2666 (Broché) by Roberto Bolaño - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

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Jul 06, 2008

brian rated it:

(review of isbn 843396867X)

the english version of this book hasn’t come out yet. it comes out in november. as such, i offer no spoilers. i’m here to make three points:

1) the blood and guts
2) the disaster
3) the women

1) y’know that bookbuzz you get when you’re walking around the world and it’s all colored with the life of the book you’re reading? 894 pages of bolano’s epic and i felt like the guy in those 50s sci-fi movies who gets shrunk down real small and is injected i...more

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Jul 07, 2008

Jessica rated it:

(review of isbn 0374900132)

bookshelves: crime-and-punishment

Read in September, 2008

recommended to Jessica by: some guy on the internet

I hate these star ratings. I'm docking this baby one, because I honestly don't believe there's any way he was finished. This book wasn't done! I didn't read the Introduction and I'm not clear on the back story, but my vague understanding is that Bolaño died after sending this thing to his publisher, who claims it was ready to go, but seriously, man, I just can't believe that. This book is almost great. Parts of it are totally mindblowing, but the fact of the matter is, I'm convinced that it nee...more I hate these star ratings. I'm docking this baby one, because I honestly don't believe there's any way he was finished. This book wasn't done! I didn't read the Introduction and I'm not clear on the back story, but my vague understanding is that Bolaño died after sending this thing to his publisher, who claims it was ready to go, but seriously, man, I just can't believe that. This book is almost great. Parts of it are totally mindblowing, but the fact of the matter is, I'm convinced that it needed one more serious edit. The thing wasn't done, and that's absolutely the most negative thing I can say about it. The most positive thing is probably that as I drew near to finishing this somewhat bloat-- er, sprawling 900-page mass of woodpulp, I began experiencing a strong sense that once I'd finished, I'd like to start over from the beginning and read the whole thing again. So yeah, 2666, unfinished though it may be, is that good. It's that good, and it's that flawed, and so what can you do? The poor guy died! So I can't really get mad at him about it, because some circumstances are beyond any author's control. It's sad, but it's true.

So yes, 2666. I haven't reviewed a book in awhile, and I'm trying to remember how this thing works.... Well, the book is kind of three (people on here say five, but to me it seemed like three) novels that are linked and overlapping in places but which are also clearly distinct from one another. The first section is about four academics (a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard and a Brit walk into a conference....) who are united through their passion for Archimboldi, an elusive and mysterious German novelist. The academics' pursuit of this writer leads them to a fictionalized Mexican border city, which is plagued by an epidemic of gruesome, mostly unsolved murders of women. The second major part -- and this was where I struggled, because the combination of highly disturbing and dully redundant can get hard to take -- takes place in this Juárez stand-in, and contains a brutal, relentless catalogue of raped and murdered women's bodies that goes on for literally hundreds of pages. The last section of the book follows the writer Archimboldi throughout his life, including his time in the German army during World War II. Okay, so I'm oversimplifying, but that's the basic structure of 2666.

Before I get to what I love most about Bolaño, I'd like to say what I love second-most, and that's that I consider him to be probably the greatest straight-male feminist writer that I can think of. I don't know how based in reason this opinion is, and I can picture losing an argument with someone who wanted to challenge me, but that's just the way I felt while reading this and The Savage Detectives. On a very basic, purely emotional level, I just love the way this guy writes about women, though I don't even know that I can explain why. It's very clearly from a male perspective, and I feel that he writes about his female characters with a certain romanticized removal, which should be a problem, but for some reason I just love it. I love it! I also think this book, especially the part in the middle, which I didn't really like, about the (based-in-fact) serial murders, is a feminist text. It makes for an interesting contrast with Ellroy's My Dark Places, which covers some similar ground -- women being raped and murdered, and a subverted detective story -- but where Ellroy gets lost in the oedipal glamour of all that violence, Bolaño takes a stark look at the economics and wider misogyny of a society and forces us to see the pages of raped and strangled young factory workers for what they are, without any romance or horseshit whatsoever....

Which gets me to what I really love best about this writer: put simply and meaninglessly, the way he writes about all the bad and good things of this world. Oh gee.... it might be impossible for me to say just what I mean! But I guess I have to try, right? That's why we're all here, yeah?

