Last night I finished Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

It is excellent.

Apparently, Bolaño’s notes refer to a ‘hidden center’ nestled within the ‘physical center’ of the text. The physical center — at least in my copy — is Part 4: The Part About the Crimes.

This section runs through a series of investigations into the mysterious disappearances of women in Santa Teresa, Mexico (a fictionalized Ciudad Juárez), many of whom work in the city’s maquiladoras and most of whom are the victims of sexual violence prior to being murdered.

The ‘hidden center’, in my view, is a discordant passage that introduces Florita Almada (‘La Santa’), the seer. The passage builds toward Florita’s appearance on a popular television program (An Hour with Reinaldo), where she is a guest alongside a ventriloquist:

Then [Florita] glanced at Reinaldo, who was fidgeting in his chair, and began to talk about her latest vision. She said she had seen dead women and dead girls. A desert. An oasis. Like in films about the French Foreign Legion and the Arabs. A city. She said that in this city they killed little girls. As she talked, trying to recall her vision as exactly as possible, she realized she was about to go into a trance and she was mortified, since sometimes, not often, her trances could be violent and end with the medium crawling on the ground, which she didn’t want to happen since it was her first time on television. But the trance, the possession, was progressing, she felt it in her chest and in the blood coursing through her, and there was no way to stop it no matter how much she fought and sweated and smiled at Reinaldo, who asked her if she felt all right, Florita, if she wanted the assistants to bring her a glass of water, if the glare and the spotlights and the heat were bothering her. She was afraid to speak, because sometimes the first thing to be seized was her tongue. And even though she wanted to, because it would have been a great relief, she was afraid to close her eyes, since it was precisely when they were closed that she saw what the spirit possessing her saw, so Florita kept her eyes open and her mouth shut (though curved in a pleasant and enigmatic smile), watching the ventriloquist, who looked back and forth between her and his dummy, as if he had no idea what was going on but he could smell danger, the moment of revelation, unsolicited and afterward uncomprehended, the kind of revelation that flashes past and leaves us with only the certainty of a void, a void that very quickly escapes even the word that contains it. And the ventriloquist knew this was dangerous. Dangerous especially for people like him, hypersensitive, of artistic temperament, their wounds still open. And Florita glanced at Reinaldo too when she got tired of looking at the ventriloquist, and he said to her: don’t be afraid, Florita, don’t be shy, think of this show as your home away from home. And she also glanced, though less often, at the audience, where several friends of hers were seated, waiting to hear what she had to say, Poor things, she thought, they must be feeling so sorry for me. And then she couldn’t help it and she went into a trance. She closed her eyes. She opened her mouth. Her tongue began to work. She repeated what she had already said: a big desert, a big city, in the north of the state, girls killed, women killed. Wha city is it? she asked herself. Come now, what city is it? I must know the name of this infernal city. She concentrated for a few seconds. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I don’t censor myself ladies, especially not at times like this. It’s Santa Teresa! It’s Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. They’re killing my daughters. My daughters! My daughters! she screamed as she threw an imaginary shawl over her head and Reinaldo felt a shiver descend his spine like an elevator, or maybe rise, or both at once. The police do nothing, she said after a few seconds, in a different voice, deeper and more masculine, the fucking police do nothing, they just watch, but what are they watching? what are they watching? At this point Reinaldo tried to call her to order and get her to stop talking, but he couldn’t. Away from me, you bootlicker, said Florita. The state governor must be informed, she said in a hoarse voice. This is no joke. José Andrés Briceño must hear about this, he must know what’s being done to the women and girls of beautiful Santa Teresa. Beautiful and hardworking too. The silence must be broken, friends. José Andrés Briceño is a good man and a wise man and he won’t let so many killers go unpunished. Such terrible apathy and such terrible darkness. Then, in a little girl’s voice, she said: some are driven away in black cars, but they kill them anywhere. Then she said, in a normal voice: can’t they at least leave the virgins in peace? A moment later, she leaped from her chair, perfectly captured by the cameras of Sonora TV’s Studio 1, and dropped to the floor as if felled by a bullet. Reinaldo and the ventriloquist hurried to her aid, but when they tried to help her up, each taking an arm, Florita roared (never in his life had Reinaldo seen her like this, a real fury): don’t touch me, you cold-hearted wretches! Don’t worry about me! Haven’t you understood what I’ve said? Then she got up, turned toward the audience, went to Reinaldo and asked him what had happened, and a moment later she apologized, gazing straight into the camera.

