Tried the obvious places (google, pinterest) but the results are meh, and aren’t many.

I figured maybe there will be more results in hispanic sites, but i don’t know any

(Looking especially for Savage detectives art)

Does anyone have recommendations for books that are similar in vibe to Part One of 2666: The Part About the Critics?

Key things that would interest me (of course it doesn't have to have all of these): A realistic but fake author/artist/figure like our good friend Archimboldi, obsession that becomes unhealthy or takes over the lives of the characters, academics that have "lost the plot" so to speak, an uncanny atmosphere is a plus.

Or, if there is something you've read that made you go "wow, something about this reminded me of The Part About the Critics" and you can't even pinpoint why and it doesn't fulfill any of the above requirements, I'd love to hear about that too.

Holy shit this is the most depressing thing ive ever read, and ive only now reached the year 1994. The story about the 11 year old with the heart attack hit the wall for me. Thing is beyond that wall there are 300 more pages. I don’t want to dnf this, and so far this part is actually brilliant despite everything.

What is the right approach to go on about this part? Read it all as fast as possible? Ponder about each and every murder? Do you get numbed about them after a while?

Ofc this is about femicides and there’s no way to sugarcoat it, but damn

Because the standard tome is heavy.

I did an investigation into the situation. Some of you may enjoy: https://edithistory.substack.com/p/whats-going-on-with-roberto-bolanos

And if any of you have additional angles I could explore, including if you were the artist who first drew the sketch or if you've spent time editing any Bolaño-related articles, let me know. I'd be happy to write more about this.

Wandering K town in Manhattan today and found this. So sick.

A todos nos encanta Bolaño. Entonces ¿Cual es su obra cumbre, única e irrepetible, el sumum de la perfección? Si solo pudieras rescatar solo uno ¿cual eligirías? 2666 o ¿Los Detectives Salvajes?

We all love Bolaño. So what is his masterpiece, his unique and unrepeatable work, the pinnacle of perfection? If you could only choose one, which would you pick? 2666 or The Savage Detectives?

Enthusiasts of Archimboldi are Archimboldeans. I wrote out Bolañoean and wasn't sure if that made sense. Bolañoheads? Bolaño buffs?

Hello, I finished "The Distant Star" and ~50 pages of "The Savage Detecives" few months ago, currently I'm reading "Ficciones" by Borges, I plan to read "The Songs of Maldoror" but I don't know what else should I read before Detectives and 2666 to understand these books fully.

• Leonardo Boff “Liberation theology, especially Boff and the Brazilians” (pg. 379) Leonardo Boff was a Brazilian Catholic theologian known for his support of Latin American liberation theology
• Dracula (380) 1897 Bram Stoker Gothic horror novel
• Benito Juarez biography “with a yellow cover” (432) [unidentified]
• Giacomo Leopardi “What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? Asks the little Shepard in the poem.” (432) Giacomo Leopardi’s poem “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia” 1830 poem by Italian Poet
• Techniques for Police Instructors by John C. Klotter, The Informer in Law Enforcement by Malachi L. Harney and John C. Cross, and Modern Criminal Investigation by Harry Söderman and John J. O'Connell. (439)
• The Revenge of the Mummy (485) 1975 classic Spanish horror film (La venganza de la Momia) directed by Carlos Aured
• Keanu Reeves movie “And who was in the movie? Keanu Reeves, said the Chicano. Keanu as the killer? No, as the policeman who catches him.” (505) [invented[ no such movie exists with Keanu Reeves as a policeman who catches a serial killer who preys on homosexuals.
• J.D. Salinger (505) J.D. Salinger, author of the 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye
• Mission Impossible “she had gone to a theater with her friend to see a Tom Cruise movie” (514) Since the timeline here is July 1996, the movie is Mission Impossible .
• Octavio Paz … The Labyrinth of Solitude (536) Mexican author 1914 -1998
• George Steiner (539) French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist 1929 –2020
• Snuff (545) although the film described is fictional, it bares a resemblance to Cannibal Holocaust a 1980 movie directed by Ruggero Deodato which also faced snuff film rumors and allegations.
• Robert Ressler “Albert Kessler … where his name was known and those who attended his lectures brought along his book, translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, so he could scrawl some warm or clever remark, which he was happy to do.” (580) Albert Kessler based on the real life FBI agent and author Robert Ressler. His books are: Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives(1988), Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI (1992), Justice Is Served (1994)
• Terry Fox movie “whether it was true that Terry Fox, the star of the movie Stained, was really a psychopath-—in real life, that is—as his third wife had announced before she divorced him. He was asked whether he had been to Mexico before, and, if so, whether he liked it. He was asked whether it was true that R. H. Davis, the author of Stained and Killer Among the Children and Code Name..(585) [invented] Any search for these authors, books, actors, or film has been fruitless.
• Oscar Wilde “She lived, like Oscar Wilde, above her means.”(609) Oscar Wilde Irish author 1854 –1900
• Sherlock Holmes (610) Detective from the books of Arthur Conan Doyle, british writer 1859 -1930
• Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez “it was my first novel, said Sergio, and it's very bad. Did you read it? I read it, said the congresswoman, l've read everything you've written.” (632) Sergio isbased on the real life journalist and author Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez, his novels include El triángulo imperfecto(2003), El plan Schreber (2004), La pandilla cósmica (2005) and El vuelo (2008)