I, like at least 99% of the human race, find it extremely difficult to live in this world. Even when things are dandy for me, my vague awareness of the incomprehensible magnitude of brutality and suffering on earth remains nearly unbearable most of the time. Of course, I am simultaneously so crushed and awed by the beauty and splendor of everything that I pretty much feel like screaming my head off almost all of the time. So, I know it sounds a little weird spelled out like so, but I assume that a lot of people feel this way, and I gotta imagine this is just one basic aspect of human experience. It's just the classic position between a rock and a hard place, or maybe more like being suspended between two equally powerful magnets, at this magical point of painfully vibrating stasis, where the unstoppable force of, say, I dunno, genocide, meets the immovable object of (sorry, this is dumb) love.... or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, everything is always so terrible that you just want to die. But everything is always so wonderful that you can't bear the thought of dying. And that's how we live, every day, and it's nuts!

"Okay," you're muttering now.... "Enough with your mixed metaphors, Jessica. What on earth are you trying to tell us about Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666???" Well, fine. Bolaño is -- again, please excuse me -- a reader's writer. I believe he really gets that good literature is the over-the-counter medication that can temporarily relieve the symptoms of this agonizing and incurable condition in which we all find ourselves. A lot of writers know this, and so they try to write about tragedy and cruelty but also the joy of being alive, but obviously doing this right is really pretty tricky, and IMHO Bolaño pulls it off way better than most other people ever have.

One reason why is that I think Bolaño grasps how the pains of the world are not really so qualitatively different from its pleasures. The way that Bolaño writes about sex, I guess I'd say (to oversimplify) is not all that different from the way he writes about death. And that's how my experience of the world feels personally, so I can relate to his fiction, because it feels so familiar and true to me in that way. I had an intense experience while reading this book a couple weeks ago, when I was having a difficult time at work. One of my clients, a very young man, had unexpectedly just hanged himself, and this same day I went court with another very disturbed, unhappy, mentally-ill client I know well, who was then dragged off to jail with self-inflicted cuts all over his arms, while hysterically shouting out his innocence in open court. All this is not my presenting social work war stories for laughs or attention, but just to say that on that day I was reading the Archimboldi section of the book on my long train ride to and from the courthouse, and I had an appreciation as great as any that I've ever had, of the intersection between what I was living and what I was reading. I don't mean the topics were at all similar, but that the experience was the same. All of a sudden, the pain of living in the world, which I was feeling pretty acutely that day, became simultaneously palpable and bearable, and oh, I don't know, I probably started crying a bit on the train. Or maybe I didn't, I don't really remember.... Anyway, this, to me, is what books are ultimately for, and this is the basic purpose of writing and reading, yeah? Just on a simple utilitarian level, the horror and glory of living in this world is too vast to comprehend, much less to endure. But a book -- even an oversized book in need of one more harsh, exacting edit -- is a scaled-down diorama, a travel-sized package, a bite-sized piece we can pick up and chew. And in that moment, the untenable position of being torn apart by the excruciating contradiction of our lives is not unmanageable. Or at least, it's soothed a little. In any case, that was my experience with this book, and being as this is the main reason why I read, I guess I must've loved it, at least in parts.

Yeah, so anyway, I don't know, should I give it another star? This book had some problems. I thought the North American character was lame, and the whole Mexico section in the middle needed a ruthless edit. Also, I don't believe that this book had a real ending, and I require a fabulous ending on such a long book. At the same time, 2666 was great. It was a far more ambitious project than The Savage Detectives, but it was less perfectly realized. I recommend this to anyone who can stomach hundreds of pages about women being brutally raped, tortured, and killed, who enjoys vast, loosely-structured epic kind of things.(less)

