no single nation can fix the problems on the border, but what’s painfully clear is that, as global consumers, we are all implicated. In the last interview before his death in 2003, Bolaño was asked to describe his vision of hell. “It’s like Ciudad Juárez,” he replied, “our curse and mirror.” It’s easy to dismiss the violence on the border as the savagery of a faraway place, but even at a distance, the horror we glimpse is unmistakably our own.6
The Part About Ice Cream
A mystery this dense with secret hints and clues deserves one more deep dive, so sit tight as we sort out what it all really means. Not until the very end do we find out what brings Bolaño’s hero to Santa Teresa. Hans Reiter, having learned his nephew is a murder suspect, promises to watch over him. Our last look at the mysterious writer shows him sitting in a park in Hamburg, eating a slice of Fürst Pückler. A stranger stops and introduces himself as a descendant of the man who invented the sweet treat. Surely the Neapolitan-style dish says something about the German exile, his Italian alias, and our world of increasingly fluid borders.
The rabbit hole goes even deeper, though, as it gets to what fate serves up most authors in the long run. The famous Fürst Pückler hoped “that he would be remembered for some of the many small works he wrote and published, mostly travel chronicles.” Instead he’s remembered for lending his name to a three-tiered loaf of ice cream. The frozen dessert is a reminder of time passing—you have to eat it quick, or it melts. That both writers are largely forgotten makes it an irresistible metaphor for B. Traven.7 The White Rose may well vanish without a trace, unless a major work like 2666 saves it from obscurity. It’s not simply that Bolaño gives obscure writers heroic status. Leafing through the pages of the past is itself a heroic act. The strange man goes on to tell Reiter that “the ultimate purpose of each of his trips was to examine a particular garden, gardens sometimes forgotten, forsaken, abandoned to their fate, and whose beauty my distinguished forebear knew how to find amid the weeds and neglect.” Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Bolaño blows the dust off a bygone era and cracks it wide open. A lost generation of Mexican poets, a neglected German author, the forgotten women of Juárez—these stories share a profound sympathy for the unsung many. Essentially, this is Bolaño’s big bang theory: a universe born of oblivion. 
NOTES
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux bills its paperback edition as “the adventure novel that inspired John Huston’s classic film, by the elusive author who was the model for the hero of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.”
- In 1978 the BBC released B. Traven: A Mystery Solved. Two journalists, Will Wyatt and Robert Robinson, make the case that Marut was an alias for Hermann Albert Otto Feige, a hypothesis many have since rejected. Regardless, “The Part About the Critics” reads like a treatment for Wyatt and Robinson’s race to find Traven.
- In another globetrotting reversal, an aging Arturo Belano arrives in Berlin after his son, Geronimo, goes missing on a trip with some friends. Bolaño never completed the final chapter in the adventures of his autobiographic hero. “The Days of Chaos” was among the files on his computer at the time of his death and posthumously collected in The Secret of Evil.
- Whereas in 2666 the pseudonymous writer is Benno von Archimboldi, in Woes of the True Policeman, his name is J.M.G. Arcimboldi. The former novel chases a German author; the latter, a French one. Whether he’s French or German, in both cases, his surname is Italian. All to say this sort of straddling is typical of a world where borders matter less and less.
- Nowhere in the book is there mention of the doomsday date. The answer to that riddle comes in another novel, Amulet, when the narrator compares Mexico City to “a forgotten cemetery” in “the year 2666.”
- Too often crime sagas tell the same old story—one in which Latin America produces horror, and the rest of us consume it. Think of all the movies and TV shows cluttering up pop culture: films like Traffic and Sicario, series such as Breaking Bad and Narcos. The smartest (but not all) of them counter lazy thinking that assumes “we” are “civilized” and “they” are “savages.” As you’d expect, Bolaño smashes the border between savagery and civilization, most notably in drawing a line from crime-ridden Santa Teresa to Nazi Germany.
- Author of thirteen novels, three story collections, and one travel book, Traven is remembered today, if at all, for Walter Huston dancing an iconic jig in the film version of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Robert Rea is the Deputy Editor and Web Editor of SwR.
