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 into someone’s body. except it’s a book. and i’m in 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 w More...

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 writes that "2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full 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 need More...

If things work out, and sometimes they don't, you're back in the presence of sacred. You burrow your head into your own chest and open your eyes and watch." (That's from page 315. Probably my favorite page in 2666.)

There were times when reading 2666 that I feared it was going to kill my love of reading. Kill it like some death toll statistics. Impersonal and I wasn't there. Somewhere far away, at someone else's hands. I'd forget my longings and not pick up another book. My hands eyes would go em More...

It starts off innocently enough.

A group of Academic Lit Nerds are mutually obsessed with an obscure novelist, and become obsessed with tracking him down in the flesh, which leads to a rather conventional but gripping opening act of this vast novel in five acts.

The next two acts are equally conventional in their narratives, and equally gripping, but progressively darker, centered as they are in a northern Mexican city consumed by an outbreak of unsolved and gruesome murders of young women.

Then 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 i More...

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 many different gen More...

I was speaking to someone over the weekend about the band Radiohead. Now, I really like a couple of their songs, but, on the whole, I find the group excruciating to listen to. The problem is probably best summed up as a clash of personalities: mine and the lead singer’s. Of course, I’ve never met Thom Yorke, and as a rule I prefer to withhold judgement on people I do not know, but in his case I can’t help myself. It would be unfair to disparage without providing evidence, so here goes:

- Thom Yor 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 explod More...

I'm a guy who never falls for the hype, I see those orchestrated culture-vulture whisper campaigns a mile away, I will not be dragooned into seeing the latest cruddy art house movie or the subversive comedian who deliberately doesn't make you laugh, nor yet do I watch Big Brother as an ironic protest against the war in Afghanistan - so imagine my horror when I got home from Waterstones and found I'd bought 2666 in a three-for-two deal. Somewhere in the stunned silence I heard the tiny impudent s More...

Also available at http://www.templeoftexts.blogspot.com/

---

Literary websites and magazines are nowadays rife with discussions about the death of the novel. For readers who refuse to part with their precious printed pages, headlines such as “The Novel in the Age of Twitter,” or “Is it Finally Time to Buy A Kindle?” can cause unconscious hand-wringing. It’s not because we’re sentimental for the book-as-object, or because we like to show our books off by placing them in plain sight for visitors in More...

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” if you wish, but in that case please capit More...

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 say Moby Dick More...

Why four starts you ask? I thought the first part and the last part were worthy of 5 stars, and there were 5 star moments in the other parts.... it's really more of a 4 and a half stars, but it just doesn't quite make it to a five star rating for me.

Part four was so graphic that it literally made me cringe and made me sick to my stomach. It was like watching a horror film and wanting to turn away from the screen, except you can't escape the words on the page. That's not a bad thing; it's a good More...

Something wholly positive that can be said about 2666 is that it's not summarizable in plot or theme -- its dimensions suggest the entirety of life on earth. Seriously! And so all I can really think to do is offer a telling quotation: ". . . history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness." At times, especially early on (first 300 pages), I sometimes impatiently derided this monster as a hyb More...

UPDATE: Aside from the wonderful detail from Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele featured on the paperback version of 2666, the best work of art to assist your reading would be the work above, the third panel of Heironymous Bosch's triptych Garden of Earthly Delights.



ORIGINAL REVIEW: Reading 2666 is like peering into a well.

In Part One: The Part About the Critics, you observe the well from a park bench. It's a little romantic; there are four critics, all obsessed with the same obscure German aut More...

Before reaching the last 100 pages of the book, I was bored. I was beginning to be afraid that the 33 early mornings when I had to wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 am just to read my target 20-30 pages of this book everyday would all be wasted. There were many questions and loose ends in my mind and I was already wondering if, in the end part, Bolano would care to tie them all up. You see, this book was published posthumously and one of the reviews here in Goodreads seemed to indicate that this was an un More...

Some pages into 2666 I started to wonder where I had seen this technique before, Bolano’s scenes, his sometimes brief, sometimes protracted, sometimes linear and sometimes anachronistic vignettes (little bricks with white mortar in between that compose the foundation of this monster of a book). Then I remembered, Joyce employed the same style in the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses (the one that starts with “The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch…”). The Wander More...

Just finished listening to this after reading it a few years ago when it came out. It sounded even better than it read the first time through when I thought it was among the best things I'd read. It's endless, open, unpredictable, monumentally poetic, dark, insightful, vivid, audacious, gripping, intentionally dull at times ("an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom"), LOLful, and worthy of pretty much every other evangelical adjective one might think of (OK-- it's not much of a tearjerker and More...

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 partner in crime, 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 s More...

Original Review:

A five-book moribund monsterpiece from Chile’s most profitable and posthumously prodigious literary export. Each book has its own narrative identity while retaining the Bolaño stamp: sprawling sentences savaged by commas, a free indirect style where dialogue blends with prose and narrative position hops from person to person, strange poetic waves of readable and glorious prose, and nasty sex. The Part About the Critics is the funniest section: a suckerpunch satire where a cast of More...

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.

I finished this a couple of months ago and have probably lost a lot of what I would like to say, but that doesn't change the fact that this was my favorite reads of 2009 and one of my top favorites of all time. In terms of what I felt while reading it, I would compare it to East of Eden except that I felt that reading Steinbeck was like fine wine while Bolano is heroin. Both books made me want to read with every spare second I had. Even just a paragraph or sentence might be enough to keep me goi More...

I came to this book expecting a masterpiece, excited by all of the glowing reviews I had skimmed over, declaring it the first great book of the twenty-first century. Having finished it, I can say it was not at all what I expected. It was beautiful, haunting, brutal, frustrating, banal and hallucinatory. And, yes, it is a masterpiece.

If you require an author to tidy-up all the loose ends, to resolve a central theme of the narrative, then 2666 will not be for you. 2666 pulses like life itself, in More...

To begin with, a poorly-devised haiku review:

Number of a rape:
Two and six and sixty-six.
It was a pleasure.
__________________________

"I get the idea perfectly, Mickey," said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive

More...