A vision of agony, ecstacy and wonder

An unblinking novel stares directly into the sandstorms of modern life

"2666" may be the first great novel of the 21st century, and the author didn't get to finish it. Roberto Bolaño died of liver disease in 2003 at 50, leaving a daredevil epic that is lyrical and stark, decadent and soaring, a sandstorm in which the author refuses to blink, the novel Tolstoy might have written if he had hoboed around the modern world, casting off history's last inhibitions. A lot of very good novels suddenly seem timid in this one's wake.

At more than 900 pages, "2666" is the kind of sprawling big-canvas fiction that is unified more by the author's vision than by its characters and plot lines. The narrative is cut into hundreds of small sections (many no longer than a page) that seem to catch everything in their dragnets: philosophy and art, bin Laden and David Lynch, Mexican politics, Aztec sacrifice, race, romance, myth, sex, prison life, Alpine landscapes, crime and mysticism, the sacred, the profane, family, friendship, and everywhere the violent stains of the 20th-century.

Remarkably, this relentless inclusiveness does not become a postmodern jumble of impressions or just a catalog of ills. Equally remarkable is the way Bolaño registers older moral and metaphysical pressures without slowing the novel down to resolve them. The world is desperately bleak in "2666," and in disarmingly straightforward prose, Bolaño measures the abyss. But he does this with such speed and daring that the book remains buoyed by an irresistible ecstasy.

The novel's five loosely-connected parts gather around a common wasteland of crime: on the Mexican side of the American border, in Santa Teresa, a city modeled on Juárez, a serial killer (or maybe killers) is raping and murdering women. In a work without traditional narrative arc, the deaths breed the atmosphere of biblical apocalypse hinted by the title -- 666 is the mark of the beast.

Part One revolves around a trio of European scholars who, following a tip, go to Mexico in quest of their reclusive idol, the German writer Archimboldi. There they learn of the unsolved murders and meet the subject of the book's second section, the melancholy, unstable Amalfitano, a philosophy professor who hears voices, makes sketches and lists, and (following Duchamp) hangs a geometry book from a clothes line like a shirt "to see if it learns something about real life." In Part Three, a journalist from New York, sent to Mexico to cover a boxing match, is distracted by accounts of the crimes, stays on in Santa Teresa, and becomes involved with Amalfitano's daughter. In the fourth and longest section, Bolaño catalogs the crime victims in morgue-cold prose, a difficult stretch of reading that is arresting in its poise.

The unfinished Part Five (for this reader the richest) focuses on Archimboldi, the absent hero of Part One. Archimboldi is a pen name for Hans Reiter, whose art was forged in the furnace of Nazi Germany. An oversized infantryman in World War II, he fights on both fronts, gets shot in the throat, discovers the notebooks of a Russian writer in an abandoned farmhouse, and in a prisoner-of-war camp listens to the confession of an officer charged (because of a bureaucratic error) with exterminating a trainload of Greek Jews. A successful writer after the war, the elderly Archimboldi heads to Mexico to help his long-lost sister's son, who has been accused of some of the murders in Santa Teresa. At this point the novel breaks off, leaving an ending as wide open as Bolaño's own vision.

The thrill of "2666" resides in the sheer range and mobility of Bolaño's attention, but it is a disturbed, disarming thrill regardless. Bolaño draws us along the perimeter of an abyss with such momentum it is hard to register the grimness of what we see. Violence is everywhere, and not just with the murdered women: an artist cuts off his painting hand and mounts it on a canvas (the ruthlessness of that detail: it was his painting hand); two scholars beat a Pakistani cab driver; an army general is literally crucified by retreating soldiers; the list could go on.