2666 and withdrawn writers

A major figure in Bolaño's work is certainly the disappeared writer, the one who has withdrawn from society after some statement of purpose, genre-splicing work or enunciation.  Recently I have found time to inch towards the final pages of 2666, a work that I have leafed through in a leisurely style.  In that predictably amazing way, finishing Bolaño's final work will help me rethink my comparative piece of Bolaño and Goytisolo, which I presented here.  Bolaño's work is not a regurgitation of some bastardized "post-structuralist" thinking, but rather like an archaeological dig, checking to see where the author's bones are buried, or saving that, where she still resides (cf. Los detectives salvajes).  So 2666 as an obsessive search for an individual of course ends in failure.  Instead, we encounter a series of places, wars, murders and rivers that work in alliance with a human writer (alliance should be said with Latour here).