2666:5

It ends with the fifth section: ‘the Part About Archimboldi’.  And, apart from being (obviously) about Archimboldi, the reclusive German novelist who so obsessed the Critics in part one—this section not only ends the novel but is about endings, I think, although in a rather veiled way.  The structure is a more-or-less straightforwardly linear narrative of Archimboldi’s life.  His birth-name is Hans Reiter.  The son of a one-legged First World War veteran and a one-eyed woman, he grows up near the Prussian North Sea coast.  As a boy he is fascinated with the bottom of the sea; he dives repeatedly (on two occasions he comes close to drowning), reads about seaweed, daydreams about the submarine world.  He grows very tall, and remains an odd, singular, friendless child.  Come WWII, he is mobilized into the regular German army and fights mostly on the Eastern Front—he is even awarded the Iron Cross for bravery, although his bravery is actually a kind of passive recklessness predicated upon a state of mind that would welcome death.  Although he is badly wounded, he does not die.  Recuperating, he discovers the manuscript memoir of a Jewish Soviet writer called Boris Ansky—this enables Bolaño to interrupt his tale with a lengthy digression on Ansky’s revolutionary fervor and disillusionment in Moscow 1920s/30s, and in particular his friendship with Evraim Ivanov, a science fiction writer. I was very interested to read a novel about an imaginary Soviet science fiction writer.  In my opinion, there should be many more novels about imaginary Soviet science fiction writer than there are.  Anyhow, Ivanov falls foul of the purge, and is executed; and it’s unclear what happens to Ansky, although presumably he is killed in the war.  Recovered from his wounds, Reiter is sent back to the front, and the book hurries through the rest of the war.

Afterwards, in a prison camp waiting to be processed by the victorious allies (who, of course, are sieving their captives for war criminals) Reiter befriends a soldier called Zeller.  Zeller reveals that he’s adopted this name in part to put off interrogation by the Americans (who are working through the camp alphabetically). His real name is Leo Sammer, and he wasn’t a soldier at all: he was a mid-level administrator.  He ran a portion of occupied Poland, and tells Reiter what happened when a trainload of 500 Greek Jews mistakenly ended up in his town rather than Auschwitz, where they were supposed to go.  At first Sammer feeds them and gives them blankets, up to a point, whilst he tries to get the Nazi bureaucracy to admit and correct its mistake; but nobody wants to take responsibility, and finally he is given a verbal order to ‘dispose’ of the Jews.

‘Do you understand?’ asked the voice from Warsaw.

‘Yes I understand,’ I said.

‘Then we have a solution, don’t we?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to receive the order in writing,’ I added.  I heard a pealing laughter at the other end of the line. It could by my son’s laugh, I thought, a laugh that conjured up country afternoons, blue rivers full of trout, and the scent of fistfuls of flowers and grasses.

‘Don’t be naïve,’ said the voice without a hint of arrogance, ‘these orders are never issued in wiritng.’[759]

Sammer then kills four-fifths of his Jews by convening work parties to march them into the woods and shoot them, a few score at a time, but it’s amateurishly and clumsily done.  His work parties, including gangs of Polish children, don’t like it at all; and neither does he.  As the Russians approach he vacates the town, and now in Allied custody he’s anxious that his true identity will be uncovered.  But before that happens he is strangled in the camp—by Reiter.

Then the narrative follows Reiter’s postwar life; hardscrabble at first, although leavened by a relationship with the love of his life, the lovely if bonkers and tubercular Ingeborg Bauer.  Reiter and Ingeborg have a lot of sex.  He works at various low-grade jobs, and writes his first novel.  When it comes to publication Reiter is concerned that the Allies might finger him for murdering Sammer; so he chooses a pseudonym, based on the Italian Renaissance painter Arcimboldo, whom Reiter likes.  His publisher points out that ‘Benno von Archimboldi’ is a stupid name, but Reiter sticks with it.

From then on, it’s the slow burn of Reiter/Archimboldi’s career: uncommercial ‘experimental’ novels that initially do not sell, but which slowly accrue readers and, as we know from part 1, academics.  I discover that somebody has made a Wikipedia page for Archimboldi, so I don’t need to list all his novels here. Though I will mention in passing that the Wikipedia page for this imaginary individual’s writing career is longer and more interesting than the pages of some actual writers. So it goes.  Archimboldi, always fame-shy, becomes positively reclusive after the death of Ingeborg.  The last section of Part 5, and the last of the novel as a whole, shifts attention to Archimboldi’s sister, Lotte; her postwar experiences, her marriage to an auto-shop owner, their only child Klaus, and his decision to move to the USA.  This, we discover, is the same Klaus Haas imprisoned under suspicion of murdering women in Santa Teresa in Part IV: and the novel ends with the elderly, now widowed Lotte worn out by repeated visits to her son in prison, asking her brother to take over.

”And that woman was very nice,” said Lotte, “even though my son is rotting in a Mexican prison. And who will look after him? Who will remember him when I’m dead?” asked Lotte. “My son has no children, no friends, he doesn’t have anyone,” said Lotte. “Look, the sun is coming up. Would you like some tea, coffee, a glass of water?”

Archimboldi sat down and stretched his legs. The bones cracked.

“Will you take care of it all?”

“A beer,” he said.

“I don’t have beer,” said Lotte. “Will you take care of it all?” [891

That’s everything, except for a tangential coda: Archimboldi has an ice cream on a terrace restaurant, a ‘Fürst Pückler’ (‘chocolate, vanilla and strawberry’) when he meets a descendent of the original Herr Fürst Pückler, who invented the ice cream.  The ancestor was ‘an enlightened man’, a gardener and botanist, the author of notable botanical and travel books.

”No one remembers the botanist Fürst Pückler now, no one remembers the model gardner, no one has read the writer. But everyone at some moment has tasted a Fürst Pückler, which is best and most pleasant in spring and fall.”

“Why not in summer?” asked Archimboldi.

“Because in summer it can be cloying. Ices are best in summer, not ice cream.”

Suddenly the park lights came on, although there was a second of total darkness, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg.

The gentlemen sighed.  He must have been about seventy, and then he said:

“A mysterious legacy, don’t you think?”