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Dec 27, 2008

Emily rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

bookshelves: 2009, not-so-much, novels

Read in January, 2009

I accept that I'll probably get flamed for this, but enough is enough: this maddening, rapacious, and occasionally compelling book is making my life miserable. Will I finish it? Will it matter? Let me say for the record that I counted myself as a likely enthusiast -- I fit the profile -- but after a long, protracted battle, can't bring myself to sing along with the choir to which Bolano is preaching. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if we're so enslaved as readers to the cult of the author th...more I accept that I'll probably get flamed for this, but enough is enough: this maddening, rapacious, and occasionally compelling book is making my life miserable. Will I finish it? Will it matter? Let me say for the record that I counted myself as a likely enthusiast -- I fit the profile -- but after a long, protracted battle, can't bring myself to sing along with the choir to which Bolano is preaching. In fact, I'm starting to wonder if we're so enslaved as readers to the cult of the author that we no longer require his masterpiece to deliver on its claim to greatness, as an integral work of art that transfigures and transcends its moment without depending on the ego of its author to contain it. This happened with Sebald, too: the writer's death, in consummating that ego, paradoxically secures the instant immortality of the work, and we promote him to canonical status before the work itself can pass the endurance test -- not necessarily of time, but of fiction as an invented life form that can survive not only in the fair weather of an assured friendly reception, but the inclemency of readers' genuine surprise. And their work makes itself available to this kind of literary leapfroggery because of its overtly moribund self-reference: there is no "2666" as a singular novel without the idea of "Bolano" as an already-consecrated literary martyr, just as there may be no individual "Vertigo," "Austerlitz," "The Emigrants," et al., as novels, without the classical fantasy of "Sebald," as an idol of immediate eternity, to connect them all.

For me, the most significant failing of "2666" is that it is not convincing *as* a novel, as a unified world inhabited by a variety of imaginary real people whose lives are in our hands. For all their hyper-personalizing detail, the "characters" of this book do not exist for readers as such, because they serve the book more than vice versa; they appear, get used, and -- not unlike the Santa Teresa victims -- are discarded; their bodies pile up along the unrelenting highway of a narrative profoundly driven, it appears, by a refusal to finish. (Not to be a dime-store psychiatrist, but this reminds me of an intensely voluble teacher I once had who said, "Nobody ever died talking.") When characters reappear, their remergence carries no real novelistic weight, because they never haunted the spaces from which they were absent; without the direct consciousness of the author, they have no being. (When he isn't thinking about them, neither is the book.) I don't refer to them by name for a reason: I don't need to. Rather than sincerely individuated figures, they seem more like components of a consuming, universal ego that substitutes humane curiosity for self-interest -- the literary narcissism of a book that absorbs itself. (By this criteria, I can think of lots of postmodern/post-postmodern novels with dead authors who are still breathing.) It might even be said that the organizing principle of this literally infinite book is the death of the author, and while that might sound coherent enough, even noble, I'm not sure that automatic posterity is the most honorable or compelling motive for a novel, which at its best, endeavors first and foremost to make something live, whether it literally exists or not, or ever did.

What I think *is* noble, though, is the ecstatic response to Bolano's work. Personally, I find the reviews -- encomia to "2666" as the apotheosis of Bolano's genius -- a hell of a lot more interesting than the book itself, and I think I know why that might be. The enthusiasm that readers have for this novel honors something tremendously important: a persisting faith in the transformative potential of the novel as a tradition. Readers who love this book believe in the novel and what it can and should do, and my question is simply whether this particular book really does it, or if we're so desirous for a novel that remakes the form -- a show of proof that literary fiction isn't a terminal enterprise, but eternally regenerative and revelatory -- that we're willing to invest our faith in something that aspires to that aim, but doesn't necessarily achieve it. Bolano clearly shared this desire, too, but to my mind failed his readers by enlisting their belief primarily in the confabulation of this wish-fulfillment -- this imaginary great new book -- rather than in the invented world inside it. Instead of champions of "2666" as an autonomous contribution to literature, or the creation of a strange new world, we've become servants to Bolano's own auto-mythology. And that might be noble, but it's also disappointing.(less)

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Nov 03, 2008

Conrad rated it:

(review of isbn 0374531552)

bookshelves: fiction, owned

Read in December, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

A really outstanding read, a book so vast and wide that it takes up a space well beyond its eight hundred-something pages. I found the language in the last book a little too abstruse in places (what, for example, does desperation smell like?) and a little too declarative in The Part About Fate; I have a nagging suspicion that amid the plot of The Part About Amalfitano, there were hints as to the identity of (one of) the killer(s) from The Part About the Crimes - on one of the occasions that some...more A really outstanding read, a book so vast and wide that it takes up a space well beyond its eight hundred-something pages. I found the language in the last book a little too abstruse in places (what, for example, does desperation smell like?) and a little too declarative in The Part About Fate; I have a nagging suspicion that amid the plot of The Part About Amalfitano, there were hints as to the identity of (one of) the killer(s) from The Part About the Crimes - on one of the occasions that someone drives Amalfitano around Santa Teresa, I'm certain it's in a black Peregrino. Some of the threads that bind the text could have been tightened a little bit, I guess. But these niggling complaints are entirely subsumed by the inventiveness of Bolano's prose and his dense, fascinating characterization. Characters in 2666 don't ever appear to have boring thoughts or routine days.

