Edward Hopper - Western Motel (1957)

>“Archimboldi is here,” said Pelletier, “and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.”

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Summary

Back with our critics. Post break-up / cab driver beating, Pelletier and Espinoza fill their sex life with prostitutes instead, with Pelletier fixating on one named Vanessa briefly. At the end of the chapter, Espinoza will similarly fixate on a teenaged Mexican girl named Rebeca.

Our four critics meet a Mexican writing student Alatorre at a conference who gives them a new lead on Archimboldi: that he's in a Mexican town called Santa Teresa (!!). And off to Mexico 3 of our 4 critics go, where they find he may be checking into hotels as Hans Reiter. Morini opts to stay behind in Turin due to his health issues.

In Santa Teresa, they meet Professor Amalfitano and are plagued by nightmares, bad hotel rooms, depleted hopes, but notably no Archimboldi. The threesome we've been waiting for comes and goes with barely time for a cigarette after, all that built up sexual tension culminating in a single sentence (a long sentence, but still) and barely mentioned again.

Norton leaves Mexico first, and the back half of our reading is threaded with a long Dear John letter to Pelletier and Espinoza, informing them she and Morini are in love. We leave our last two critics in Santa Teresa, accepting they'll never find Archimboldi, but seemingly content they are at least as close as they'll ever be to him.

As with last week there are more tangents, more puzzle pieces that don't feel like they quite fit so neatly into the main narrative. Last week u/7_Types and u/John-Kale discussed "the secret story" and how these vignettes may operate as a key to what the novel is really about. Here are a few:

• Lots of dream sequences in this one
  • Espinoza dreams about a Mexican prostitute reading graffiti on a wall in a hallway
    • There's two parallel dream sequence where all three have a nightmare. In the first, Pelletier dreams of blood and shit smears in his hotel bathroom, Espinoza dreams about his hotel room painting moving and speaking, and Norton dreams of seeing her reflection and realizing it's not her.
    • In the second, Pelletier dreams of a page he can't read, Norton dreams of a tree she's tasked with carrying around, Espinoza dreams of a girl selling rugs he can't rescue.
• After reuniting with Norton, Espinoza and Pelletier tell her about a trip the three men took to visit Edwin Johns in a Swiss sanitarium. We later learn from Norton's letter that he died in a fall at his sanitarium.
• A man known as "El Cerdo" (The Pig) is Archimboldi(?)'s host in Mexico City and describes his eyes like "a blind man's"
• Amalfitano, Pelletier, and Espinoza go to the circus because there's a German, who turns out to an American with a disappearing act

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Prompts

Some ideas for discussion (suggestions only, post about whatever you want and feel free to post your own prompts):

So the same broad question up front: did you like this section about the critics? It appears to be polarizing based on the feedback we've gotten so far. Happy to be moving on or will you miss this foursome?

• We see Pelletier and Espinoza perhaps begin to move on with other women, Vanessa and Rebeca respectively. Espinoza also briefly gets hung up on a prostitute pre-Rebeca only known as "The Mexican." Did you think the matching nationality of the mystery prostitute and Rebeca is meaningful? How did you interpret these relationships and what they say about our two male critics?
• What did you make of the anticlimactic resolution to the love ~triangle rectangle?
• We get a lot more about Norton in this back half, gaining access to more of her thoughts (which turn out to be mostly about Morini, awww), but she's still primarily filtered through a long letter to our gruesome twosome. She's also decidedly less passive this week, initiating the threesome and then leaving on her own accord. What did you think of Norton in this part? What did you think of Bolano's decision to have her be so passive until she isn't? What did you think of the James Crawford information?
• In the Edwin Johns vignette, Morini directly asks him why he cut off his hand and Johns whispers something to him. BUT, when recounting the reason to Norton, Morini says "he thinks he knows the reason" and that reason is money, indicating perhaps this doesn't align with what Johns whispered or his misrepresenting it to Norton. What's going on here, do you think? And do you think "money" being the reason is Bolano saying something about the art world? And why do you think Johns didn't shake Morini's hand?
• What did you make of the parallel between the Pakistani cab driver attack and the doormen vs cab driver warfare?
• Amalfitano gives an explanation of how intellectuals work in Mexico where they are overseen by the state, and it starts off sounding a bit like Plato's The Cave mixed with performing for an audience before dwindling further and further into nonsense and confusion. By the time it ended, I was right there with Norton saying "I didn't understand any of that" - Any thoughts on this?

