2666

2666 is a posthumously published novel by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, translated into Chinese by Zhao Deming. Running about 700,000 Chinese characters, it is divided into five parts that are independent yet echo one another. Part One, "The Part About the Critics": four scholars from different European countries meet through their study of the German writer Benno von Archimboldi; hearing that the long-vanished writer has appeared in the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa, three of them set off together to find him. Part Two, "The Part About Amalfitano": a Chilean philosophy professor who has moved to Santa Teresa grows increasingly unhinged; his wife leaves him for a poet in a mental asylum, he lives alone with his teenage daughter, and he hangs a geometry book on the clothesline in his yard to let the wind turn its pages. Part Three, "The Part About Fate": a Black American journalist comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, meets local colleagues and the professor's daughter, and gradually realizes that women in the city are being killed and dumped in the desert, while his investigation is blocked at every turn. Part Four, "The Part About the Crimes": the longest and darkest, recording in near-archival fashion, year by year, the many murders of women in Santa Teresa in the 1990s, with the killer never identified. Part Five, "The Part About Archimboldi": finally tells the German writer's life head-on—from childhood in a northern village and service as a manor servant, to conscription and the Second World War, to becoming a writer after the war and living under a hidden name, and finally to the faint, uncertain link between him and the Santa Teresa murders. With cold, intricate narration, the novel pieces together a twentieth-century panorama spanning Europe and Latin America.