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2666

by Roberto Bolaño, Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

4.18 of 5 stars 4.18 · rating details · 11,058 ratings · 1,915 reviews

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, mentall...more

Paperback, 898 pages

Published September 1st 2009 by Picador (first published 2004)

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Sep 05, 2008 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Jan 29, 2009 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, 2009, not-so-much

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 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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Oct 10, 2009 Christy rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: world-lit

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

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Oct 13, 2008 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jessica by: some guy on the internet

Shelves: crime-and-punishment

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 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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Sep 17, 2011 Mariel rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: in 2666 I'll surely be dead

Recommended to Mariel by: a guy I'm no longer friends with

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 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 empty and I would not remember where to look again. Keyholes blind, doors shut. Almanacs from 2666, 1996 and 1946 were stolen by Biff from Back to the Future for sports games (the athletes will all die when they are forced to take a dive. Maybe the almanacs are fake). It doesn't matter when it is connections faded. This might not make a lot of sense. I have to watch myself in the Charly Cruz method of it depends on the movie and on you sacred night. Opening up yourself and making the small feel big. Restlessness is to be avoided at all costs. If there's not some other place to go to, some one to know... What else is there? That leads to more depressing thoughts and black moods.
I both love and was sorely impatient with this book. It spoke to me in the gutters that I try to avoid. It also spoke to me in some that I avoid too much. I think that's where it wanted to go. I'm undecided about the first kind. Morini from part one with the inexplicable depression sitting in the built up part of London with Liz Norton (I'd sooner forget all about Liz. She was terminally uninteresting to me). Espinoza and Pelletier's loss in the red light district. The realness was in the emptiness, in the void that cannot be filled. I felt nothing when they had sex marathons and day dreamed fantasies of universities paying for conferences and steamy hotel sex and who will the lady choose as if there was an end goal and everything in between was a shadow not made from light. The answer is love didn't bells and trumpets parade to my lips. Bad lonely of "Oh, well co-eds are hot!" and the necessary sharpness of not knowing what you want. A sad sigh did answer, a fear of not being able to move. Boredom, too. I knew how Morini felt when he was paralyzed. It must have been on purpose. Who would care about these guys who breathe from altitudes up in the land of hoisted on their own petards (Bolaño gave them wedgies). I suffered the lonely emptiness for the emptiness that means something wedged (wedgies) with the impatience of profesors who get hit on by co-eds I would walk across the street to avoid. Maybe it shouldn't be filled. It's why I pick up books, I think. It wasn't until the unfilled in lines appeared between other bodies in the other four parts that I began to feel that this book had something to say that was better than a generic big picture. I did feel paralyzed... The whole self steering thing. Maybe I do it too much.

I think it was in the second part that a character notices that a young man prefers the minor works of authors such as A Christmas Carol to the messy battling it out with oneself works like the Pickwick Papers or A Tale of Two Cities (I prefer Bleak House myself. Or Our Mutual Friend. Not that that is important to this review). There is something about forgetting to be restrained. I've been thinking a lot lately about how to navigate between the two kinds of empty. I don't know which has what or the other. I guess I'm bringing this up because I feel 2666 is the one that meant more to the author that he didn't take the step back. It's kind of silly to say that, maybe. The whole book is a step back (hence the often static characters). Maybe I'm not alone in too much eye shutting?

D'oh the afterword quotes that part and it said something about the books that tackled the big issues that affect us all. I prefer (and I'm probably wrong to prefer my own memory but that's how it is) that they battled their own navigation's of emotional and mental pitfalls. Less controlled and more making shadows with all the rest of the people. I'm going to walk across the street to avoid guys who write afterwards afterwords...