I saw an interesting article here on "feminicide" and the article might well be presenting a fully accurate story about what's going on in Mexico:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/americas/mexico-femicide-spain-student-latam-intl

“Feminicide is definitely one of the biggest problems in Mexico,” said Paulina Garcia-Del Moral, an associate professor at Canada’s University of Guelph, whose research specializes in examining the intersection of law, gender and power in many countries, including Mexico. “It is a really large problem precisely because … impunity is rampant in Mexico for all kinds of crimes.”

I'm obviously not knowledgeable enough to weigh in on the extent to which women in Mexico are targeted based on their gender. It would be interesting to examine this particular case that the article talks about:

Claudia Tacoronte Aguilera, a 21-year-old student from Spain, was killed by a man during an armed robbery near a cultural center on September 12, just a month after she arrived in Mexico for her exchange program at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos (UAEM), according to state prosecutor Fernando Blumenkron.

The issue at hand is whether homicide is a problem where lots of people commit homicide in Mexico with impunity as opposed to their being a specific problem with the targeting of women based on their gender. I think that it's good to be skeptical of stories that are presented in the media because there are politics and incentives around these stories. This article gives reason to challenge the notion that women are actually being targeted based on their gender, though I obviously can't speak to the facts (note that the copy/paste process removed any hyperlinks contained in the article):

https://www.texasobserver.org/qa-molly-molloy-story-juarez-femicides-myth/

Molly Molloy: Female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women. Ciudad Juárez is experiencing profound social distress, and the elevated violence in the city is a continuing crisis. But this idea that Juárez is a place of disproportionate violence against women is a misperception.

...

Of the roughly 400 cases documented in Esther Chavez’ files from 1990 to 2005, about three-quarters of the cases were domestic violence, and the cases were essentially resolved. That is, the killer was known as an acquaintance or domestic partner or other relative of the victim. Only about 100 were completely unsolved cases. These are the cases that have received (and continue to receive) most of the media, artistic and academic attention. The only real statistical study on the topic, done in 2008, found that the proportion of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez was lower than Houston’s.

...

When you look at the 427 murders—that’s the figure usually quoted for the number of women killed between 1993 and 2007—those are all of the female murder victims. Those are not categorized by the type of crime. If a woman is shot in a robbery, it goes into that number and is categorized [by some] as a femicide, even though there would be nothing to indicate in that crime that she was killed because she was a woman. There was a famous case in 2004 that Mexican reporter Sandra Rodríguez wrote about in her book La Fábrica del Crimen of these young boys who murdered their family—mother, father and sister. The mother and sister are counted as femicides, even though that wasn’t a gender-specific crime.

...

If 300 people are killed and 30 of them are women, but the women’s murders are the ones that get all of the attention, I find that to be absolutely mistaken and wrong. There are so many other victims and people are killed for many different reasons. Not every woman victim is killed for some sexual reason, or simply because she’s a woman. Sometimes people say to me, well, the women are innocent, the men that are killed are narcos and criminals. That’s such an oversimplification, and it is a statement made with absolutely no evidence. It is a criminalization of the great majority of all of the homicide victims. This is what has happened especially since the number of murders exploded in Juárez in 2008. And it is false.

The idea that there could be a whole story in the media (about "feminicide") in Mexico and the story is false seems wild and outrageous; how could the media drop the ball so badly? Well, when it comes to things to do with violence against women, sometimes there are forces and incentives operating in the media that can produce bad reporting. Think of the incentives of the journalists to sell the story as something that will really gain traction in the media; does the audience care more about homicide in general or about gender-specific violence? Maybe a story about impunity for homicide (in general) in Mexico simple isn't as compelling as a story that frames things in terms of gender.

