The issue of writer-as-martyr is an interesting one, but I’m not sure it fits here. Archimboldi isn’t dying, or even suffering for other people’s sins. He promises nothing, presents no paradisaical vision, offers no forgiveness to humanity. It’s not his role, and I don’t see any sense that Bolaño sees the writer (fictional or real) as a redeemer. If anything, the writer is observer and storyteller, someone who doesn’t forget in a society where forgetting is the norm.

Does that make the writer better than others? I’m not sure Archimboldi shows that. He barely interacts with other characters, at least in ways that we would recognize as emotionally rich. I think “mad, cold, indifferent” describes Archimboldi as well as, and perhaps better than most of the other characters in the book.

All collapses into pain: This doesn’t preclude beauty, or long stretches of an ordinary life. This doesn’t mean that life is *about* pain, any more than life is about eating or sex or any other universal. But pain differs from these others precisely in its painfulness, and in people’s tendency to turn a blind eye to its existence. We need to forget it to live normal lives; yet it exists all around us, in the streets and hospitals, behind closed curtains, across borders we don’t read about in the news, in our own futures. A car journey that ends by crashing into a tree isn’t *about* that bloody end. But the end is real.

I don’t think it is condescension to say that forgetting has consequences. Santa Teresa (or Ciudad Juarez) is a thinly disguised version of reality; but even if it weren’t, the kind of horror that takes place there could be found in varying degrees in hundreds of places around the world. Even the United States. Forgetting this, trying to shut it out, has consequences for the community’s soul, Bolañois arguing; turning a blind eye warps us.

2666 is a book of extremes. I don’t think that Bolaño is arguing that Archimboldi is some kind of demigod, superior to the rest of us. I don’t think that the existence of Santa Teresa is meant to exclude the possibility of other kinds of environments. I think that each are poles, the existence of which helps to understand the grayer middles.

It’s impossible to live a normal without forgetting. Archimboldi shows this by living a life wholly outside the frame of everyday human interaction. Is he meant to be superior? I don’t see this, unless simply being outside is superior (but Bolaño shows that real human attachments, love and friendship and camaraderie, are desirable even if inevitably flawed). Yet a life, or a community, that is all forgetting, that turns a permanently blind eye to the horror that *does* exist, leads to atrocity.

Another interesting question. Is this book, or is Bolaño, misogynist? Women are killed, brutally, and these crimes are given dispassionate description. The victims are seen almost as non-people, because we see nothing of them *as* people. Rather, they are corpses, a collection of contradictory stories pieced together after their death by police investigators who barely care.

I see this as narrative strategy rather than misogynism, in a way that goes back to the earlier point. Santa Teresa exists, and is warped by, its ability to forget the sufferings and even the existence of these women. If we saw them as people, saw the violence as it happened, saw them walking unknowingly to their doom, it would change the story, and change the emotionally flat horror we experience reading it. Nor is this seen as a morally ambiguous thing: It is precisely this forgetting (and thus this treatment of the women) that the novel’s fundamentally moral core excoriates.