Bolano remarked that 2666 has a "secret heart." This is no exaggeration - the bareness of the sinews that connect the two opposite ends of the book, Archimbaldi and the murders of the women in Santa Teresa, only becomes clear in the last twenty pages of the book or so. 2666 is full of people telling stories about things that they heard and things that happened to them, and even very few of these stories are ever corroborated or given closure. And yet it's not irritating, it just makes you curious. Klaus Haas's lawyer, who despite being well-educated has a lot in common with the whores her client is accused of killing, could have used another 300 pages or so. So could have Amalfitano's daughter. So could have General Entrescu and Baroness von Zumpe and (above all) Lotte, who is maybe the most boring person in the novel but who struck me as more empathetic than all the other characters in the book put together; reading about her was like being given a bottle of water after wandering through a desert for a week.

Bolano has things in common with Musil, Proust, Ellroy, Heinrich Boll, and Gunter Grass; he seems to be to be more strongly allied with the postwar tradition of western European writers than any South American writers that I know of. (I don't get at all what he's supposed to have in common with Borges...) But his style is completely his own. He has listened to Kundera's advice about using motifs in long prose - I kind of want to start this over and reread it just to catch all the patterns I missed the first time around. Why is it so much easier for me to connect bits of Wagner together in my head than bits of Bolano? Anyway, there is indeed a web of not symbolism, precisely, but recurring bits of business that need reexploring.

I don't think I can put this on my Masterpieces shelf - I need to read more Bolano. But I might down the road.

[300 pages in:]
So far, this book is pretty remarkable for being so easy to read. It's like drinking campari and soda - you only notice when you try to stand up. Unlike other books of its scope, there aren't all that many daunting shifts in perspective or a whole lot of self-conscious experimentalism, just a completely commanding narrative voice that ever so subtly implies what the characters are thinking underneath what it tells you they're thinking. I don't think I've ever read such a masterly third-person perspective. And it's so unshowy but so icy, aggrieved, and wise at the same time. And seductive! It's really hard to stop thinking about and in, um, Bolañese.

I'm thinking in particular of this moment when Norton and Espinoza and Pelletier meet in a restaurant, and the narrator mentions in passing that the tables are somehow the wrong size, and would only seat four people uncomfortably. The three have left their fellow academic and friend Morini out of their love triangle and out of this meeting, as always, because (it is implied) none of them are capable of considering Morini a sexual threat or an object of attraction - something that he only dolefully thinks about every now and then. The narrative trick here is that there's no need for a table for four, but the possibility of a fourth person is perhaps meant to perch in the reader's consciousness as lightly as Morini's absence does in the three characters'. If I were writing a novel, this is the kind of thing I would never, ever be able to do on purpose, but which Bolano does so incredibly well.

I could be wrong, but so far, this is reading like it's going to end up on my "masterpiece" shelf.(less)

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Oct 16, 2008

Jesse rated it:

(review of isbn 0374900132)

Read in November, 2008

Written under the specter of his own death, Roberto Bolano's "2666" is a statement of the capacity of cruelty that resides in the darkest heart of humanity. The novel is really five novellas, thematically tied together, and centering around the fictional Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juarez in our world) where hundreds of young women are being raped and murdered. The plot of the novel takes a back seat to the real driving force which is the nightmare deathscape of Santa Teresa. There is some gr...more Written under the specter of his own death, Roberto Bolano's "2666" is a statement of the capacity of cruelty that resides in the darkest heart of humanity. The novel is really five novellas, thematically tied together, and centering around the fictional Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juarez in our world) where hundreds of young women are being raped and murdered. The plot of the novel takes a back seat to the real driving force which is the nightmare deathscape of Santa Teresa. There is some great yarn spinning as Bolano is a gifted storyteller, but "2666" lacks any overall narrative with a traditional beginning, middle, and end. In this way the novel resembles "Infinite Jest", as there are multiple characters who interact peripherally and whose meaningful, and potentially fatal, interaction takes place outside of the text as the reader must project more narrative onto the end of the novel.

