Next comes a meditation on the childhood of Benito Juárez and the inner lives of shepherds, then an explanation of the circumstances that have brought Florita to follow a ventriloquist from Guaymas on An Hour with Reinaldo. She provides a brisk autobiography, an account of how she cared for her blind mother, and later her blind husband, a dealer in livestock whose habit of bringing books home turned Florita into a voracious reader and autodidact. It worked well for some people and not for others, especially lazy youths with regrettable habits”). Next she lists the various schools of herbalism, or “botanomancy,” including those that promote the use of hallucinogens (“Everyone was free to mess with their own heads. Why isn’t anyone saying or doing anything about the killings? That pressure will erupt through Florita at the end of a scene that goes on for ten dense (there are no paragraph breaks) pages-written in the third person but clearly in Florita’s voice-a passage that seems musical in its flights of melody, its swells and dips and crescendos, like a great operatic aria, but more free-form and improvisational, more like a brilliant jazz solo.įlorita begins by describing the nature and limitations of her gift (“sometimes she didn’t see anything, the picture was fuzzy, the sound faulty, as if the antenna that had sprung up in her brain wasn’t installed right or had been shot full of holes or was made of aluminum foil and blew every which way in the wind”) and goes on to dispense some basic nutritional advice (“a tortilla with chile is better for you than pork rinds that are actually dog or cat or rat”). The litany of dead women and girls (many of the victims are very young) has exerted an intensifying pressure on the reader. By the time Florita makes her television debut, Bolaño has described, in clinical detail, the discovery of dozens of corpses, but no one in any official capacity has been much concerned the police have been busy trying to catch a madman known as the Penitent, whose illness compels him to desecrate churches. Local, in this case, means Sonora, a state that includes the city Bolaño calls Santa Teresa, which is based on Ciudad Juárez-a bleak, industrial desert hellhole on the Mexican side of the border, where over the past fifteen years hundreds of women (many of them factory workers in the maquiladoras) have been raped and killed, as they are in Bolaño’s book. $30.Īlmost halfway through Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, a seventy-year-old seer and healer named Florita Almada appears on a local TV talk show.

Roberto bolano 2666 review