I make my battle plans from the spirits of my sleeping soldiers said Napoleon. I like that quote a lot. There's something similar said by a character in the fifth section. What if who is remembered in 2666 is the shadows. If you could tell who the long shadows belong to... The women killed in Santa Teresa. They didn't get to be more than how the love and blow jobs and death of the other people would speak too loudly for their notices. I liked that the Archimiboldians tried to stay out of the wrong kind of shadowy thoughts with their books. Lola with her possibly homosexual and crazy poet. I got something out of this book so I did like it. I still feel restless though. I don't know if in a good way. I feel like I have to watch myself from thinking too long about how empty it felt to read about all of the blow jobs and anal sex and coke snorting and murder (it was probably supposed to be so ridiculous). Sleeping, worst fears and avoiding emptiness. I did get something out of this book and that means there's hope in just doing the allowing something sacred to come in. Yeah, this is a good book.

P.s. I also really liked pages 334-335 (parts three and four were my favorite). The happiness of thinking you getting something and the uneasiness if you don't. Who cares about classic status? That's damned awesome to have that.(less)

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Jan 25, 2010 Eddie Watkins rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Jan 26, 2009 Carl rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“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 “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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Oct 28, 2008 jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: translation, fiction

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

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Feb 18, 2013 [P] rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bitchin

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

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Dec 13, 2008 El rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-centurylit, big-effing-books, cuckoos

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 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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Nov 23, 2012 Paul added it · review of another edition

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

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Feb 20, 2013 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourites

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

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

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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 a pretentious display of our mental archives. It’s because fiction is perhaps the only remaining refuge of the arts that doesn’t feel entirely cheapened, hollowed out by digitisation, and robbed of its sanctity. With fiction (and by extension, books), the embers of its heyday are still crackling because the physical medium of its delivery is yet to be wholly perverted. This might sound hyperbolic or romantic to you, and it probably is. But even if it is difficult to write about a subject like this without impassioned rhetoric or sounding as though I’m a holy martyr poised upon a cliff edge, there is a kernel of truth to it. Ask Roberto Bolaño.

In this massive and sprawling final novel of unparalleled humanity, Bolaño laments the loss of the sacred. Not for its entire 893 pages, of course, but this is ultimately the idea at the heart of 2666. It is a dark and hideously violent novel, and is sometimes regarded by critics as a soulless book, a joyless work that serves for nothing other than to manifest the author’s twisted passions. What these critics fail to realise is that if 2666 is soulless and cold (it isn’t), then the world we know is irreparably heartless and cold. Writing with the awareness of his own impending death, in 2666 Bolaño seeks nothing other than to capture the spiritual deadening of a global culture drawing away from the sacred. Not from the religious, and not necessarily the spiritual either, but from human empathy, a true connection to the arts, and everything else that brings a sense of depth to our lives.

2666 is split into five loosely connected parts: “The Part About the Critics,” “The Part About Amalfitano,” “The Part About Fate,” “The Part About the Crimes,” and “The Part About Archimboldi.” Originally intended to be published in five separate volumes in order to better provide for his family, Bolaño’s heirs (rightly) decided that the text would be served better by being published as a whole. While the parts take place in different time periods all across the globe, they essentially revolve around the fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, and the horrific murders and rapes of women that are occurring there. In the novel’s structure, Santa Teresa acts an abyss of sorts: the longest section of the book and placed directly in the middle, “The Part About the Crimes” details in a clinical and detached voice the countless deaths of the city’s women. The parts surrounding it are about very loosely connected characters that begin in other parts of the world but are drawn almost magnetically towards the city.

Structurally speaking, 2666 is a very unusual novel. Characters may be introduced and thoroughly developed for a hundred pages before abruptly, and permanently, disappearing. Plotlines become tangential, threading themselves through other micro-stories before ultimately fading away. One of the primary narratives, introduced at the novel’s outset and largely forgotten throughout the mid-section, does not get resolved until the very final pages. This is not so much an authorial flaw as a deliberate technique: like his other lengthy novel The Savage Detectives, in 2666 it seems as though Bolaño is attempting to create a cohesive whole out of smaller fragments, as in the paintings of Archimboldo that are referenced often throughout.