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For those who have read the book before or have read ahead, please keep the comments focused on The Part about the Critics and use spoiler tags when in doubt. We're concerned more about major, purposeful spoilers than minor slip ups.

Thanks for reading along with me. Last week we had, by far, our biggest turnout ever for a read-along discussion, so I hope the momentum continues. Please share what you thought, even if it's just to say you did the reading but don't have anything to add.

We'll have a shorter reading this week with The Part about Amalfitano and then move into longer readings for the rest of the read-along.

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Remaining Schedule

Special thanks to rarelybeagle for providing the Spanish sentences.

August 17: Pages 80-163, through the end of "The Part about the Critics."

August 24: Pages 163-231, the entirety of "The Part about Amalfitano."

August 31: Pages 231-353, the entirety of "The Part about Fate."

September 7: Pages 353-449, The Part about the Crimes begins, through "coming down the hallway." / es: "que avanzaban por el pasillo."

September 14: Pages 449-545, through "according to witnesses, was indescribable." / es: "fue, según los testigos, indescriptible."

September 21: Pages 545-637, through the end of "The Part about the Crimes."

September 28: Pages 637-770, through "Then he remembered who she was." / es: / "rostro dormido. Entonces la recordó."

🏜️🏜️🏜️

October 5: Pages 770-898, through the end of "The Part about Archimboldi" and the end of the book.

🏜️🏜️🏜️

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Playlist Recommendations

These were sent to me by u/Dengru, moody dark jazz and ambient instrumentals that fit the mood so far

Bohren and club of gore - Constant Fear

Peter Brontzmann - This Word Love

Dirty Beaches - Floating Underwater Watching Waves

Mal Waldron - A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing

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Previous Discussions

August 3 - Introduction Thread

August 10: Pages 1-80, through "they probably would have killed him." / es: "el taxista se hubiera materializado ante ellos, seguramente lo habrían matado."

Artwork is Giuseppe Arcimboldo's The Librarian

>They spent the free time they had, which was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier’s opinion) sites of interest in Augsburg, a city that Espinoza also found paltry, and that Morini found only moderately paltry, but still paltry in the final analysis, while Espinoza and Pelletier took turns pushing the Italian’s wheelchair since Morini wasn’t in the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health, so that his two friends and colleagues considered that a little bit of fresh air would do him no harm, and in fact might do him good.

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Summary

We have met Pelletier, a refined French critic and perhaps the most intellectually confident of the four.

We have met Espinoza, an angry, resentful Spanish critic who was once an aspiring poet and writer.

We have met Morini, a wheelchair bound, depressive Italian critic with MS (and was also in a "spectacular accident" on top) who mostly seems to operate as a quiet observer and oft-forgotten bystander so far.

And we have met Norton, an English critic and inscrutable woman and divorcée.

We have notably not met Archimboldi, a German writer with an Italian pen name who our 4 critics obsess over.

So far:

There's a swirl of conferences and dead ends while investigating the mysterious Archimboldi, what he looks like and where he might have been and where he might be.

Espinoza and Pelletier are both in love and sleeping with Norton, who seems content enough to carry on this arrangement until she isn't, and breaks things off while also suggesting one last roll in the hay as a threesome. When a Pakistani cab driver insults her morals, it lights the fuse, the anger Pelletier and Espinoza have been feeling combusts, and they beat the cab driver nearly to death.