The main character of the novel is a reclusive German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi. His story is told in Part 5, while Part 1 tells the story of four critics who are enmeshed in Arhimboldi's oeuvre and each other. Part 2 tells the story of a college professor named Amalfitano, who is slowly losing his grasp on reality after moving to Santa Teresa with his teenage daughter. Later on the daughter meets a black journalist named Oscar Fate who is the subject of Part 3, after being sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match, this despite the fact that he isn't a sports writer. Part 4 leaves us in Santa Teresa to give us an eyes held open (think "A Clockwork Orange") look at this border town and her merciless murders. Part 4 is the most harrowing section in modern fiction, right up there with "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis or Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn". Except Bolano shows us not just the bloodthirsty (this being the desert) murders but also the pathetically inept city police, the suspiciously apathetic politicians as well as the devastated families. As the descriptions of murdered and (usually) raped women are repeated, you strangely become used to the death and it is only the brief descriptions of human remains, which no one claims or which are never even identified, that reawakens you to the sheer horror of this fictional border town. The police rarely solve any of these murders and the county attorney tries to pin all the murders on one man, which seems viable until the dead girls start showing up again while the suspect is locked up. This takes us to Part 5 which, as aforementioned, tells Archimboldi's story. But it's not what these characters do that gives this novel its forcefullness, it's what these charcters are searching for.

It is a natural human response, after being witness to an atrocity, to search for a reason - to try and find out what caused this unthinkable act. As humans, we continually fail to recognize that these horrific acts are not anomalous, nor are they the response of some extraordinary circumstance. They are just an aspect of humanity, a symptom of the disease which is human free will. And in "2666" this shameful beast rears its head repeatedly. Bolano draws parallels between the female homicides in Santa Teresa and the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the early 1940's. In both cases one group held extreme power: both industrial power, and economic power. And, living within the same geographical area, was another group - helpless, and lacking the industrial and economic power to collectively protect themsleves - and thus the more powerful group began a movement of mass murder. Compliant in these murders were the community in which they took place. Whether from fear of retaliation, or a sense that the victims themsleves brought about their own demise (in Santa Teresa becuase the were "putas" and were asking for it, in Romania because they were jews: the vermin of the earth). After the deaths began to mount and became uncontrolable, people then began to look for answers - a reason for all the death. Yet Thanatos was already summoned and not taking kindly to requests to leave. It is into this vortex of death that all the characters of "2666" are sucked. They all are looking for something, slowly losing their grasp on reality, slowly losing their faith in humanity. Each character is moving closer and closer to what David Foster Wallace calls "the default setting" of which there is a "constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." This is the ultimate reason for "2666" as Bolano was racing against his own death to make a final statement about the world in which we live. When we look back in the year 2666 we will see these horrific acts - the Holocaust, the murders in Cuidad Juarez - not as singular acts of unfamiliar human conduct, but as two examples of the all to familiar trait of human cruelty. And just as today no one remembers 13th century atrocites, in 2666 all the pain, suffering, and questioning of our characters will be dim reflections of the invincible living.(less)

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Mar 03, 2009

Josh rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

Eloquent Thrashing

Randall Jarrell (so many double letters in that name!) once said that a novel is a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it. Bolano's 2666 reverses this idea by implying that actually, a novel is something wrong that has a prose narrative of a certain length around it. Seen from the point of view of finished art, I think it's a failure: that is, it attempts to cohere, but does not. Seen another way, however - a more important way, let's s...more

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May 26, 2008

Evan rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

bookshelves: novels, spanish-literature

Read in May, 2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Instructions for reading:

If you want the short version read Part I, then Part V.

If you like what you read and want more, read Part II, then III.

If you are looking for punishment and a reason to quit, head to Part IV.

Review:

Part I-III were engaging. I enjoyed the quotidian sketches punctuated by beautiful writing about commonplace tragedies. Bolaño was definitely a David Lynch fan. His characters even reference their favorite Lyn...more

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Jun 24, 2008

jeremy rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

Read in July, 2008

If, as Roberto Bolaño surmised in his speech accepting the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos Prize (for The Savage Detectives), literature is indeed “a dangerous occupation,” then 2666 is certainly his attestation. Completed shortly before his death in 2003 (though left partially unedited), 2666 is a monumental work of consummate achievement, one deserving of the most exalted acclaim. Epic in scope and epitomizing the “total novel,” the late Chilean writer’s masterpiece fuses man...more

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Jun 14, 2008

R. marked it as to-read (review of isbn 0374100144)

bookshelves: to-read

Anybody who has discovered an obscure author and delighted (and suffered) in the compulsion to track down his or her oeuvre will be moved towards...towards nostlagia for the days prior to the Internet when fate, not search engines, yielded the fruits by which a further inquiry, a deeper delving, could be achieved. And when the circle of acquaintances who shared your knowledge was limited to a handful. Not thousands at a...certain website.

