I am reading the late Roberto Bolaño's massive novel 2666, on the recommendation of everyone in the book world, possibly even galaxy-wide (there's a faint voice from Mars saying "and you'll love the tribute to the women of Juárez!").

I haven't been so thrilled by a work of art since Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album, or since I saw my first Martin Parr photograph and realized that something huge was coming at me that would knock my world view slightly off-kilter forever.

I am urging everyone I know to read 2666. If it doesn't seize you now, let it simmer on your shelves for another decade. In 2019, you'll say, "That Heather sure was a leading indicator."

Accurately or not, we think we are living through an apocalypse. Daily, we contemplate climate change, economic collapse, war, hysterical politics and of course the dread fear of losing our jobs, never to find another. I can't believe that news story, we think.

Then along comes Bolaño, the artist utterly fitted to this era. It's the same sensation people must have had when the Impressionists appeared and everyone said, "My, don't they paint badly. And yet so well."

Headlong good

It is difficult to summarize Bolaño's work. And this may not be his greatest piece — I have now ordered everything else he wrote before his tragic death in 2004, at 50, and I should delay the column till I've read them all but I don't want to.

Bolaño writes the way we don't. Headlong. Canadians don't do headlong; our forte is mute distress.

Great writers, especially in the Anglo world, are almost excessively educated in literature, so anxious about influence, so timidly venturing out to try to demolish the world with glory. All that nonsense about the great American novel is what stops the great American novel from being written.

Bolaño doesn't waste his time seeking mastery over the page. He writes without self-consciousness like a force of nature.

On his deathbed, Bolaño intended the 900-page 2666 to be five novels, but his executors disagreed, realizing that combining the sections — which are more or less unrelated beyond a basic link to the fictional Mexican city of Santa Teresa (real-life Juárez) — was the only way to unleash his full genius.

False neutrality

Of the many who have tried, Minh Tran Huy, writing in a Paris literary magazine, summed up 2666 the best: "Bolaño borrows from vaudeville and the campus novel, from noir and pulp, from science fiction, from the Bildungsroman, from war novels; the tone of his writing oscillates between humour and total darkness, between the simplicity of a fairytale and the false neutrality of a police report."

The plot involves four European professors hunting down a reclusive literary genius, a black New York reporter drawn to Mexico, a professor patiently losing his mind and a police detective disastrously in love; each gets his own moment.

All find themselves in the city of Santa Teresa, where the bodies of hundreds of women, raped, tortured, sometimes cut into pieces, have turned up.

These crimes actually happened in Juárez, on the U.S.-Mexico border, where the assembly-plant maquiladoras sprang up, employing young women to produce the stuff people like us could buy cheap.

It was these women whose bodies first began to appear in the early 1990s, the motive perhaps being an economic "gynophobia," a hatred of women who are suddenly able to support themselves without the help of men.

"Almost all Mexican men are afraid of women," one character says flatly. She runs the Santa Teresa insane asylum.

Drug wars

In real life, people like Jane Fonda marched in support of the dead women, the FBI was sent in to help with the investigation, Mexican reporters and journalists like Linda Diebel of the Toronto Star risked their lives to cover the story while handwringers like me sent money.

The crimes were never conclusively solved. Section 4 of 2666, entitled "The Part About the Crimes," is almost heart-stopping to read.

Juárez is currently going through a fantastically violent drug war, in which mass beheadings play a significant role.

Bolaño was a poet as well as, among other things, a dishwasher and campground custodian who worked during the day and wrote at night. Born in Chile, he lived in Mexico and Spain, and began writing novels in the '90s to support his young family.

He may or may not have suffered under Pinochet, may or may not have been a heroin addict. But he was penniless and yet he wrote like a dream under the harshest conditions because it was what he was born to do.

Weird wisdom

Natasha Wimmer, his bold English translator, describes Bolaño's style as "extravagant metaphors, deadpan non sequiturs, heterogeneous sentences, an underlying plainness."

It is also hallucinatory, full of dreams and symbols, effortless in its endless tangents as well as disorderly, panic-making and philosophical about great art being something that both lures and repels.

Black holes are very big for Bolaño, as are Marcel Duchamp, hip hop, the hyoid bone (the one that supports the tongue), derangement, mirrors, knives, drinks and the long black hair of a hundred corpses dumped in the dust.

As the critic Adam Kirsch wrote in Slate.com, "According to Proust, one proof that we are reading a major new writer is that his writing immediately strikes us as ugly."

There is no tiresome magic realism in 2666, no dancing imps. There is no man-made beauty — Santa Teresa is an absolute hole — the only thing remotely attractive being Mexican sunsets as they sink on the human mess. There is, however, a lava flow of intensity.

News flash: Death is going to happen, later if you're lucky but perhaps sooner. Your lifespan is more like a hallucination than a reality and if you find this strangely comforting, Bolaño is your man