While this concludes the main, uh, thrust of our reading this week, there are lots of asides and vignettes that may (or may not) tie into the main plot or comment upon it. Based on these ~80 pages and The Savage Detectives (only stuff I've read of his so far), Bolaño seems to have a thing for peppering his novels with these anecdotal detours. A few examples:

• Morini reads an article about murdered women in Sonora, Mexico, feels sad for a beat, and then forgets it immediately, fantasizing instead about the Italian journalist.
• A woman recounts her late husband participating in a fixed (in his favor) horse race and the gaucho boy who approached her, incredibly angry about it. Archimboldi was an audience and immediately recognized the violence in the boy.
• Morini has a dream about an enormous pool that Norton disappears in. He senses an evil presence but find a younger Norton instead who warns him "There's no turning back."
• Pelletier also has a dream about Norton and a body of water and an eroded statue rising from it.
• An artist, Edwin Johns, cuts off his painting hand and works it into a self portrait.
• A homeless man in London recounts his old job, making mugs with textual jokes until he had to quit, enraged, when it became a new job: making mugs with imagic jokes.

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Prompts

Some ideas for discussion (suggestions only, post about whatever you want and feel free to post your own prompts):

• Some broad questions up front: What did you think of our critics? Do you like them? What do you think of the central throuple? Do you have an idea where this is going?
• Last week I got some pushback on suggesting the first part was boring (based on what I had heard). Did you find it difficult to get through? Or are you liking it? Or even loving it?
• There's a lot of focus on nationalities in this section and it's not subtle. We have four critics from four different countries following a German writer with an Italian pen name who has written a trilogy that's set in England, Poland, and France. What do you think Bolaño is doing here?
• What, do you think, is the significance of Archimboldi recognizing the potential for violence in the gaucho boy?
• Was there any anecdotal detour you find particularly interesting or perplexing?
• Norton's interiority is deliberately withheld from us, even stated outright at one point with "As for what passed through Liz Norton’s head, it’s better not to say." What do you think Bolaño is doing here?
• Do you think Bolaño is making some kind of comment on the art world with the Edwin Johns' self mutilation?
• Although Espinoza is shown as the rougher and angrier of the two - using slurs, marinating in resentment, more on edge around the Norton situation, his incredible reaction to the Japanese horror movie - he is the one more troubled by the attack on the cab driver and cries and confesses to a different cab driver and questions his true nature while Pelletier goes home and makes pasta and checks his email. Do you think this is meaningful? Is Bolaño saying something about sensitivity working both ways or something else? Or is it meaningful that they both detonated and attacked the cab driver, that the gentleman and the brute are really just the same thing underneath?
• Speaking of which, what did you make of the relationship between Pelletier and Espinoza? Were there other moments besides the attack you felt illustrated their similarities? Their differences?
• What do you think Morini's purpose is? He so far has been mostly cast aside. Even in his own dream, Pelletier and Espinoza forget about him.

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For those who have read the book before or have read ahead, please keep the comments focused up through the assault on the cab driver and use spoiler tags when in doubt. We're concerned more about major, purposeful spoilers than minor slip ups.

Thanks for reading along with me. We'll finish up the Part about the Critics next week and see how this love triangle resolves or dissolves.

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Remaining Schedule

Special thanks to rarelybeagle for providing the Spanish sentences.

August 17: Pages 80-163, through the end of "The Part about the Critics."

August 24: Pages 163-231, the entirety of "The Part about Amalfitano."

August 31: Pages 231-353, the entirety of "The Part about Fate."

September 7: Pages 353-449, The Part about the Crimes begins, through "coming down the hallway." / es: "que avanzaban por el pasillo."

September 14: Pages 449-545, through "according to witnesses, was indescribable." / es: "fue, según los testigos, indescriptible."

September 21: Pages 545-637, through the end of "The Part about the Crimes."

September 28: Pages 637-770, through "Then he remembered who she was." / es: / "rostro dormido. Entonces la recordó."

🏜️🏜️🏜️October 5: Pages 770-898, through the end of "The Part about Archimboldi" and the end of the book.🏜️🏜️🏜️

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Previous Discussions

August 3 - Introduction Thread

Posting this a little bit early since it's just the intro. Time to start reading.

>“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” - Charles Baudelaire

Introduction

Welcome to the 2026 2666 Read-Along. This is just a last call to get the book if you have not already and a reminder to start reading sometime soon. The first few weeks are on the slower side so even if you haven't been able to get the book, hopefully there will be time to catch up.