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Jan 02, 2009

Erik Simon rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

A sublime, inscrutable, horrifying, riveting, magical, mystical, breathtaking maelstrom. I read his shorter novels and didn't much like them. My goodreads friend Jesse loved this book enough to induce me to give it a go. I'm indebted to Jesse. I'm not saying I understood all of this book. I'm not sure anyone will. But I could not put it down. It is the finest, most momentous work I have read since UNDERWORLD or BLOOD MERIDIAN, and this could well surpass those.

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Nov 10, 2008

Carl rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

Read in January, 2009

“Madness is contagious,” the most memorable line from this sprawling, desultory, Frankenstein of a novel. And madness is a tedious, dull slog in Bolano’s world. I can ride through a couple hundred pages of experimental obnoxiousness in an ambitious novel like this, as long as the rewards are there. But, ultimately, 2666’s rewards are minor.

I started out liking this book, found it fascinating and darkly funny in the Kafka sense. From there the humor was either lost, or, later,...more “Madness is contagious,” the most memorable line from this sprawling, desultory, Frankenstein of a novel. And madness is a tedious, dull slog in Bolano’s world. I can ride through a couple hundred pages of experimental obnoxiousness in an ambitious novel like this, as long as the rewards are there. But, ultimately, 2666’s rewards are minor.

I started out liking this book, found it fascinating and darkly funny in the Kafka sense. From there the humor was either lost, or, later, shifted registers into that nasty Celine territory, which I can get interested in if something worthwhile is at stake, something important is being said or grappled with. But, as you read, it becomes evident that the stories and motifs are going nowhere, really, or perversely feeding back into themselves, as though written by a madman applying his very personal and idiosyncratic logic to stories and ideas, whose only end is to regenerate further applications of this logic, never getting anywhere--deliberately going nowhere--the sole purpose to keep his madness alive and thriving.

If you’re looking for any remotely sympathetic characters, you won’t find them here. They’re not even characters--more like zombies, really. If you think zombies are cool, you may hate them after reading this book. “Death to zombies!” may be your new motto. Then there’s the sense that the novel is so full of literary inside jokes or elaborate cross-textual references so as to render it incomprehensible to a reader like me. I really couldn't stand nearly all of the final book. Was that supposed to be funny? interesting? fascinating? insightful?

Masterpiece? I don't think so.

While there is much to be admired in Bolano’s skills (his narrative command is excellent, which makes what he’s using it for frustrating), and he has some fine sentences, figurative and philosophical, the final experience of this novel is just plain boredom. Finishing the last page, I was left completely cold and disinterested in unraveling any the stories’ various enigmas.

2666 comes across as a grand exercise in narrative obfuscation. If that’s what he was going for, mission accomplished.
(less)

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Jan 05, 2009

Chris rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

bookshelves: read-in-2009

Read in March, 2009

This book is almost impossible for me to rate. There are parts of it that I hated more than life itself. There are parts of it that I loved more than Five Guys burgers and Chick-Fil-A milkshakes. At times it was so mind-numbingly boring that I almost started to read Mitch Albom books. At times it was so engrossing that it made me forget what time and even what day it was.

I loved and hated 2666 and I'm giving it four stars because I can't possibly give it a lower rating than its p...more

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Nov 08, 2008

Kelly rated it:

(review of isbn 0374531552)

bookshelves: fiction

Read in November, 2008

recommended to Kelly by: Jonathan Lethem (via the NYTimes)

I keep talking to people about this book, and they keep asking if it's "good" or if I "recommend it," which feels a little like asking someone who has spent 6 months abroad, "How was zzz country?" Where do you begin in answering that question, about a place you've inhabited? I feel like I've lived in this book for the last two weeks, and now, just pages from the end, I am sad to be getting on the plane and flying home, but also relieved to be returning to more famil...more

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Jun 24, 2008

Christy rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

bookshelves: miscellaneous-fiction

Read in October, 2009

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 has been described as "the most electrifying literary event of the year" (Lev Grossman, Time), as "a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form" (Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review), as "a work of devastating power and complexity" (Adam Mansbach, The Boston Globe), as "the work of a literary genius" (Francine Prose, Harper's Magazine), and, repeatedly, as a masterpiece.

