The Part about the Global North

This chapter examines how Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño&s;s novel 2666 tells the story of the femicides in Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.–Mexico border without exceptionalising Latin American violence. While the commodification of Mexican violence is commonplace, 2666 actively subverts Northern readers’ expectations of, and foregrounds their desire for, such violence. It diverges from other attempts to represent and make sense of the femicides by journalists such as Sergio González Rodríguez, who inspired Bolaño to write the novel, filmmakers, crime writers, and others by refusing to establish a culprit or culprits and raising more questions than answers about the nature of such violence. This chapter discusses how the first and third parts of the five-part novel, “The Part about the Critics” and “The Part about Fate,” establish a libidinal economy that prioritises objective violence (primarily, against women) in the North before revealing connections between these international libidinal investments and the femicides in the fourth part of the novel, “The Part about the Crimes.” By revealing desire as the non-historical or noncontextualisable within the femicides, Bolaño does not give way on the issue of responsibility, collapsing the distance between us, his characters, and the killer or killers.