Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: An Equator Reading Group

Beginning in 10 January 2027, the second Equator reading group will explore total violence, literary obsession, borderlands and the wreckage of the twentieth century through Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. The sessions start at 4pm GMT and are fully online, open to all; they will be moderated by Gavin Jacobson.

In an epoch characterised by the militarised borders, femicide and the unextinguished debris of European fascism, 2666 is the perfect text to grapple with the history of the present. Bolaño’s pentaptych brings together into a single work several themes: the mandarinism of Western European academia, the terror of the Latin American security state, the legacy of World War II, the sensationalist mechanics of American mass culture and the industrial hellscapes of the Sonoran borderlands.

Each month, the group will consider one section of the novel, meeting via Zoom alongside an array of novelists, translators, historians and theorists. (Video recordings of each session will be available to registered participants after each meeting.)

Readings
Session 1: 10 January | Part I: The Part About the Critics
Reading: Part I (pp. 1–159)
Guests: Natasha Wimmer, Barbara Epler, Chris Power
Description: The opening session begins with the quest for the reclusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. Focusing on the group of European philologists who construct their careers on Archimboldi’s canon, we will explore themes such as the contemporary western intelligentsia’s provincialism, the reification of literary prestige and high European culture's historical blindness toward the violence on the global periphery.

Session 2: 7 February | Part II: The Part About Amalfitano
Readings: Part II (pp. 161–227)
Guests: Claudio Lomnitz, Benjamin Kunkel, Brenda Lozano
Description: Shifting to Santa Teresa – Bolaño’s fictional version of Ciudad Juárez – we will encounter the exiled Chilean philosopher Óscar Amalfitano. This session looks at the pathologies of political displacement, despair and the paralysis of critical theory when transposed to the US–Mexico borderlands, where bourgeois rationality founders upon the realities of exploitation and lawless power.

Session 3: 7 March | Part III: The Part About Fate
Reading: Part III (pp. 229–353)
Guests: Rachel Nolan, Vinson Cunningham
Description: Following Oscar Fate, an African-American journalist dispatched from Harlem to Sonora to cover a prizefight, Part III charts the penetration of the American empire into the border zone. We examine the nexus of racial capitalism, athletic spectacle and sensationalist journalism, analysing how the metropolitan gaze processes foreign atrocities while turning violence into consumable narrative.

Session 4: 4 April | Part IV: The Part About the Crimes
Reading: Part IV (pp. 355–633)
Guests: Natalia Mendoza, Rachel Kushner, Francisco Goldman
Description: The centre of the work lies in its unrelenting register of the mass femicides in Santa Teresa. Employing the analytical tools of necropolitics and ”gore capitalism”, while registering the economic transformations wrought by NAFTA, this session confronts Bolaño’s cool, austere prose. We consider how narrative form can register systemic slaughter without succumbing to voyeurism or spectacle.

Session 5: 2 May | Part V: The Part About Archimboldi & The Legacy of 2666
Text: Part V (pp. 635–893)
Guests: Pankaj Mishra, Julia Kornberg, Karl Ove Knausgård
Description: The final session addresses Part V, tracing the trajectory of Hans Reiter from the Eastern Front of World War II to his literary metamorphosis into the writer Archimboldi. We will trace the historical continuum linking twentieth-century European totalitarianism to the late-capitalist barbarism of Latin America, evaluating Bolaño’s ultimate bequest: whether aesthetics retains any power at the end of history, or merely registers the descent into the abyss.

SIGN UP FOR THE READING GROUP: 2666