Adam Kirsch of Slate.com writ...more

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Jan 29, 2010

Tío Steve rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

Read in February, 2010

recommended to Tío Steve by: Jane
recommends it for: Nobody

HEADLINE: I do not recommend that you read the best novel that I have read in the last 20 years.

Yes, 2666 is easily the best novel that I have read in the last 20 years, perhaps longer. No, I do not recommend it to you or anyone else.

Nonetheless, in the event you are unfortunately tempted, I would like to be helpful. Please answer the 20 questions in the following questionnaire with a simple “yes” or “no.” You may answer with a complicated “yes” or “no...more

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Nov 12, 2008

nathan added it (review of isbn 0374531552)

Read in November, 2008

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Dec 17, 2008

Greg rated it:

(review of isbn 0374531552)

bookshelves: fiction

Read in December, 2008

Coming in just five minutes under the wire of ringing in the new year I finished this book. I'd been toying with giving it four stars, I figured I would give it four because it's a deeply flawed novel. I'll come back to this.

There may be spoilers, but nothing too serious in what follows (but where I allude to things that happen in this novel and in Infinite Jest).

About fifty pages into the final part of the book, with about two hundred and something pages left I knew ...more Coming in just five minutes under the wire of ringing in the new year I finished this book. I'd been toying with giving it four stars, I figured I would give it four because it's a deeply flawed novel. I'll come back to this.

There may be spoilers, but nothing too serious in what follows (but where I allude to things that happen in this novel and in Infinite Jest).

About fifty pages into the final part of the book, with about two hundred and something pages left I knew that it wasn't going to end well. I call this the Infinite Jest effect because the first time I ever had this occur was during my first reading of DFW's masterwork. In that book at around page 700, with three hundred and something pages left it started to dawn on me that there is no way the book can wrap itself up in the amount of space left. No matter how much I'd be praying in my head for their too be more, for the book not to end the pages gradually lessened and in the end I was left with something that was amazing and great but also unsettling because we want our stories to end nicely. We want to know what happened, be reassured that everything is ok, or that everything is fucked up and life is worthless, or something. We want resolution and we aren't given it. Sorry if I ruined anything about either book, but that is what happens here.

There was so much more I wanted from this book. In my head I felt like a greedy slut wanting to scream out, "More, more, more!!", I felt this same way after reading Savage Detectives, and it was this incompleteness that left me dissatisfied with SD and led me to only give it four stars instead of five. But now I'm seeing that there is something going on here in Bolano's writing, something like meta-fiction but not quite and I don't have a clear focus yet on what to make of it. I mean there are so many things left in the open in this book. Like for example, what is the title supposed to mean? Are you looking for an answer in the book? Well I'll tell you right off that the numbers 2666 don't crop up once in the text.

I could go on about things that I find intriguing and infuriating in the book, but part of reading this book I think is not knowing what you're getting into. Instead I think I'll just ramble for a bit on my bewilderment over the cult of Bolano that has sprung up. He's a really interesting writer, and for me personally he's right up my alley. Bookish, obscure literary references, leftist politics, allusions to the Situationists and E.M. Cioran, people who are living for the idea of literature as something more than just some entertainment. Lots of things that I think are great, and that I find wonderful in books, but why are books that circle around these things gaining such a following by American readers who generally ignore most of the things that his books center around? Why did a book basically about avant-garde poetry make everyone cream their shorts a couple of years ago? American readers don't like experimental poetry, they don't like radical politics, so what is exactly pulling people to his books like flies to shit? Why isn't there more of a overrun of readers from his books to other 'bookish' Latin American writers both living and dead? (Ok, yes, there does seem to be a big influx of publishers putting out books by kind of obscure Latin American authors, New Directions and Dalkey being the two notable publishers here, but why aren't more people coming in asking for these authors too? (Um, stupid (that would be me), maybe it's because people just don't know about these authors and just because you see all these books come into the bookstore and you shelve them all the time doesn't mean other people necessarily know about them, would you know about them if you didn't work in a bookstore? (um, yeah that's true))).

I don't mean for this to sounds condescending in anyway. I think it's great that people are reading him, it's good when awesome writers are read by lots of people, and if lots of people hadn't started reading him I probably would have never been interested in him until 2666 came out, and that would only be because I'm a sucker for packaging like the book has. It was only because of so many people being so into Savage Detectives that I decided to read it to see what all the fuss was about.

