The second part of 2666 begins with Amalfitano, the academic the Critics meet at the end of Part 1. He’s from Chile, lived in Spain, but moved to Santa Teresa. Actually it begins really with Lola, his daughter’s mother.

After Amalfitano establishes he’s going crazy in Santa Teresa, paranoid of the violence, the narrative moves to Lola abandoning the family, running around Europe (Barcelona, San Sebastian, elsewhere), pursuing a mad poet before and after he was committed to an asylum. It’s clear she loves him, but it’s unclear if they ever had sex, despite what Lola says about that party, and the poet appears to be gay.

Before 2666 hits you with a gauntlet of grisly murders, it offers us this, a free woman empowered to roam and make mistakes that harm her family, emotionally, but not physically. The damage is mostly left unsaid, but in her years of absensce, Amalfitano goes mad, though you can’t really call it madness when the thing he’s paranoid about is very real. “Madness really is contagious…”

He does talk to himself, hearing the voice of his overtly homophobic grandfather. Amalfitano has the idea, maybe from a science fiction novel he read, he can’t remember, but he believes “(or likes to think he believed)” that people in other cities don’t exist until you get there, and that the effort it takes for them to put themselves together was the result of the phenomenon known as jet lag, “which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the poeple who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled.”

Is it madness if what’s making you lose your grip on reality very much exists, or is at least threatening and constantly lurking, all around you? The idea about jet lag here assumes other people get tired based on what you do, so while it’s speculative sci-fi and absurd to really believe, it inverts what Amalfitano really experiences. “They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own.” Instead of other people making him feel scared, his travel makes other people tired (jet lag). So the theory goes.

But more than that, it doesn’t need to be real. It’s consoling. Amalfitano’s remarks could describe the novel 2666 itself:

“They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. [page 189].”

One of the novel’s most prominent and recurring images is the geometry textbook Amalfitano pins on his clothesline. A description of the geometry textbook’s separate parts could just as easily describe 2666: “each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole.”

Amalfitano’s jet lag idea only came up because he couldn’t remember where the geometry textbook, Testamento geometrico, materialized from. Hanging it was Marcel Duchamp’s idea, “leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life.”

“You’re going to destroy it,” said Rosa.

“Not me, nature.”

Amalfitano asks himself, “What made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city?” He watches the book hang “impassively” and resists the urge to take it down.

Later this let-it-be attitude will be in stark contrast to a sadistic prison inmate Klaus Haas, with long arms and iron hands, who believes “every individual controls his own fate.”

Agency is a recurring theme in 2666. Do the poor innocent victims have any? Do the journalists or even detectives? The few people interested in actually helping get to the root of the crimes face enormous obstacles, as they run up against powerful, deeply-entrenched institutions and the violently or violently apathetic attitudes they perpetuate. All Amalfitano knows is that he’d like to get his daughter away to Spain, where she’ll be safe. Though Lola wasn’t always very safe in Spain, and there was a fair amount of madness there, too.

Telepathy themes continue in Part 2. Not only does his grandfather speak to him, not only does Lola imaging she establishes telepathic contact with the poet [page 175], but “he thought about the telepathic Mapuches or Araucanians [page 216”], and recalls a short academic book examining the early history of the independence of Chile. This section touches on the a book about the secret history of the Aracunians, a group of Indigenous from Chile, whose state was “politically identical to the Greek state,” along with Chilean migrants who lived in Northern India and kept in permanent touch via telepathy.

Once the Spanish invaders learn that some Aracunians are telepaths, they cut their power by killing them, so the Aracunians develop another secret mode of communication, “Adkintuwe”: the power to send messages by the moving of tree branches. The world of Santa Teresa is dark and violent, but so is the broader interconnected world itself. If reality is so grim, why not look to the supernatural for help?

2666 is permeated by ghostly images, nightmares, and messages that seem to come from beyond. There are echoes within the novel’s sections that reinforce the theme that everything in the world itself is connected. The seer Florita Almada continues this in Part 4, and she’s alluded to briefly in the Amalfitano section. He sees her on TV [page 212].

It feels like the night sky, the stars, are the symbolic landmark that speak to characters in every section. They’re real, of course, but they don’t really say anything. They’re just there, visible to everybody in every section, in every part of the world. But there are beautiful extended passages about the stars, different kinds of stars (Hollywood stars, star athletes, dead stars we see as brilliant light in the sky), from a sweep of characters.

Many novels do this, of course! But stars hold a special significance in 2666 as the medium providing ballast in a topsy-tuvy world, a landmark hanging over the insane-real-dream world characters really live in. It’s like they gaze at them, hoping to see beyond Santa Teresa, hoping the dreamy-mythological thing stars represent manifests in their life instead of the cold haunting darkness cursing life in their city.

The Amalfitano section closes with a dream, fittingly, in which Boris Yeltsin, who looks as if Amalfitano invaded his dream and not the other way around, gives him a formula: “Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to. But that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic.” Magic is defined as “epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play.” Maybe it’s also madness and telepathy.

At the end of the dream, Amalfitano, the mad seeker of supernatural consolation who pins a book to a clothesline where it hangs impassively to its fate, “had no choice but to awake.”