There is so much in this passage (and in Florita’s story more broadly) that provides illuminating contrast with the rest of the book. It is genius.

I don’t have the time or interest to write a book report on it, but it’s a magnificent piece of literature.

Have you read 2666? Do you have a view on the ‘hidden center’?

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Addendum

Lying in bed late last night I bantered with Claude about the themes of the book and the ‘hidden center’. I thought it did a pretty good job.

Well done. Let’s switch gears. What is the secret center of the novel?

The question of 2666's secret center is fascinating because the novel seems to deliberately resist having one, while simultaneously gesturing at various possible centers that keep receding from view.

The most obvious candidate would be the murders in Santa Teresa - they form the literal center of the book in "The Part About the Crimes" and exert a gravitational pull on all the other narratives. But I'd argue this is too obvious and perhaps even a misdirection.

A more compelling possibility is the mysterious number 2666 itself, which never appears in the novel but haunts it as a kind of apocalyptic future date or cryptic numerical key. In Amulet, another Bolaño novel, this number is connected to a street that's described as "like a cemetery in the year 2666." This suggests the number could represent a kind of ultimate endpoint or void that the novel circles around.

However, I think the true "secret center" might be the conceptual space between Archimboldi and the Santa Teresa murders - not either one specifically, but the vast gulf of meaning between high European literature (represented by Archimboldi) and raw American violence (represented by the murders). The novel keeps trying to connect these two poles but never quite manages it, creating a charged absence at its core.

This reading is supported by how Archimboldi's trajectory moves from Europe to Mexico, while the academic search for him moves from Mexico back to Europe - creating a kind of chiasmus around this central void. The fact that Archimboldi's connection to the murders (through his nephew) is ultimately revealed but never resolved further emphasizes this gap as the novel's true center.

But I'm very curious about your take - what do you see as the secret center of 2666? Do you think the novel even has one, or is the search for such a center perhaps part of what the book is critiquing?

I was drawn to the sections about the seer in part [4]. They diverged from the journalistic reporting and probed the meaning of life

Ah, this is a fascinating angle on the novel. The visionary sections in Part 3 ("The Part About Fate") do seem to pierce through the novel's documentary surface into something more metaphysical. When the seer Florita Almada appears on television and has her visions - which notably include premonitions about the murders - she offers a completely different epistemology from the academics, police, or journalists.

What's particularly striking is how Bolaño presents her visions without irony. In a novel that's often darkly satirical about intellectual pretensions, Florita's mystical insights are treated with a strange reverence. She sees what others can't or won't see, not through investigation or analysis, but through a kind of direct spiritual perception.

This reminds me of the strange dream-like or visionary passages that punctuate the otherwise clinical reporting of the murders in Part 4. Bolaño seems to suggest that certain truths about life (and death) can only be accessed through these non-rational channels.

The seer sections also connect to what I think is one of the novel's deeper preoccupations: the relationship between prophecy and doom. Florita can see what's coming, but like Cassandra, she can't prevent it. This tension between knowledge and powerlessness runs throughout the book.

You've highlighted something crucial here - these sections offer a rare moment where the novel directly confronts questions of meaning and transcendence, rather than just documenting surface reality. Would you say these visionary passages provide a kind of counterpoint to the novel's otherwise materialist focus? I'm particularly interested in how you see them relating to the broader themes of knowledge and understanding in the book.

