London

London is more than a destination in 2666: it is a city of literary discovery, shifting intimacies, and remembered violence. Its successive appearances connect Liz Norton’s early reading of Benno von Archimboldi to her later relationships with Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, and Piero Morini, while a wartime episode narrated through Mr. Bubis places the city under bombardment and in the shadow of German literary collaboration. The result is a setting where private lives and historical catastrophe repeatedly meet, without resolving into a single meaning.

Literary Discovery and the City of Reading

In 1988, when Norton was twenty, she spent three months in Berlin, where a German friend lent her a novel by an unfamiliar author. The name Benno von Archimboldi struck her as improbable: she wondered how a German writer could have an Italian surname preceded by a particle suggesting nobility. Her friend guessed that the name was a pseudonym, but the explanation did not settle the matter. Norton liked The Blind Woman, though it did not immediately send her searching for the rest of Archimboldi’s work.

Five months later, back in England, Norton received another Archimboldi novel from the same friend. She liked it, went to her college library, and found only two books by the author: The Blind Woman, which she had already read, and Bitzius. The latter changed the force of her interest. The narration renders her response through a strange, almost hallucinatory account of rain in the quadrangle: drops seem to turn around and disappear into the earth, while grass and soil appear to argue in words like crystallized spiderwebs. London is not named as the site of this discovery; rather, it belongs to the English setting of Norton’s return and her library search. The distinction matters: the city’s place in the novel is part of a wider English geography through which reading, travel, and attachment take shape.

A City of Reunions and Unsettled Affection

London becomes a more direct setting for the Archimboldi scholars’ intimate lives. After returning from Avignon at the end of 1994, Pelletier recognizes, in the privacy of his Paris apartment, that he misses Norton and wishes to be with her, not only talking but sharing a bed and declaring his love. Espinoza reaches a similar realization earlier, while still on the plane to Madrid: he thinks Norton is the woman he had always hoped to find, and the recognition makes him suffer. Their separate reactions establish how distance from Norton can intensify rather than settle their feelings.

Espinoza invites Norton to Madrid, presenting the city’s seasonal beauty and a Francis Bacon retrospective as reasons to visit. She answers that she will arrive the next day, catching him off guard because he had offered the invitation more as a wish than as a real expectation. They have a good Sunday together and sleep together that night. Espinoza’s many questions go unasked; Norton tells him that she and Pelletier are lovers, though the words she uses are ambiguous. The disclosure gives the relationship its defining uncertainty: the men are not simply competing for an unattached woman, and Norton does not reduce their arrangement to a settled label.

More than three months after a visit to Norton, Pelletier and Espinoza decide to spend a weekend in London. The narration leaves open which of them made the call; it emphasizes instead that one proposed the trip and the other agreed. They meet at the airport, take a cab to a hotel, and later go to Norton’s apartment, where they have made a dinner reservation for three. From the sidewalk, they see Norton’s silhouette in a lit window and then the silhouette of a man beside her. Espinoza carries flowers; Pelletier has brought a Jacob Epstein book wrapped in fine paper. Norton seems to be trying to explain something while the man appears to make a gesture that the two visitors read as mocking. Before they can join her, the window becomes a tableau of exclusion and jealousy. London turns an anticipated reunion into a scene viewed from outside.

Morini’s Journey and the Limits of Interpretation

Near the end of 1996, Morini dreams of Norton diving into a pool while Pelletier and Espinoza play cards with their backs to the water. The apparently ordinary hotel pool expands into a vast, dark body of water, at least a thousand feet across and more than two miles long, with oily patches like those in a harbor. The other people gradually disappear; the two men remain absorbed in their game, and neither asks where Morini is going when he wheels himself toward the edge. Norton is nowhere to be seen. In the dream she eventually tells him, in German, that there is no turning back, then walks away into a red-lit forest and disappears. Morini tries to reinterpret the ominous sentence as evidence of telepathy rather than evil, even as he senses that the dream’s course is fixed.

A week later, after interpreting the dream in at least four different ways, Morini travels to London. The journey breaks with his routine: he usually travels for conferences or meetings, with expenses paid by the organizing institution, but this time he pays for the hotel and transportation himself and has no professional pretext. Nor is the trip a response to an appeal from Norton. He has spoken with her and told her he plans to come. She is delighted and invites him to stay at her home, but he falsely says he has already booked a hotel. Their meeting is therefore shaped by both closeness and reservation from the start.