Hearing the words ‘reflexive’ or ‘self-referential’ applied to fiction, you would be forgiven for immediately thinking of those wacky American postmodernists (i.e. Barth, Pynchon, Coover). In 2666, however, Bolaño uses self-reference not as a means of reflexivity but in order to hint at the novel’s intent, structure and themes. On the very first page, the name Archimboldo is invoked (somebody mistakes his name for the character Archimboldi), an immediate hint to making sense of the novel’s structure, and is again referred to in the last pages of the book, with descriptions of his paintings that are easily likened to 2666 itself. The word ‘abyss’ and the phrase ‘the edge of the abyss’ are used more than several times. This, and further examples I’ll omit for the sake of spoilers (though this book is more or less unspoilable), read as Bolaño literally speaking to the reader and guiding them into an interpretation of his sprawling and seemingly undisciplined splatter painting of a novel.

The question remains, however: is 2666 a success? Critics such as Scott Esposito in the Quarterly Conversation maintain that the novel is uneven, and that Bolaño’s real triumph is in The Savage Detectives. Personally, I believe that 2666’s crazed structure and “uneven” stretches befit its overarching themes of madness and evil, and that they heighten its lingering mood of haunting mysticism. Reading the novel really feels as though its characters and ideas are sinking headlong into an abyss, a void, a moral quicksand. And along with them the drag the callow values of the modern world, the remaining traces of the sacred. To my mind, 2666 is indeed a success, and is without a doubt one of the greatest books of this still very young century. It’s not an easy read, and it demands a lot of your time. But it is a Goya painting for the modern world, a transcribed Guernica, and it needs your attention.(less)

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Feb 21, 2010 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Nobody

Recommended to Steve by: Jane

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

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Mar 12, 2009 Josh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Jun 05, 2009 Ademption rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, spanish-literature

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 Lynch films in Part III.

2666 is a distinctly Mexican Blue Velvet (198...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Jenn(ifer) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2011, you-should-read-this, book-club, gr-friends-recommend, own

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

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Dec 13, 2008 Conrad rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, owned

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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Nov 30, 2012 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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 hybrid of Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Chandler, a brutal borderlands high-lit mystery that suggested more than it ever actually signified. But then came a speech by a former Black Panther and a New Yorker named Oscar Fate and things took off, especially once it offers multitudinous murders and the prodigiously pissing, iconoclastic Penitent, and then the massive german, Klaus, in prison. I may have skimmed a dozen or so overly gratuitous descriptions of murdered women, and wasn't high on the 2666 hog through the end of the fourth part, but then the fifth part, mainly set in Europe during and after WWII Germany, is more than worth it. Like reaching the Rockies and the West after driving across the plains en route from New Jersey to California -- all the better because you'd made it that far. Thanks to this book, I've learned that the masterpiece is like a crucified Jesus -- in this book, a Romanian general with a foot-long schlong -- that needs the minor thieves to conceal it, or like a lake in a forest of minor novels. You could discuss this book endlessly, or never say a word thanks to respectful speechlessness. It's more an experience than a literary entertainment. A highwater mark for ambition, authority, oomph, audacity, execution. At the end, there's a reverberating sense, like I want to read it again in a totally vain hope that all the clattering echoes cohere into an a-ha moment of thematic clarity. The structure requires the reader to make associative diagrams (like Amalfitano's charts), which are essential to this one's "fun." Total authority in the prose ensures that such associative thinking isn't just an exercise in making "castles in the air." A proliferation of images circle around and conceal and suggest the masterpiece's center. No cookie-cutter poignancy here or precious, luminous prose: five pairs of cat's eyes rise in the dark, lacking "spatiotemporal coherence," during a feverish, clandestine buggery session in a crowded house. Anyway, I'm really interested to see the reception this thing receives in November. The first new book I've read in a while where the blurby expectations are matched and maybe even sort of exceeded because my final sense of the book is a distinct but equivalent awe.