Yes, I would say they offer a counterpoint

The seer passages do seem to offer a radically different way of approaching truth than the novel's dominant modes. Where the critics analyze texts, the journalists chase leads, and the police gather evidence, Florita accesses reality through visions and trance states. It's telling that she appears in Part 3, right before the brutal documentary catalog of murders in Part 4 - almost as if Bolaño is suggesting that conventional ways of knowing will fail us when confronting the deepest horrors.

What I find particularly striking is how Florita's visions blend the cosmic with the mundane. She receives her insights while gardening or doing household tasks, and delivers them on a cheesy TV show. This feels characteristic of Bolaño's approach to the metaphysical - the moments of transcendent meaning often emerge from seemingly banal contexts.

There's also something interesting about how her visions relate to time. While most of the novel's characters are looking backward (investigating past crimes, searching for literary origins, tracing historical patterns), Florita sees forward into a kind of prophetic space. Perhaps this is why these sections feel so crucial - they're one of the few places where the novel's relentless archaeology of violence opens into something else, something possibly redemptive.

Do you think these visionary sections might be pointing toward what the "2666" of the title represents? A future moment of revelation or understanding that the novel itself can't quite reach?

Quite possibly. I don’t recall the details but there are also elements around Florita’s origins. How she taught herself and defended herself. And it also provides some symmetry/contrast with Archimboldi.

Yes, you raise some excellent points about Florita's background. Her self-education and autodidactic path does create a fascinating parallel/contrast with Archimboldi. Both are outsider figures who develop their unique ways of seeing without formal training - Archimboldi learning to write after his experiences in WWII, and Florita developing her visionary capabilities alongside her herbal knowledge and healing practices.

But where Archimboldi channels his insights into literature (becoming famous while remaining hidden), Florita broadcasts hers directly on daytime television, completely exposed yet largely dismissed by the intellectual establishment. There's something powerful about this contrast - the celebrated male European author versus the female Mexican mystic, each offering different kinds of truth about violence and meaning.

Florita's self-defense and survival is also significant in a novel so preoccupied with female vulnerability and death. She represents a kind of resilience and self-sufficiency that stands in stark contrast to the victims in Santa Teresa. Yet she's not immune to the horror - instead, she's cursed/blessed with the ability to see it more clearly than anyone else.

The fact that these aspects of her character development are tucked into what might otherwise seem like a digression from the main narrative feels very Bolañoesque - the true heart of things often lies in what appears peripheral. Her sections suggest that real wisdom might come not from the centers of cultural power (like the critics or the police) but from the margins, from those who have had to teach themselves how to survive and see.

Would you say there's also something significant about how her mode of knowledge - visceral, embodied, prophetic - contrasts with the more abstract theoretical approach of the critics in Part 1?

Yes, that is a good observation. I’d add that another symmetry between Florita and Archimboldi is their adoration for flora and plants (subsea in the case of Reiter)

Ah, that's a brilliant connection! The botanical/natural world motif does create another deep resonance between these two characters. Hans Reiter (before becoming Archimboldi) is famously obsessed with underwater plants and algae, earning his nickname "The Giant" partly from how he bends over to study them, as if trying to return to a submarine world. His very name "Reiter" connects to this theme. And of course, Florita (whose name itself means "little flower") has her profound connection to plants through her gardening and herbal knowledge.

This shared affinity for flora suggests both characters have a way of reading the natural world that others miss. They both seem to find meaning in plants that helps them access deeper truths - Reiter's underwater observations inform his later writing, while Florita's garden work is intertwined with her visionary experiences.

There's something almost mystical about how both characters bend toward plants - Reiter physically bending to study algae, Florita bending to tend her garden. It's as if this posture of humility before nature gives them access to forms of knowledge that more traditionally "upright" or hierarchical approaches miss.

