NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

2666 was published posthumously, more than a year after the author's death. It is reasonable, then, to ask how closely the text in the reader's hands corresponds to what Roberto Bolaño would have given us had he lived long enough. The answer is reassuring: the novel as it was left at Bolaño's death is very nearly what he intended it to be. There is no doubt that Bolaño would have worked longer on the book, but only a few months longer; he himself declared that he was near the end, long past the date when he had planned for it to be finished. In any case, not just the foundations but the whole edifice of the novel had already been raised, and its shape, its dimensions, its general content would by no means have been very different from what they are now.

Upon Bolaño's death it was said that the grand project of 2666 had been transformed into a series of five novels corresponding to the five parts into which the work was divided. In fact, in the last months of his life Bolaño insisted on this idea, as he grew less and less certain that he would be able to complete his initial project. It must be said, however, that practical considerations (never Bolaño's strong point, incidentally) figured into this plan: faced with the increasing likelihood of his imminent death, Bolaño thought it would be less of a burden and more profitable, both for his publisher and for his heirs, to deal with five separate novels, short or medium-length, than with a single massive, sprawling work, one not even entirely finished.

After reading the text, however, it seems preferable to keep the novel whole. Although the five parts that make up 2666 can be read independently, they not only share many elements (a subtle web of recurring motifs), they also serve a common end. There is no point attempting to justify the relatively "open" structure that contains them, especially considering the precedent of The Savage Detectives. If that novel had been published posthumously, would it not have given rise to all kinds of speculation about its unfinished state?

One other consideration underlies the decision to publish the five parts of 2666 in a single volume, leaving open the possibility that once the essential framework is established, the parts might be published singly, which would allow combinations that the open structure of the novel permits, even suggests. Bolaño, an excellent short story writer and author of several masterly novellas, also boasted, once he had begun 2666, that he had embarked on a colossal project, far surpassing The Savage Detectives in ambition and length. The sheer size of 2666 is inseparable from the original conception of all its parts, as well as from the spirit of risk that drives it and its rash totalizing zeal. On this point, it is worth recalling the passage from 2666 in which, after his conversation with a book-loving pharmacist, Amalfitano, one of the novel's protagonists, reflects with undisguised disappointment on the growing prestige of short, neatly shaped novels (citing titles like Bartleby the Scrivener and The Metamorphosis) to the exclusion of longer, more ambitious and daring works (like Moby-Dick or The Trial):

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

And then there is the title. That enigmatic number, 2666-a date, really-that functions as a vanishing point around which the different parts of the novel fall into place. Without this vanishing point, the perspective of the whole would be lopsided, incomplete, suspended in nothingness.

In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolaño indicates the existence in the work 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, faithful reflection of Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexican-U.S. border. There the five parts of the novel ultimately converge; there the crimes are committed that comprise its spectacular backdrop (and that are said by one of the novel's characters to contain "the secret of the world"). As for the "hidden center"… might it not represent 2666 itself, the date upon which the whole novel rests?

The writing of 2666 occupied Bolaño for the last years of his life. But the conception and design of the novel came much earlier, and its stirrings may retrospectively be detected in various other books by the author, especially those published after The Savage Detectives (1998), which not coincidentally ends in the Sonora desert. The time will come to catalog these stirrings thoroughly. For now, it may suffice to note one very eloquent example, from Amulet (1999). Rereading that novel offers a single unmistakable clue to the meaning of the date 2666. The protagonist of Amulet, Auxilio Lacouture (a character who is herself prefigured in The Savage Detectives), tells how one night she follows Arturo Belano and Ernesto San Epifanio on a walk to Colonia Guerrero, in Mexico City, where the two go in search of the so-called King of the Rent Boys. This is what she says:

I followed them: I saw them go down Bucareli to Reforma with a spring in their step and then cross Reforma without waiting for the lights to change, their long hair blowing in the excess wind that funnels down Reforma at that hour of the night, turning it into a transparent tube or an elongated lung exhaling the city's imaginary breath. 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.

The text in the reader's possession corresponds to the latest version of the different "parts" of the novel. Bolaño indicated very clearly which of his work files should be considered definitive. Even so, earlier drafts were reviewed with the aim of filling in possible gaps or correcting errors, as well as for anything they might reveal about Bolaño's final intentions. The results of this scrutiny failed to cast much new light on the text and to leave very little room for doubt that it is indeed definitive.

Bolaño was a conscientious writer. He made many drafts of his texts, which he generally wrote quickly but later carefully polished. In all but a few places, the final version of 2666 is clear and clean: deliberately composed, in other words. There has been only the rare need to make minor changes and to correct some obvious errors, with the editors confident in their handling-diligent and expert but above all complicit-of the writer's "weaknesses" and "obsessions."

A final observation is perhaps in order here. Among Bolaño's notes for 2666 there appears the single line: "The narrator of 2666 is Arturo Belano." And elsewhere Bolaño adds, with the indication "for the end of 2666": "And that's it, friends. I've done it all, I've lived it all. If I had the strength, I'd cry. I bid you all goodbye, Arturo Belano."

And so farewell.

IGNACIO ECHEVARRIA September 2004