A few things to know going into 2666:

It is an unfinished book. I believe how unfinished is up for debate, but Bolaño had at least hoped to revise it but died of liver failure in 2003 before he could. He was 50 years old. His friends and relatives published it posthumously and there's some inconsistencies in how the book is structured (one book, 5 parts) vs what Bolaño supposedly wanted (5 books). You'll get more from the Spanish wikipedia page on this.

Born in Chile, he spent his young adulthood between South America and Mexico before moving to Europe where he would die. He had a colorful life (though perhaps less colorful than he claimed) that included working as a journalist, left wing activism, accusations of terrorism, supposed heroin addiction, and poetry.

Bolaño hated magical realism and was known during his lifetime for attacking his fellow Latin American writers. So if you were expecting levitating women, probably(?) not.

The first part is supposedly kind of boring. I say this not to discourage anyone from reading, but to encourage you to push past it if you find yourself doubting the hype the first couple of weeks.

And speaking of slogs, The Part About the Crimes is supposed to be brutal both in terms of length and content (hundreds of pages describing murdered women). I know it's a red scare sub and we all hate trigger warnings, but given some of the hesitancy we've seen already, I feel like it needs to be said. We can trade coping mechanisms as we get closer.

No one knows what the number 2666 means. Maybe a spoiler, but let's get it out of the way. It may be a reference to his novella Amulet:

>Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, 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.

A few things to know going into the read-along:

This is part of the RSBC Leviathan series that started with Infinite Jest and has included Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, and Gravity's Rainbow. The idea is to help posters get through long and difficult books together so we can enrich our lives, strengthen our minds, collect our bragging rights, etc.

I have never read the book before and have only read one Bolaño book (Savage Detectives), so I don't really function in these read-alongs as an expert or guide, I'm just good at posting reliably and roughly on time. If you have read the book before, even if you're not re-reading with us, please chime in. These kinds of comments from experienced readers were an immense help during the Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow read-alongs.

If you have read the book before or are reading ahead, please avoid spoilers. I'll provide a summary each week of what we've covered.

While lurking is fine (I'm a wallflower myself), I encourage everyone to join in the comments from week to week, even if it's just to check in. Please respond to other comments you find interesting even if it's just to say they're interesting. This is a collaborative effort and it helps even just to know you're following along, even if you feel like you don't have anything substantial to say (which is ok! half my comments for the Infinite Jest read-along were just announcing I had read the assigned pages).

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Prompts

These are just suggestions for things to talk about in the comments. Answer as many or as few as you want. You can also post your own prompts in the comments for others to answer; this holds true for the entire read-along.

• Feel free to use the comments to introduce yourself. There was some interest in video chats expressed in the announcement thread. I don't want to participate in that myself, but you can use the comments to organize discord servers or zoom meetings or whatever else people use these days.
• Have you read the book before? Have you read anything else by Bolaño?
• What draws you to 2666? What are you expecting to get out of it? Are you going into it with any preconceived notions?
• What edition are you reading? Are you reading it in English or the original Spanish or another language entirely?
• I can't post images in the main post, but if I'm able, I'll post some of the cover art in the comments. What cover art is on your edition and what does it lead you to expect about the book?
• What do you think the title 2666 evokes?

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Schedule

Note: In order to make sure the page numbers of the most common edition aligned with my own, I went to two different Barnes and Nobles that said they had 2666 in stock and neither had it on the shelf, so I'm just going by my three volume FSG edition and I'm never going to Barnes and Noble again. If you have a different edition, please make sure you find the stopping point. Everything should be on a line break, if not the end of a part.

The Part About the Critics (2 weeks)

• August 10: Pages 1-80, through "they probably would have killed him."
• August 17: Pages 80-163, through the end of "The Part About the Critics."

The Part About Amalfitano (1 week)

• August 24: Pages 163-231, the entirety of "The Part About Amalfitano."

The Part About Fate (1 week)

• August 31: Pages 231-353, the entirety of "The Part About Fate."

