Salzburg matters in 2666 as more than a conference destination: it is where the four scholars reunite, celebrate the prospect of Benno von Archimboldi’s Nobel candidacy, and suspend their professional rivalries, even as the author’s absence and the characters’ private unease persist. The city’s public culture—its symposium, music, and celebrated attractions—sits beside hotel rooms, private conversations, and a nightmare in which a familiar pool becomes immeasurably vast.

The 1996 symposium

The four scholars meet again in Salzburg at a symposium on contemporary German literature in 1996. Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza seem happy to be there, while Liz Norton is markedly indifferent to the city’s cultural attractions. Piero Morini arrives burdened with books and papers to grade, as though the meeting has coincided with an especially demanding stretch of work. Their different states of mind establish Salzburg not as a uniform intellectual haven, but as a shared setting inhabited in four distinct ways.

All four stay in the same hotel, but on separate floors: Morini and Norton occupy rooms 305 and 311 on the third floor; Espinoza is in room 509 on the fifth; Pelletier is in room 602 on the sixth. The hotel is crowded with a German orchestra and a Russian choir, whose music and humming seem to fill its corridors and stairways. Espinoza and Pelletier are unbothered, and Morini appears not to notice. Norton, by contrast, cites the musical hubbub as one of several reasons she dislikes Salzburg. The hotel’s shared spaces bring the party together while its numbered rooms preserve their separation.

Archimboldi’s candidacy and a truce

The news that Archimboldi is a candidate for the Nobel Prize spreads through the symposium and its small gatherings. The news prompts celebration among his admirers and, at a beer hall, a reconciliation between the principal factions of Archimboldi scholars. Pelletier and Espinoza make peace with Borchmeyer, Pohl, and Schwarz; they agree to respect one another’s interpretive differences, cooperate, and stop sabotaging one another’s publications. In practical terms, Pelletier will no longer block Schwarz’s essays in journals where he has influence, and Schwarz will no longer veto Pelletier’s studies in the journals where Schwarz is esteemed.

Morini is less swept up in the excitement. He points out that Archimboldi has not, as far as he knows, received an important German prize—not a booksellers’, critics’, readers’, publishers’, or even honorary award. Since the Nobel candidacy brings no corresponding recognition at home, the united scholars become more determined rather than discouraged. The episode makes Salzburg a temporary center of collective advocacy: a literary honor that has not yet been won nonetheless changes the critics’ relations and renews their efforts on the writer’s behalf.

The city and competing accounts

Salzburg also frames the scholars’ discussion of an account by the Swabian cultural promoter. The article revisits Archimboldi’s visit to a Frisian town and dinner with a woman who had traveled to Buenos Aires. It adds a sardonic exchange about Archimboldi’s origins and name: he identifies himself as Prussian, while the woman tests the name Benno von Archimboldi against her familiarity with Prussian nobility. He tells her that what he knew of Prussia was its forests and describes his name as French, of Huguenot origin. The article presents the woman as a long-widowed figure who remains at ease among local fishermen and peasants, and as someone who rides on the dunes or walks roads exposed to the North Sea wind.

Over breakfast in Salzburg, the four scholars disagree over how to read the article. Pelletier and Espinoza suspect that the Swabian had been the woman’s lover when Archimboldi visited. Norton considers the possibility that the Swabian’s account changed with his mood and audience, and that he may no longer remember precisely what was said or what happened. Morini offers a more structural interpretation: the Swabian is Archimboldi’s grotesque double, a negative image linked to him by their shared youth under Hitler, service as veterans of the Second World War, work as writers, and displacement in a ruined nation. The setting thus becomes a forum for competing readings, not a place where uncertainty about Archimboldi’s past is resolved.

Recognition, absence, and private strain

Archimboldi does not receive the Nobel that year. The narrative describes the days in Salzburg as generally pleasant and the friends’ lives as proceeding smoothly, while emphasizing that the appearance of order does not erase their separate troubles. Norton repeatedly speaks of her ex-husband as a threatening and violent figure, though he never appears in the events described. Pelletier interprets her repeated grievances as a punishment she inflicts on herself for having loved and married him; the narration explicitly says that Pelletier is wrong. Salzburg’s orderly scholarly setting therefore contains both a failed expectation of public recognition and a private situation that Pelletier cannot correctly understand.

Near the end of 1996, Morini has a nightmare that recasts the familiar hotel-like setting as a place of disappearance. Norton dives into a pool while Pelletier and Espinoza play cards with their backs to the water. As the other people leave through doors connecting the outdoor area, bar, and rooms, Morini sees Pelletier apparently winning and realizes that he himself has no playable cards. He moves his wheelchair toward the pool’s edge; only then does its scale become apparent, stretching, in his estimate, at least a thousand feet across and more than two miles in length. The water is dark and marked in places by oily patches, and Norton is nowhere to be seen. Morini calls her name. The dream does not change Salzburg’s geography, but it gives the novel’s recurring hotel spaces an unsettling second life, turning social proximity into isolation and an apparently ordinary pool into an immense, empty expanse.

Narrative significance

Across these episodes, Salzburg links the professional and the personal without resolving either. The symposium permits the critics to unite around Archimboldi, but he remains absent and loses the prize; the Swabian’s printed recollection generates interpretations rather than certainty; and the companions’ apparent calm coexists with Norton’s distress and Morini’s nightmare. The city’s hotels and conference gatherings provide the recurring architecture for encounters, separations, and acts of interpretation. Salzburg is consequently a temporary meeting point in the scholars’ European lives, where recognition is anticipated but withheld and where shared intellectual purpose cannot guarantee a shared understanding.