2666: A Novel
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM ?ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS? (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño?s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa?a fictional Juárez?on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: It was one thing to read Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives last year and have your mind thrilled and expanded by a sexy, meandering masterpiece born whole into the English language. It was still another to read it and know, from the advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bolaño's true masterpiece was still to come. And here it is: 2666, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bolaño's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread. But where the motion of The Savage Detectives is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, 2666, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of maquiladoras and la migra in northern Mexico. He takes his time getting there--he tells three often charming book-length tales before arriving at the murders--but when he does, in a brutal and quietly strange landscape where neither David Lynch nor Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh would feel out of place, he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane. --Tom Nissley
2666: A Novel Accessories
 The Savage Detectives: A Novel
A Mercy
Netherland: A Novel
The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Unaccustomed Earth
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
The Forever War
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2666: A Novel Reviews
Clearly without equal, the late Robeto Bolano, has made concrete dreams and razor edged light seem commonplace. Pervasive, funny and savage all at the same instant This work, by one of a handful of brilliant writers, spans the whole of the imagination.
Really, the scope of this book is large and hard to decribe but the reason I would suggest it is that it is completely fascinating. He writes in short, vivid scenes. Reading this book has the effect of driving up on a bad car accident where bodies are strewn in the road: you keep looking whether you mean to or not.
Scenes where something could go wrong, someone could get hurt, the character is scared or lost. Another thing that I love about Bolano's writing is that he does not give you the option of becoming bored. Bolano's characters are spellbinding, odd and they hold your attention so well it's almost hypnotic.
The reviews just left me curious. Everything makes you want to stay. I bought this book because most of the reviews were interesting but ambiguous.
If you pick this up it will speak to you no matter who you are and you may have trouble putting it down.
lol. Perhaps one who likes to be intellectually stimulated but has yet to find their own counterpart to fit that role. You need to be open minded, I want to say intellectual but I suppose I here am the exception as I cannot think of the word and hardly am calling those who dislike it dumb. An academia of sorts. did that make sense. WOW. but in a sort of Chuck Palahniuk but not quick as raunchy way. I agree that this is absolutely not for all.
Counterintuitively enough, that is a good thing. After reading this work, I am left with more questions than when I began. Perhaps Bolano's own words best describes this work:. While this work by no means exhibits perfection, it spurs us on, coaxing us through its multitudes, to excavate and face our own questions, whatever those may be.
On a lighter note, the obscure literary, philosophical, and historical references make for interesting detective work as the novel is read.
Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.".
They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters.
"Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.
The words painted across this ambitious masterpiece are unmistakably those of a dying man.
Weaving five disparate narratives that brush, grate, and engage in shadow play with each other around the still turning point of this work- Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juarez), Mexico- Bolano has undoubtedly attempted to impart upon the reader those feelings most essential to Death and Man's existence within a Universe dictated by Nature, Chance, and Uncertainty.
This is not a work to be missed and these sort are few and far between.
Bolano's final, colossal work is just that.
Bolano's novels are as much about writing per se as the poems of Wallace Stevens are about the art of poetry. Suppose you were lucky enough to be alive in Paris when Joyce's "Ulysses" first appeared or when Proust's Marcel arrived; wouldn't you feel blessed and lucky and amazed. Part 1 is an extended set piece on academic life, the pretensions of critics, and the mysterious explication of a writer's life and the meaning of his work. It is only through the compression of reading the entire 893 pages in one sitting that one can detect the correspondences between the different sections and note the transformation in the writer's strategy from the omniscience of Proust to the dogged Thomas Mann of "The Magic Mountain". Both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" are set up as a type of detective fiction because life and creativity are fundamental mysteries; that the novels end somewhat inconclusively is consistent with the profound difficulties of such mysteries. To my taste, Section II, concerning the removal of one of Archimboldi's critics from Spain to Mexico, is the weakest part of "2666", though the writing, as always, is detailed and poetic in the best sense of the term.
Unfortunately, Bolano is not alive to share in your excitement but in his great novel, "2666" he clearly anticipated the posthumous career of a creator who can reveal himself only through his creations. In section V, The Part About Archimboldi, the novel's locus moves from Mexico and North America to Germany and time steadily speeds up from the Second World War to the present, exactly the time-lapse strategy of The Magic Mountain's final pages. His heirs decided to print the five novels as a unified whole, a decidedly wise decision.
The latter novel, only recently detonated in the English-speaking world, is the author's masterpiece, a great baggy word-intoxicated book with all of the ambition, and some of the mechanics, of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past". Like Proust's great work, Bolano's books are arriving posthumously, year after year, volume after volume. In section III, The Part About Fate, Bolano brings a black reporter from Detroit to Santa Teresa, the town where the murders are occurring, and stretches his canvas to cover all nationalities and ethnicities. The drum beat of rapes and murders in Part IV, each of which carries the plot outline for an entire novel by a lesser writer, creates an inexorable tension, one that is relieved by the more conventional narrative flow of Part V. It is the most humorous part of the book and tenderly sexual in a way that the rest of the novel is not.
This is simply another way of saying that although Bolano stopped writing poetry in order to feed his family from his fiction, "2666" reads like an extended poem. When the mysterious writer of Part I is uncovered in Part V standing beneath a sky lit by stars burnt out long ago, he and his girlfriend are described returning to a village "while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads." In this encyclopedic novel, you will feel that way too, alone and connected to everything. Section V solves the identity of the writer chased by the critics in Part I and, in a chilling description of how ordinary townspeople could shoot Jews in pits during the Second World War, explains the banality of evil underlying the multiple rapes and deaths of young Mexican women in Part IV. Concerned about the financial security of his family after his premature death, Bolano intended for the five long novellas of "2666" to appear one after the other. The novel eschews ordinary plot development, standard grammar and the use of quotation marks to break up the solid blocks of prose. Like Proust, the set pieces move at a speed one might call "real" time in that it takes as much time to read about the event as it probably took to experience it in real life. Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) began as a poet; his magical novel, "The Savage Detectives" described the hopeless search for the founders of a bizarre Mexican literary movement, one of whose leaders is Arturo Belano, the unnamed narrator of "2666".
One must remember that Bolano gave up the chance for a life-saving liver transplant in order to complete "2666". In its restraint and quietude, Part V is the most moving and dramatic literary explanation of the Holocaust ever written, a triumph achieved without sentimentality and without a single description of the camps. Well, here's your chance: you are alive when the novels of Roberto Bolano are first appearing, the most important literary event in South American and world literature since the arrival of Gabriel Garcia Marques. That an unknown author might be a candidate for the Nobel Prize is a painful irony that the dying Bolano understood only too well; Death is introduced as an explicit character in Part V.
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