The Part About the Crimes (3 weeks)

• September 7: Pages 353-449, The Part About the Crimes begins, through "coming down the hallway."
• September 14: Pages 449-545, through "according to witnesses, was indescribable."
• September 21: Pages 545-637, through the end of "The Part about the Crimes."

The Part About Archimboldi (2 weeks)

• September 28: Pages 637-770, through "Then he remembered who she was."
• October 5: Pages 770-898, through the end of "The Part about Archimboldi"

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I look forward to seeing everyone for our first actual book discussion post next week.

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Talked a bit about this play in my previous post but I wanted to go into more detail now that I've seen it performed. It's a dark comedy about a mess of a man (Max) being set up on a blind date with a mess of a woman (Becky Shaw). They're both damaged and manipulative in different ways (Max was adopted in late childhood after his mother's death and father's abandonment, Becky is basically BPD) and the play touches upon the question of whether brutal honesty or a gentle touch is the best way to handle someone, without preaching any conclusions.

The opinion I keep coming across is that there aren't any likeable characters in this play, which is baffling because all of the characters are likeable, and I think people just mean there aren't obvious heroes or villains but I love that you can understand where every character is coming from, even when they take opposing stances. In her introduction, the playwright Gina Gionfriddo reflects:

>I don’t think any character in this play is bad or wrong or crazy or worthless or unlovable. I don’t think any of them are damaged beyond repair. I don’t think any one character is more to blame than the others for the emotional wreckage that piles up in the second act.

>I wish fingers didn’t have to be pointed, but – trust me – they will be. In the audience talkbacks I have taken part in after productions of Becky Shaw, the one constant I have seen is the zeal to ascribe blame. The good news is that the audiences invariably fail to reach consensus as to which character is most deserving of their contempt. These characters seem to function as screens onto which audience members project old wounds and fierce convictions about how people ought to behave. The best comment I ever got in one of these talkbacks was from a woman who shook her head wistfully at the people arguing around her and opined that the characters were all ‘just doing the best they can.’

But it's also just very funny, and with a sense of humor I think and hope most people on this sub would appreciate.

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Max: The day of my mother’s funeral, she bought me a suit. I’m ten years old. I’d met her, like once. She took me to the fat child department at Sears. She said, ‘Your mother is dead and your father dresses you like a gay hustler.’

Suzanna: Max, that’s awful. Why have you never told me that?

Max: It was awful at the time, but … She saved me from walking into my mother’s funeral looking like a gay hustler.

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Susan: Meaning your father and I allowed for pockets of mystery in our marriage and I would advise you to do the same.

Suzanna: ‘Pocket of mystery’ sounds like code for gay.

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Suzanna: Do you think all love is use or just romantic love?

Max: All love. Your father, for example, paid our college tuition. We, in turn, loved him very much.

Suzanna: You’re saying my father was generous with us because he couldn’t love men? Is that it?

Max: I think if your father had been more self-actualized, I’d have college loans. I do believe that.

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Max: She cut her arm! It’s teenager shit. You remember what I told you when you wanted to do it.

Suzanna: Yes.

Max: You’re too old for it. Cutting yourself over the age of eighteen is just embarrassing. Everyone at the ER will laugh at you.

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Max (to Suzanna): I’m also gonna give you some advice. Your husband is not the fucking Red Cross. The last time he started consoling a cute, suicidal chick, he married her. He hears, ‘I want to hurt myself’ like a fucking mating call.

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Susan: Sexuality is like intelligence. We’re all born with different endowments. Some people are retarded and they eat paint, others split atoms and write symphonies.

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Becky: I need to get back in school, I do.

Susan: The story about the black boyfriends and the racist parents. Write that up and re-apply to Brown. You’ll get in. (After a beat.) You may have been very victimized in your life; you may be a complete con artist. I don’t know. My sense is you fall somewhere in the middle. Truth or con … It’s unattractive. We pity Job; we do not fall in love with him.

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Susan (to Becky): Learn to lie. When someone with damage – as we have damage – courts a lover, we must be like the pedophile with the candy. Lure with candy no matter how frightful your nature and your intent.

