You can’t talk about the core subject of 2666 unemotionally, the mystery of missing and murdered porr women in Mexico. How exactly, as a writer, do you approach this topic, then?

In section four, about the killings, Bolaño is as detached and cold as a newspaper headline writer. This part of the novel itself is often newspaper clippings. They leave you wanting to know more, they’re open-ended.

Elswhere, throughout the novel, Bolaño’s tone is usually blunt and declarative, but is often full of contradictions and second-guessings. A character will say something matter of factly and then just as quickly backtrack, saying they aren’t sure, it could just as easily be the exact opposite.

2666 is told from the perspective of people whose job it is to know things–critics, professors, journalists, detectives–and they very seldom do. The closer they get, the less they know, and this theme is declared hundreds of times in sentences that pronounce one thing and then reverse course. The reversals are small and large, on different scales. But they encourage the reader to believe something before pulling the rug out a bit.

Here are a few examples from the text to illustrate this point:

“One day, when more than three months had gone by since their visit to Norton, one of them called the other and suggested a weekend in London. It’s unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call. In theory, it must have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a strong sense of any such virtue.” [pg. 64]

“And Norton told them no. And then she said maybe she did, it was hard to give a conclusive answer in that regard.” [pg. 72]

“It was Morini’s idea, because Morini had somehow learned that a man he considered to be one of the most disturbing painters of the twentieth century was living there. Or not. Maybe Morini hadn’t said that.” [pg. 87]

“He had the eyes of a blind man. I don’t mean he couldn’t see, but his eyes were just like the eyes of the blind, though I could be wrong about that.” [pg. 127]

There are lots of other examples, these are obviously all from The Part About the Critics, the first section. Ambiguity is one of the novel’s major themes. People are trying to figure something out all novel, then don’t, or can’t, for one reason or another. They might get very close, but even when they do, all they can pronounce with certainty is that they’ll never truly get all the way there: “Archimboldi is here,” said Pelletier, “and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.” [pg. 159]

Indeed, the nearer they get to the mysterious writer, the more they “reread novels by Archimboldi that suddenly they didn’t understand.” [pg. 130]

Sometimes the characters [Harry Magana] have an outsider’s perspective, they don’t understand Mexico or Santa Teresa, but try hard to solve it and come up short. Sometimes it’s the opposite, that they’re insiders too close to Santa Teresa to even pursue answers about the killers, knowing its danger and futility. But Bolaño toys with us all along in regards to much smaller questions, not just the bigger ones.

Bolaño does this sentence by sentence, but also on a macro scale, in the novel’s structure. The opening of the novel is about trying to somehow locate the elusive novelist Archimboldi, while the fifth and final section is told from Archimboldi’s perspective and we’re with him the whole time.

This trick of conditioning the reader to both know and not know things all while continuing the search for truth makes the novel disorienting while luring you in deeper. You get accustomed to ambiguity, uncertainty, even while determined to forge ahead to pursue the answers. Whatever uncertainties lay ahead in the novel, you can’t trust what you think you already know, either.

Bolaño said that 2666 has a “hidden centre” in addition to the physical one, Santa Teresa, and there’s lots of speculation about what exactly this means. Given that the novel’s name 2666 comes from a different Bolaño story, the answer to the “hidden centre” might very well be contained outside this novel, too. There’s no end to the speculation and guesses. It makes the reading fun and engaging, like a puzzle that both has multiple answers and no answers but is somehow rich and not futile because that’s how reality is. It’s like playing hide and go seek with someone who may be hiding outside the boundaries of the game, and who may not even exist. The game is as fun as the search because that’s all there ever is.

Like the characters in the novel, readers need to content themselves to both knowing and not knowing. To the main question, who is responsible for the killings, is there even one specific answer? Is it a single person or group? Are the killings related? Are some things unknowable? It feels typical of the world of this novel to not even know that. Lurking threats are not the same thing as really knowing, even if the feeling of fear is real.

This is a discussion about the larger themes, but on rereading this novel I’ve felt intrigued by how often characters and the narrator cast a dubious light on things they’ve just said, and the dynamic of such sentences feels like it parallels the larger search for answers in the novel’s biggest question.

…”Not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” [excerpt from Bolaño’s 1999 short story “Amulet.”]

In this type of dark and foggy world, very much the world of 2666, certainty is anything but assured.