Book of a lifetime: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

From The Independent archive: Jeet Thayil takes pleasure in the way profound aesthetic ideas occur at casual moments in a book Bolaño knew would be published after his death

‘2666’ was published posthumously but established Roberto Bolaño’s pre-eminence in Latin American literature (Pan Macmillan/AFP/Getty)

First published in Spain in 2004, a year after the author’s death, 2666 appeared in English translation four years later. It is, among other things: a Russian war epic; an American reporter’s hard-boiled take on Mexico, boxing and love; a grisly if verifiable police procedural; a study of mental and other derangements; a skewed and scholarly view of the (great) writer’s life; a prison chronicle.

2666 is also a kind of time bomb. It hasn’t been around very long but it casts an impregnable shade of influence. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that in a decade or so it will be Bolaño, not Márquez, who will be considered the pre-eminent Latin American novelist of the 20th century.

Great books develop their own mythology. Bolaño wrote his when he knew he was dying. Though he is a master of the unsaid, of Dostoyevskyan digression and the open ending, the book’s last part doesn’t feel like its end. Which, apparently, it wasn’t: Part VI was found among his papers after his death. Knowing how self-aware the author was, he likely anticipated the kind of reception 2666 would receive and withheld the last part for sensational posthumous publication.