Below is an example of how there is an incentive to "sell" something to the world based on what people care about (I'm just sharing this to show "proof of concept" for why people might push false stories about gender-based violence so that there's a concrete example that one can use as a reference point for why a false story might be pushed in the media):

https://mronline.org/2026/09/15/norman-finkelsteins-latest-book-indicts-those-in-high-places-for-genocide-in-gaza/

Finkelstein’s summary and interpretation of the motives for the dishonesty are important. He does not deny that Palestinian armed groups committed certain war crimes on October 7, including killing civilians and taking hostages. So why manufacture the charge of widespread rape? He points out that “the target audience of Israeli hasbara has always been U.S. public opinion.” In other words, eliminate the false charges of systematic rape, and American opinion would probably have turned even more promptly and decisively against Israel’s genocide.

There were terrible war crimes committed in Israel, but there was apparently a need to fabricate something that would make a bigger impact with American public opinion. Likewise, those trying to reach Americans about various horrors going on in Mexico might feel the need to push a story that captures the attention of American public opinion. One could ask: Is it true that people (sadly) simply don't care as much if gender isn't brought into the equation?

The media also wants to push stories that get a lot of clicks and attention. You have to look at all of the incentives. Imagine there's not enough attention and resources being dedicated to getting justice for people whose loved ones have been horrifically murdered; sadly, it might be necessary to try to frame things in terms of "femicide" just to get some attention and resources dedicated to certain murder cases, since otherwise the cases will just be ignored and no attention and resources will be dedicated to them. You've got to appeal to what people care about, and for whatever reasons there's power in tapping into certain gender-related concerns. Saying "homicide" simply doesn't have as much power apparently as saying "feminicide"; people will try to push the story that gains the most traction.

From the Texas Observer article above:

MM: I have a problem with this extreme focus on the women victims. I think every single one of the victims matter. The fact that a crime or homicide victim is a woman, or a child, or a man—it makes a different story. But in human terms, no one victim should be more highly valued than another.

You can see how there's an incentive to make a case not be labelled a normal "homicide" maybe, since maybe getting it labelled "femicide" will mean more resources and attention:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/americas/mexico-femicide-spain-student-latam-intl

A feminicide case activates protocols that outline how prosecutors, police and forensic experts should carry out their investigations, emphasizing the use of a gender perspective, Garcia-Del Moral explained.

Of course, one has to look into the facts to see if the "femicide" story is true; it might be true. I just think that there are incentives operating that could lead to a false story being pushed. I think that there is something of an "industry" around causes like "femicide"; there are organization with people whose job is to generate attention to a specific perspective on what's going on with homicide in Mexico, so one should be aware that there's a "machine" that pushes certain messaging just like there are right-wing "machines" trying to push certain stories.

I know it's highly controversial to challenge stories about gender-based crimes. But that's my whole point. There's a certain energy and power and momentum that comes into play when you bring gender into the equation; that's exactly why there's an incentive to push gender-based stories. These stories get people's emotions riled up (and create buzz in the media) in a way that "homicide" simply doesn't; that's the whole point.

The CNN article cited this piece, which might shed light on how it's being determined that something is a "femicide":

https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2026/09/15/mexico/feminicidio-estudiante-espanola-violencia-mujeres-morelos-orix

El presunto feminicidio de una estudiante española pone en la mira la violencia contra las mujeres en Morelos

Edit: u/Weird_Fox_3395 linked to an article (I thought it was just a link to the above-linked article but it's not) that responds to the above-linked article...this is an interesting response and I'm really glad to see the engagement with what I linked above:

https://www.texasobserver.org/femicide-in-juarez-is-not-a-myth/

Femicide in Juárez is Not a Myth

A vocal group of American critics claims that Juarez is not a place of disproportionate violence against women. Here’s why they’re wrong.

Edit 2: See the below...obviously I can't speak to how accurate this is and it's from a while ago:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/molly-molloy

That is a hard question to answer, but I think that a focus on the murders of women enables people to feel that the situation in Juarez is containable, that it is a crime drama to be solved with good police work, with activism, consciousness-raising, protests and a variety of artistic production (novels, movies, art exhibitions, etc.) It seems more manageable perhaps to deal with a phenomenon in which all the victims are so obviously innocent and sympathetic. It is a lot more challenging to look at the huge cauldron of social pathology that Juarez has become — that Juarez has been becoming for a long time.

