The most exhausting novel I've ever read

For my birthday last December, my daughter gave me Roberto Bolaño's celebrated novel, "2666," which sprawls over five parts and 898 pages. Faced with such a daunting read, I vowed not to pick it up until I had a good block of time to dive in.

I waited until March, when Lori and I were on Orcas Island, to wade into it and, through sheer persistence, finally completed it this summer. And, yes, it's taken until now, the day after Labor Day, to make time to write about it.

At times, it felt like a marathon -- initially exhilarating. But if you've ever run one, you know the feeling of trudging along in the final miles of the event, willing yourself to continue when your body wants to stop and your mind theatens to lose focus. If you'd asked me at any given time what I thought of the novel that Time magazine proclaimed "The Best Book of 2008," I would have answered: brilliant, tedious, crass, dark, pointless, compelling, astonishing, exhaustive.

Although Bolaño died in 2003 and the novel was published more than a year after his death, the book wasn't translated into English until 2008. That year, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. This year, the buzz has continued. In the Feb. 18, 2009 issue of The New Republic, for instance, the magazine devoted five and a half pages to a comprehensive review by William Deresiewicz.

Reading that review while also laboring through "2666" gave me the context I needed to make sense of the massive novel and its author.

I learned that Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, the son of a truck driver who moved the family to Mexico City when Roberto was still a boy. I learned that he was a high school dropout who gravitated to poetry and leftist politics, that he moved to Europe in 1977 and was said to have developed a taste for heroin. I learned that he died at age 50 from a liver disease. And, I learned from The New Republic review, that he was an unconventional as they come -- and not just because he'd write a single sentence that would run for a full page.

"In every sentence he wrote, every image he conceived, every compositional choice he made, Bolaño did whatever the f*** he wanted. In his art as in his life, he left a record of headlong daring that will become a rallying point for young writers for years to come...

"At a time when the novel, at least in this country, has retreated into caution, he demonstrates again what is possible in fiction -- which is to say, anything."

What's the novel about? Hard to say. Part 1 is about four literary critics, all European, who are authorities on a mysterious German novelist named Archimbrodi, whom they've never met. Acting on a tip that he's been seen in a town in northern Mexico, three of them travel there but never find him. Part 2 is about an American journalist who's sent to the same Mexican town -- Santa Teresa -- to cover a boxing match but gets caught up with criminals and druggies. Part 3 is about a professor who teaches in Santa Teresa. Part 4 is about the horrific serial rapes and murders of more than 400 hundred women in Santa Teresa (based on the very real and ongoing crimes in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso). Part 5 is about Archimbrodi, the reclusive novelist.

Bolaño stitches together only some pieces of the narrative. Other parts (and dozens of characters) are introduced but never revisited -- and that can drive you crazy even as you marvel at the brilliance of their creator.

Ultimately, would I recommend the book? I can't say that I would. It's such an investment of time, for starters. It demands patience -- even stamina -- that I suspect most readers don't have as they encounter one digression after another. It also requires a very strong stomach to make your way through the excruciating detail with which Bolaño describes the torture-murders of so many poor, vulnerable women who are killed in Santa Teresa, disposed of like so much trash, and quickly forgotten.

I think the TNR critic William Deresiewicz has it just right. He praises Bolaño's "virtuosic range of narrative modes: academic satire in I, minimalism in III, reportage in IV...fictional biography in V, allegory and surrealism in places throughout."

"There is no problem with Bolaño's implication that to know something one must speak about it in different ways," he writes. "The problem is that there is no single central something about which the novel attempts to speak."

And that is why, after 898 pages, I felt emotionally and physically spent. As if I'd done a marathon.