Roberto Bolaño

So my holidays were not the most productive in terms of art, but I did stumble upon this really great writer — whom I had never heard of before I went to the Spanish bookstore one slushy day and decided that there must be something to these Roberto Bolaño novels because they had, like by far, the nicest covers.

The book I ended up reading was 2666 — a huge book into which the author seems to have crammed the sum of his experience and which he wrote during the last years of his life, as he died prematurely of liver failure...

It is composed of several separate but interlinked sections focusing on a set of characters: a group of libidinous conference-hopping European university professors obsessed both with their own complicated love triangles and with the mysterious and elusive post-war German writer hiding behind the unlikely pseudonym of Benno von Archimboldi; there is another European don, a slightly odd man who seems to have retreated from the world, living alone with his beautiful and nubile daughter in Santa Teresa, a dangerous border town of Northern Mexico; there is the mad wife who abandonned them long ago to live out an unfathomable and self-destructive mission; there is the lonely African-American intellectual reporter who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match and ends up perhaps falling in love with the beautiful and nubile daughter and perhaps rescuing her from a horrible fate; and there are the murdered women of Santa Teresa — the hundreds of young workers from the poor quarters of this fictional stand-in for the dread Ciudad Juarez, who inexplicably dissapear and get raped and tortured and snuffed year after year with no explanation; and, going back in time, there is the Second World War and the surprising evolution that led a German country boy to become the mysterious and elusive master Benno von Archimboldi...

Lots of sex and death and madness. Like Dostoïevski but with more sex and less mysticism. Cadavers. Big cocks. Dreams. Squallor. Misery. Longing. Art. The abyss...

And now, for all you Guardian readers, here is the clever literary criticism bit:

With the sheer inventivity of his literary imagination and the depth of his psychological insight, Bolaño re-invests and re-invents the contemporary past. He pretends to show; to document; to witness. But throughout what he is really doing is conjuring something vivid and eery; something exciting and aweful; something very like history. Through a glass, darkly...