Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño owes much of his current literary celebrity to the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, 2666. The novel comprises five parts, which ultimately coalesce to create a harrowing portrait of violence against women in a Mexican border town. As this grisly scene unfolds, Bolaño implicates the novel's characters—and, more broadly, the reader—in a crime equally disturbing: inaction, indifference, and thus complicity. However, Bolaño offers artistic solutions to the bleakness of the modern condition: reading and writing. In creating this utterly sui generis novel—and violating established literary norms in the process—Bolaño thus enacts the very solution that he offers to the problems of modernity, a time in which "poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated."