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It would be a shame not to acknowledge the proximity, and namesake likeness, between Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and our magazine’s hometown of Tucson, Arizona. The novel, just published FSG, is set in the fictional Mexican town of Saint Teresa, in the state of Sonora (get it? Sonora Review?), which borders our humble little state. Throughout the novel, writers and professors are flying into Tucson before driving down to investigate either a boxing match, a slew of murders, or the mysterious life of a forgotten German author. Nogales, a border town ninety minutes from South Tucson, is a short drive from Saint Teresa, which is itself a city based on Juárez, Mexico, where hundreds of murders have taken place in the past decade. It’s impossible, when reading the book while sitting in Tucson, not to feel the actual heat and filth that Bolaño describes emanating from the Sonoran desert. The book condemns the entire world, while also revelling in its mystery, but living in the same desert he describes makes it hard not to feel extra-condemned. Which I’m okay with: Bolaño writes beautifully, and powerfully, and the frightening passages of his book–the frightening third of the book–genuinely terrifies me, a borderland desert dweller. For being a writer from Chile who later moved to Mexico, Bolaño certainly understood his surroundings, esp. the desert sunsets, which he describes as being impossible until they happen in front of you.