That's all for this review. My 2008 reading is done on a very nice high note. Now onto the 2009 books. (less)

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Nov 30, 2008

El rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

bookshelves: 21st-centurylit

Read in December, 2008

This is one of those books that surpasses anything positive or negative I might manage to say about it. This is one of those books that I can say with a fair amount of certainty actually consumed me. I thought about it constantly while I was reading it, and while enough time has not passed since I finished it this morning, I am fairly certain I will be thinking about it regularly for quite some time. I showed it to someone at work and said it would be the kind of book to cause my brain to exp...more This is one of those books that surpasses anything positive or negative I might manage to say about it. This is one of those books that I can say with a fair amount of certainty actually consumed me. I thought about it constantly while I was reading it, and while enough time has not passed since I finished it this morning, I am fairly certain I will be thinking about it regularly for quite some time. I showed it to someone at work and said it would be the kind of book to cause my brain to explode if it did not end the way I wanted/hoped/expected/anticipated/etc. My brain exploded. And it itches now, the inside of my head. A lot.

In a nutshell (since the story actually takes just shy a few pages of 900) the central character is reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi, but there are so many other characters that it is hard to focus on one character and say "this is the one". They all served a purpose, and ultimately all wind up in Santa Teresa (more recognizably Ciudad Juarez to the rest of us) where hundreds of girls and women are raped and murdered (based on the true story). The book is split into five parts, some of which read more easily than others (the section primarily about the murders I found tedious at best as even I, with my stomach mostly made of iron, had trouble stomaching such an attack of visual imagery, section after section repeating almost the exact same images). Each of the five parts are told from the perspective of different characters, but Archimboldi's writing plays a part in all as does Santa Teresa and the murders. There are motifs and symbols out the wazoo here, and I think even if I kept detailed notes throughout the reading I would have missed a few. On top of that I find out now that Roberto Bolano uses a lot of the same motifs in his previous books, which, ah hell, now means I need to read them all and probably be consumed by each and every one of them in turn.

More accessible than Proust and Pynchon put together, I was driven the entire time to finish the book to find out the meaning of the number on the cover. I also became obsessed with the cover (I normally try not to put much stock in the cover images unless it's Margaret Atwood since I know she chooses her own covers for specific reasons) - Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele (be still my heart)... and now I'm finding myself analyzing the hell out of that choice. Does it relate to the story? Is there a connection? Is it a random choice, outside of the one small Moreau reference in the book which probably went unnoticed by most people as just another artistic/literary reference? And now I also need to brush up on my Greek mythology to see what more I can gather about Jupiter and Semele's relationship, and try to trace a relationship to 2666...

One day if I have a brain aneurysm, the central reason will be this book.

Interestingly today when I returned the book to the library and picked up another book on-hold, the guy at the counter had a book off to the side of his keyboard. I saw that it was Nazi Literature in the Americas; when I looked closer I saw that it was written by Roberto Bolano. Random coincidence?

I want to talk about this book a lot, I want to discuss it with people. But I certainly can not do it the right amount of justice. And I am saddened that Bolano died before he was able to finish it, even if they do say he was near the end anyway. I still feel like there is more that should have been included, more characters I would have liked to have been fleshed out more, more avenues investigated. But I can't really complain, overall. Except maybe for this persistent itch in my head that just won't go away even after I finished reading it.(less)

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Jun 23, 2008

Nathan rated it:

(review of isbn 0374100144)

I'm afraid to write about this book, a fear that emanates from the knowledge that attempting to describe a monolith almost always lessens its sublimity. Here is a brief, top-of-my-head summation. I finished it in a breathless rush last night (finally), and am confident when I say it's even better than my favorite book of last year, Bolano's amazing The Savage Detectives. Perhaps Pynchonian in length, but where Pynchon revels in overwhelming information strewn with clever asides, Bolano choose...more

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Dec 15, 2008

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 843396867X)

Read in December, 2008

I wanted to like this, but really it did very little for me. I read the whole first section, almost all of the second, and 100+ pages of the fourth. I got it from the library and couldn't renew. I thought about buying it to finish it, but couldn't imagine it would all just snap together and impress me - or even interest me - all of a sudden. The fourth part - about the murders - I liked best, but not enough.

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