In the spirit of Dengru's recent thread and because the Tonys are tonight, I thought I'd take my own advice and talk about plays I've been reading recently. I know next to nothing about theater, so nearly everything is new to me and it's pretty humbling just how much stuff is out there that I've never even heard of. I have no real strategy to my approach, just reading stuff I see is playing, what an algorithm recommends to me, or just what sounds interesting while browsing.

A thing I find interesting about reading plays is you're not reading the finished product (and there's really no "finished" product in the same sense there is with screenplays, since a play can be performed over any number of production and which production you see, which night you see it on, which seat you have in the house might wildly alter your perception of it), but the instructions for it. Stage directions play a unique role, as you'd be unaware of them when seeing a performance, but become like fingerprints in a reading. Eugene O'Neill's stage directions are so hyper specific they sometimes even mention the eye color and it essentially feels like reading a novel at times because he'll delve into the specific psychology of his characters. Shakespeare, on the other, basically just remarks on entrances and exits. This fascinates me.

Some plays I've read recently (* - also saw performed):

Tracy Letts, Bug* - A down-on-her-luck woman takes up in a motel room with an ex-soldier who is convinced he has government-controlled bugs under his skin. I both read this and saw it performed about a year after. I liked it on the page, but loved it on stage since being in a physical space really hones in on the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a folie a deux. Also, at one point, the lights went down for just a second and then came back up and the entire set was covered in tin foil. Neat trick.

Tracy Letts, Superior Donuts - A man owns a donut shop and hires a black kid to help him out. This read like a very special episode of What's Happening or something, and in fact was later made into a (failed) sitcom. I didn't like it at all and was kind of baffled that this hokey thing came out of the same mind as Bug. I like What's Happening though. I don't think I would want to see a stage play of What's Happening.

Gina Gionfriddo, Becky Shaw - Complete mess of a man goes on a blind date with a BPD woman. I loved this and I'm going to see it before it closes soon. "Unlikeable" characters that are perfectly likeable, imo. Very "RS." I also love the stage directions in this, especially a moment she points out what could be a gag should be subtle and not played for laughs.

David Hare, Skylight - A 50 year old man confronts his much younger ex-mistress after his wife dies. This is one of those plays where the characters are both stand ins for opposing worldviews and I think he does a deft job of not making either one look completely foolish while it still being kind of obvious which side he's taking. There's a Bill Nighy / Carey Mulligan recording that I can't find that I'd like to see.

Annie Baker, The Flick - A bunch of movie theater workers work in a movie theater. So I worked in a movie theater for a good chunk of my youth and had many of the same conversations these characters had. The scam that they pull is a scam we pulled. The issues they face were the issues we faced, etc. Apparently in performance, this has a lot of long pauses and tries people's patience, but since I was reading it, I set the pace and it wasn't an issue at all.

David Auburn, Proof* - A woman inherited her father's mathematical genius and perhaps his mental illness. I read this before seeing the Don Cheadle/Ayo Edibiri production. In both cases, it kind of just felt very middlebrow, made-for-awards (though this production was shut out of the Tonys), but I'm enough of a philistine that I still enjoyed it both reading and, even moreso, in performance.

Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance* - An old couple allows their best friends to stay with them while their daughter, going through a divorce, also comes to stay. A wacky, dysfunctional family drama? comedy? This worked as-read for me, especially the visiting couple who are inexplicably afraid of something at their house and refuse to go home that had shades of Twilight Zone that's never delved into. But in performance, it really lost me as it was completely grating. It's one thing to read about someone playing an accordion during a blow-out argument, it's another thing to sit through it.

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia - Parallel timelines in the same house, one in which a man tutors a girl on math in the past and another where present day people research Lord Byron's visit to the house. This was half annoying and half lovely. Tom Stoppard is one of those writers who just seem too eager-to-impress but the interplay between timelines is funny, interesting, and sometimes sweet.

Next planned reads:
Anne Washburn, Mr Burns - people in a post-apocalyptic dystopia try to remember details of a Simpsons episode
Edward Albee, Goat - A man is in love with a goat
Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape - A man listens to old recordings of himself.
David Adjmi, Stereophonic - A band records their second album