The Broken Book

But the meandering quality of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which hits you all the harder because you don't see it coming. How can art, Bolaño asks, a medium of form and meaning, faithfully reflect a world that is blessed with neither? That is in fact a cesspool of randomness and filth? An orderly book, all signal and no noise, would not be a true book. To mirror a broken world, to speak the unspeakable, you need a broken book. That Bolaño should have died and left his book an orphan might even have struck him as appropriate.