Norton waits for Morini at Gatwick. They have breakfast near his hotel and dinner at her apartment; their conversation begins with Archimboldi, his growing reputation, and the many gaps in what is known about him, then turns personal. They talk until three in the morning, when they call a cab and Norton helps Morini into the building’s old elevator and down six steps. The day between their meals, however, is spent apart. Morini first stays in his room, then goes to Hyde Park and wanders without noticing the people around him. His wheelchair attracts curious looks because he moves with unusual determination and at a steady pace. The city offers him room to travel, but that access is not universal: he later praises London’s accommodation for disabled people in contrast with Turin, which he describes as full of obstacles for wheelchairs.

When the account of Morini’s London stay returns later, Norton says he spent the first two days alone without calling her. She imagines him shut in his hotel room, reading and staring through open drapes at the drab backs of buildings, while Morini’s own account describes solitary wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods, secondhand bookshops, and visits to Sherlock Holmes’s house on Baker Street. He calls the street timeless, lovingly preserved in Dr. Watson’s tales, then corrects the word to immaculately. Norton eventually meets him in the hotel lobby, where he waits in his wheelchair with a package on his lap, and takes him to a Brazilian vegetarian restaurant in Notting Hill. At her home, he gives her a book on Brunelleschi, illustrated with photographs of buildings by the Renaissance architect. The gift, the delayed calls, and the differing images of his solitary days leave their intimacy open to interpretation rather than converting it into a simple declaration.

London as a Contested Social Space

Norton’s London is also a place where she reflects on the dangers facing women who live on the streets. After leaving Santa Teresa, she wakes at home in England disoriented for only a moment, recognizes familiar street noises, and thinks that everything is over. Instead, she begins to cry and spends the day overwhelmed, sometimes wishing she had stayed in Santa Teresa and sometimes feeling an urge to return to Mexico. The impulses become more destructive: she thinks of setting fire to her apartment, cutting her wrists, abandoning the university, and living on the streets.

She recalls reading an article about street women in England who are gang-raped, beaten, and sometimes found dead outside hospitals. What disturbs her is that the perpetrators are not, as she had once expected, the police or neo-Nazi gangs, but other people living on the streets. That recognition unsettles any simple division between vulnerable victims and outside aggressors. While confused and hoping to cheer herself up, Norton goes out and unexpectedly finds herself at a gallery retrospective of Edwin Johns, the artist who cut off his right hand to display it in a self-portrait. The route from thoughts of street violence to the exhibition makes the city a space where reading, public art, and personal distress converge, without suggesting that one explains or cures the others.

The Wartime City and Its Afterlife

A separate London belongs to the past recounted in Mr. Bubis’s letter. Before 1933, he says, he published promising young German writers. In 1940, alone in a London hotel, he tried to calculate how many of those writers had joined the Nazi Party or the SS, written for antisemitic newspapers, or built careers in the Nazi bureaucracy. The result nearly drove him to suicide. Instead, he struck himself, cursed himself, and opened the window as he struggled to breathe. Outside, the bombing of London became a nocturnal spectacle: bombs fell near the river, spotlights crossed the sky, and occasional flashes above the barrage balloons suggested that a German aircraft might have been hit.

As the bombs grew louder, a young Irish bellhop came to Bubis’s room and advised him to close the shutters. Bubis opened the window again after the bellhop left and watched fires on the docks. He wept for what he thought had been a life lost and then saved by a hair. The episode makes London both a physical city under attack and the setting of Bubis’s reckoning with his own publishing history: the threatened life and the moral accounting occupy the same hotel room, but neither cancels the other.

The city’s postwar history continues through Bubis’s return to Hamburg in September 1945, which re-enters the narrative through memories of exile and loss. Mrs. Marianne Gottlieb, his most faithful former employee, had been living in dire poverty; Bubis, who had lost his wife, brought her to live with him. Her recovery is gradual. One morning she recognizes her old employer but says nothing; that evening, after Bubis returns from city hall, he finds supper prepared. Their happy reunion ends in tears as they speak of his exile and the death of Mrs. Bubis, whose grave is lonely in a London Jewish cemetery. London thus persists in the story even when the action has moved elsewhere: it holds the grave of the publisher’s wife, while the living survivors rebuild a life amid the ruins of postwar Germany.