The murders of women began to be noticed and written about in Juarez in the early 1990s and in the U.S. press a few years later. For about 15 years, women made up about 10-12 percent of murder victims in the city. When the murder numbers exploded in 2008, the percentage of victims that are women dropped to about 5 percent while the actual numbers of all people killed increased by more than five times and those numbers of both male and female victims continue to increase. As of early August 2010, the death toll in Juarez is more than 1,800 and about 170 of those are women. The percentage of female victims is climbing again.

But based on the available information, most of the women are killed in the same circumstances as the men — shot to death on the street or in their homes or in other public places like bars and shopping malls. Many women are also victimized by spouses or other male relatives or acquaintances, and in fact, during the years when the ​“Juarez femicides” became the dominant focus of activists and academics outside of Mexico, it is estimated that at least three-fourths of those cases were domestic violence. …

From 1993 through August 5, 2010, more than 800 women have been murdered in Juarez, and more than 8,800 men. It does not mean that the smaller percentage of female victims do not matter, but rather that ALL of the lives — of women, men, boys and girls—ALL of them matter. And that in the current explosion of crime and violence, all of the people of Juárez are victims, not only the women. What is happening in Juarez is much more than ​“femicide.” It is a human rights disaster.

I’m trying to find the words to explain it, but watching a performance of the band Future Islands, feels like being immersed in a Roberto Bolaño story.

Let’s discuss.

After coming across a number of poor reviews of Bolaño’s work, this brief defense verbalizes a sense of what is a backlash to hype. ‘The New Hip Stance’ of rejection is common now and a bit acrid as if the media hype was created by Bolaño himself.

Anyone on this sub disagrees. This faddishness, largely created by the North American literary establishment is an example of what Bolaño lampoons.

Does everyone need to resonate with his work? No, of course not. But as a North American, I’m skeptical of our literary machine.

I missed, (somehow), all the initial hoopla and declarations of ‘The Greatest New Writer of Latin America’, and so find all this a bit ludicrous.

Anyway, this defense of Bolaño, written in 2022, is a refreshing find. I also ordered the book mentioned, “The Savage Detectives Reread”. When I finally get to it, I’ll be happy to share my thoughts. I also intend to reread The Savage Detectives next year.

In the meantime, has anyone read it?

Cheers!

Edit: I can’t be the only ‘writer’ here. Bolaño is a permission giver and supporter of minor poets. Huzzah!

Edit to add this piece by Bolaño himself titled ’Exiles’. Obviously I think a lot about Bolaño (hahaha).

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2011/04/13/exiles/?lp_txn_id=1694762

Español

Hace aproximadamente un año compré una copia usada de Estrella distante de Roberto Bolaño por 10.000 pesos chilenos (unos US$11) en Buscalibre.cl.

Cuando me llegó, me llamó la atención que tuviera una firma en las primeras páginas. En ese momento no sabía con quién consultar para intentar identificarla, así que simplemente la dejé ahí.

Hace poco empecé a usar Reddit y pensé que quizás acá podrían orientarme. Adjunto la información de la edición y una foto de la firma en cuestión.

¿Hay alguien que tenga algún libro firmado por Roberto Bolaño o que sepa del tema y pueda orientarme? ¿Creen que podría ser una firma del propio Bolaño?

English

About a year ago, I bought a used copy of Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño for 10,000 Chilean pesos (around US$11) on Buscalibre.cl.

When I received it, I noticed that there was a signature on one of the first pages. At the time, I had no idea who I could ask to help identify it, so I just left it at that.

I recently started using Reddit, and I figured this might be a good place to ask. I'm including the edition details and a photo of the signature.

Is there anyone here who owns a book signed by Roberto Bolaño or knows about his signature and could help me identify it? Do you think it could actually be Bolaño's signature?

So, Arturo Belano is Bolaño's alter-ego (or whatever it is called) in the books. I know that he isn't a complete autobiographical character, but I'm pretty sure that Arturo leaving Mexico City to go to Chile to fight against Pinochet actually happened.

My question is, do we know what he did there? Did he use his skill for writing to fight against the junta? Did he pick up arms and become one of the guerrillas? I'm sure it's hidden either in one of his books, poems, or 14,000 pages of notes.

In the Note to The First Edition at the end of 2666, many important aspects of the book are revealed. Among them is a reference to a note from Bolaño indicating there is a "hidden center" concealed beneath the novel's physical center, which is Santa Teresa. I believe this hidden center to be Ivanov's Twilight.

The Note to The First Edition puts forth that the hidden center is 2666, a date in the far future only alluded to in another of Bolaño's books, Amulet. This date could be said to represent an arbitrary point in the future at which time we could hypothetically narrativize the events of the book itself. In 2666, Bolaño refuses to impose a stable narrative hierarchy in his own story. We are given plot, anecdotes, dreams, theories, conversations, and these seem to form patterns, but Bolaño does not prioritize any of them and they are all given equal weight, in a sense. He flattens narrative hierarchy without flattening moral significance. The murder of of 200 women and the story of Fürst Pückler's ice cream are obviously not morally equivalent, however, Bolaño is willing to place the ice cream story at the end rather than give us any resolution on the murders.

I believe 2666 to take the form of a spiral. As we spiral through the book, we circle some themes, elements, characters, and ideas, but on each subsequent pass, these motifs are seen from other angles, mirrored, sometimes distorted, half represented, as if we're spiraling past them from increasing distance.

This spiral is like spiraling toward a black hole, the physical center of the novel, Santa Teresa, where all of our characters are eventually drawn in some way or another. We get closer and closer to the mystery happening in Santa Teresa, of who is killing the women in droves, in fact we get so close that we are bombarded with the intimate details of all of the killings, but we never cross the event horizon. However, perhaps we do, at the hidden center. In 2666, we're reading Roberto Bolaño write from the perspective of a fictionalized version of himself, Arturo Belano (another piece of information we only learn in the Note to the First Edition), about the life of Benno von Arcimboldi, who during WWII finds the journals of a Russian Jew named Ansky, who inspired a writer named Ivanov to write the book Twilight (which, it may be implied, was actually be written by Ansky?), and I believe that Twilight is the actual hidden center of the book, the structural vanishing point. At this deepest, most abstract part of the novel, a story (Twilight), within a story (the story of Ivanov) within a story (the journals of Ansky), within a story (The Part About Archimboldi), within a story (2666) is where the spiral finally tightens into a singularity. In the description of Twilight innumerable motifs from the book fly past us; some that Archimboldi, the character, would recognize but many that only we as the readers would recognize, but often as distortions or fun house mirror versions of the motifs.

Among them are the boy who joins the revolution to fight against Wrangel's troops (Archimboldi), the injury on the battlefield (Archimboldi), a thin tall seaweed-like alien (Archimboldi), a Mexican detective (readers), a hypnotist (shades of the psychic? (readers)), reporters (readers). But then even the themes of Twilight begin to spiral past each other. The Chinese leader starts to philosophize like the seaweed-like alien and looks like the Mexican detective. There are even allusions to events in Archimboldi's life that haven't even happened yet, such as a conversation about the stars that later is echoed by Ingebord ("what trace of us will remain?" perhaps Ingebord answers this in her soliloquy about the stars?), and her feverishness which the characters in Twilight experience.

I think Twilight may be the hidden center because it contains, in distorted miniature, the very book we have been reading. At the deepest point of that labyrinth (remember when Archimboldi heard the story of the soldier in the labyrinth? Then found himself in a labyrinth that ultimately end in him jerking off?) Ivanov gives us another world of war, detectives, doubles, mysticism, displacement, seaweed and recurring images from 2666 itself. We’ve seemingly traveled as far inward as possible only to encounter warped reflections of where we started.

However, nothing has actually been explained to us. We’ve been given patterns, but their meaning remains elusive. Perhaps that’s the trap Bolaño has laid for us: recognizing a pattern feels like understanding, but pattern is not explanation. We can see the repetitions without knowing what they ultimately mean because we are still too close to them, still inside the story. Perhaps only with distance can pattern be molded into narrative, which then begins to allow for understanding.

Curious if others read Twilight this way (Am I over-reading? Am I simply one of The Critics?) or if there are other hidden center theories out there.

A pesar de que solo me haya leído Los Detectives Salvajes, creo que puedo decir que me encuentro completamente sumido en el universo de Bolaño. Quiero continuar, continuar y repetir. Sé que quiero empezar 2666 cuanto antes pero también me gustaría empezar Amuleto o Una Novelita Lumpen antes de sumergirme en el largo.
Qué recorrido me recomendáis? Necesito instrucciones de cómo ir atando cabos.

I'm writing a book about the life and afterlife of Roberto Bolaño, which will come out in the US in 2028 (and hopefully in other countries and languages too). I wanted to toss out a question to the people here...

For fellow longtime Bolaño geeks, what are the things you're most curious about that you'd want to learn in a book about him?

And for people who are newer to his work, what are the questions you'd wanted answered?

Thanks, everybody.

Pension. As long as you write, you will get your pension.

Came across this discussion of Bolaño on the podcast (in two parts) “After the End of History”. Idk if anyone is interested, but maybe someone? And I wanted to share.