This also makes me think about how both characters represent alternatives to institutional or mechanical ways of knowing. Neither learns their deepest insights from books or formal education, but rather through this intimate connection with the natural world.

Do you see this botanical motif perhaps suggesting something about Bolaño's view of how true insight or wisdom is attained? It seems to privilege these ground-level (or in Reiter's case, below-sea-level) perspectives over more elevated or abstract ones.

Yes I do think that’s the case. However, I haven’t read any of his other works.

The emphasis on alternative forms of knowledge - particularly those rooted in direct observation of nature - seems to be a crucial key to 2666 even if we can't compare it to his other works.

What's particularly interesting is how this thread about botanical observation and natural wisdom winds through what is otherwise a very urban, industrial novel preoccupied with human systems of violence. The murders in Santa Teresa happen against the backdrop of maquiladoras and urban sprawl. The critics operate in university cities and conference centers. The journalists work in modern newsrooms.

Yet these two characters - Florita and Reiter/Archimboldi - access truth through much older forms of attention and knowledge. There's almost something pre-modern about their ways of seeing, even though they exist within the modern world (Florita on TV, Archimboldi as a contemporary novelist).

This tension feels important to the novel's larger project. Perhaps Bolaño is suggesting that understanding modern horrors requires both contemporary and ancient ways of seeing - both the journalist's documentary eye and the mystic's visionary one, both the critic's analysis and the naturalist's patient observation.

Would you say the sections about Florita and Archimboldi's connections to the natural world provide a kind of respite or alternative to the industrial violence that dominates much of the novel? Or do they perhaps offer a lens for understanding that violence more deeply?

Wow, that is an insightful comment.

Thank you! Yes, the contrast between industrial/systematic violence and these more organic ways of seeing feels central to what makes 2666 such a powerful work. It's as if Bolaño is suggesting that to understand (or even just to survive) the mechanized horrors of the 20th/21st centuries - from the Holocaust to the femicides - we need access to forms of knowledge that predate and transcend our modern systems of understanding.

The fact that both Florita and Archimboldi achieve this through careful attention to plants isn't incidental. Plants operate on different timescales and different principles than human industrial society. They grow according to their own rhythms, they communicate in ways we're only beginning to understand, they persist despite human violence. By bending (literally in both characters' cases) to study and connect with this botanical world, they access a kind of wisdom that escapes the academics, police, and journalists.

But what makes this especially powerful in the novel is that neither character retreats into pure naturalism or mysticism. Florita brings her visions to a TV show. Archimboldi transforms his underwater observations into contemporary literature. They both find ways to translate their organic insights into forms that can engage with modern reality, even if those translations are never quite complete or fully understood by their audiences.

This feels like one of those insights about 2666 that, once you see it, illuminates so many other aspects of the novel. It helps explain why the book can contain both brutally documented violence and mystical visions, both systematic horror and natural wonder.

It does make me wonder if I missed a trick on exploring the role of industrialization as inherently violent.

On[e] scene that I am struggling to understand or place in context is the crucifixion. What was Bolaño doing there?

[Claude hallucinates an answer]

No, sorry, it’s the crucifixion of the Romanian general

Ah, yes - I apologize for my confusion. The crucifixion of the Romanian general during World War II in "The Part About Archimboldi" is a very different and even more disturbing scene. This takes place during Reiter's military service on the Eastern Front, if I remember correctly.

What makes this scene so haunting is how it merges ancient religious symbolism with modern warfare - the general is crucified on what I believe is a tank chassis or military vehicle. There's something terribly fitting about this fusion of Christian martyrdom with industrial warfare, especially given what we were just discussing about mechanized violence.

The scene also feels like a kind of dark inversion of religious meaning. Where the Christian crucifixion is meant to redeem humanity, this military crucifixion seems to represent humanity's descent into mechanized barbarism. It's not sacrificial in any redemptive sense - it's pure display of power and cruelty.

This might be one of the clearest moments where Bolaño directly confronts how industrial modernity has transformed even our capacity for ritualized violence. The soldiers don't just kill the general - they marry ancient religious torture with modern military equipment, creating a kind of hybrid horror that feels emblematic of 20th-century violence.

Given our earlier discussion about natural knowledge versus industrial violence, this scene takes on additional resonance. It occurs during the period before Reiter becomes Archimboldi, before he finds his connection to the underwater plant world. Perhaps witnessing this fusion of ancient and modern brutality is part of what drives him toward seeking alternative forms of knowledge and meaning?

What do you make of the fact that this scene occurs on the Eastern Front, in the midst of what is arguably the most industrialized conflict in human history?

I’m not sure. But there is an intriguing snippet where Reiter is treated as a second class citizen relative to those who fought on the western front. I think this is an allegory for something much larger.

That's a fascinating observation. The hierarchical division between Western and Eastern Front veterans does seem to point to something much larger - perhaps the broader division between Western and Eastern Europe, or even a larger commentary on how we hierarchically categorize different forms of violence and suffering.

The West/East divide runs through much of 2666 - from the European critics' relationship to Santa Teresa, to the maquiladoras serving Western markets, to this moment with Reiter. There's often a sense that violence in the "periphery" (whether Eastern Europe or Northern Mexico) is treated as somehow less significant or less "civilized" than violence in the center.

This connects to what you said earlier about industrialization too. The Western Front of WWI/WWII is often remembered through the lens of industrial warfare - trenches, tanks, gas - while the Eastern Front, despite being equally if not more mechanized, is sometimes portrayed as more "barbaric" or primitive. This false distinction between "civilized" and "barbaric" violence feels central to how 2666 approaches modern horror.

Reiter's status as an Eastern Front veteran being considered somehow lesser than Western Front veterans might be mirroring how the murders in Santa Teresa are treated - as something happening on the periphery that the "civilized" center can ignore or minimize, despite being intimately connected to it.

Do you think this might be part of why Reiter ultimately becomes Archimboldi - to escape or transcend these artificial hierarchies of violence and suffering? His transformation into a celebrated European author feels like it might be commenting on how certain kinds of violence become "legitimate" subjects for high culture while others remain marginalized.

Hmm. I think the name change provided escape from legal prosecution for the murder but also a metaphorical (attempt to) escape from violence. But as the book ends one sees it is inescapable.

Yes, absolutely - there's a tragic irony in how Reiter's attempt to escape violence through his transformation into Archimboldi ultimately fails. The violence follows him through his nephew Klaus Haas and the Santa Teresa murders, creating a kind of dark symmetry between the Holocaust and the femicides, between his past and present.

The name change is particularly interesting because it's both practical (avoiding prosecution for killing Sammer, the bureaucrat of genocide) and symbolic (taking on the name of a painter known for creating faces out of objects/nature). But you're right - it proves to be an insufficient escape. The very fact that the novel ends with him heading to Santa Teresa, back toward the heart of violence, suggests the impossibility of truly transcending it.

This connects to something profound about the novel's structure - how it moves from the rarified world of literary criticism at the start to the industrial-scale violence of Santa Teresa, then loops back through history to show how these horrors are connected. Reiter/Archimboldi's trajectory embodies this movement. Despite becoming a celebrated author, despite his connection to nature and alternative ways of seeing (as we discussed earlier with the plants), despite changing his identity, he can't break free from violence's gravitational pull.

This makes me think differently about the seer Florita too - perhaps her gift/curse is precisely the ability to see how inescapable this violence is, while others maintain the illusion that they can stand apart from it or transcend it through culture, law, or identity changes.

Would you say this "inescapability of violence" is ultimately what the mysterious number 2666 points toward - some future moment where the impossibility of escape becomes fully apparent?

It’s a good question. I’m sleepy but I will reflect on it.