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Apr 13, 2011 nathan added it · review of another edition

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Jan 10, 2013 Christopher rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 500-pages-or-more, fiction, south-american, 21st-century

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

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Sep 16, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2010 only)

Shelves: 1001-non-core, translated, latin-american, doorstopper, sex, violence

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

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Aug 03, 2009 Geoff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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 Wandering Rocks is about 50 pages long, 2666 is 900. The effect of this technique, rather than becoming tiresome or bewildering, actually serves Bolano’s purposes well, as this is a novel told through action, through events, and this style of composing a novel out of shards of various lengths allows all the divergent, multifarious, snaking stories to play out in whatever breadth and width suits them.

Surely, a reader looking for characters to attach themselves to, fully fleshed out, living and breathing protagonists to follow through the narrative, will be disappointed. People often barely exist in this book. With the exceptions of the Part About Archimboldi, and to a lesser extent the shorter Part About Amalfitano, characters are subjects of action and function, hundreds of them, they rise and vanish like shadows or phantoms or criminals, exist in the service of a branch of a story and then are disposed of. When characters do arise again, they are mostly only briefly glimpsed. What Bolano does so well is create a universe. The success of 2666 is its lament over the brutality of humanity, the vivid horror and tension of the world it creates, the countless narratives that sometimes entwine but mostly disintegrate into thin air, that linger or appear later like memories of dreams (another world that Bolano likes to explore; almost all of his characters dream at some point, even the very minor ones, and we learn a great deal about them and the novel in general through these dreams; they suggest a symbology and initiate recurring motifs that end up connecting, in unexpected and strange ways, the five rather dissimilar parts).

The style of 2666 is violence and dream. This is a book trying to be something big, trying to get at many things, but only pointing around them, talking about them obliquely. It is a detective novel and a horror novel and an inventory of man’s inhumanity to man, a parade of natural and supernatural oddities, and a mosaic of modern maladies. In a way, it’s all here, but we never arrive at it and it is never named, and this story never ends. I think that what Bolano is suggesting, with the character of Archimboldi, is that amid a reality of chaos and violence it is the creative individual, the artist, whose greatest resource is himself, that finds his way out of the nightmare of history and withstands “our wolfhound age”.
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Adam Floridia This review sounds like it could be exactly applied to Gravity's Rainbow (based on what I've heard of the book, having yet to reach page 20). Ulysses-...more
Aug 07, 2009 09:13am

Geoff You know, the problem I had with the (very tiny) amount of Pynchon I have read was with his style. I love a great stylist (I adore Nabokov and Joyce),...more
Aug 07, 2009 10:20am

Geoff To finish a thought: Bolano is not much of a stylist, at least in this work. His prose was rather stripped down and functional (yet still gorgeous whe...more
Aug 07, 2009 10:23am

Jan 29, 2013 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audio, favorites

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

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Aug 03, 2012 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-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 partner in crime,...more

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Nov 14, 2008 Jesse rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 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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Sep 15, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, voluminous, latin-american

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

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Jan 02, 2009 Erik Simon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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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Apr 19, 2011 Jeremy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

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 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 going for awhile. The following are my disjointed thoughts:

Each part was rich and integral to the overall story in its own way. I loved that 4 literature professors became obsessed about a reclusive author. This part is probably my favorite, but it was the first part and I still thoroughly enjoyed the other parts. The part about the women's deaths is extremely redundant at times as he at times just describes the bare facts of each and every woman found - or at least the ones in this book. And there are MANY. Yet even though at some point I started thinking "I get the point" I immediately thought, "but do I get the point? Wouldn't these women deserve to be individual and not part of a summary? Doesn't it hit you harder when you think you've read of the last rape and murder and then you turn the page and there are 4 more and so on? If you can't really catch on to the horror of it all, at the very least you can start to feel the hopelessness and the desparation of the detectives that actually were trying to solve this.

The subject itself was of merit that he deserves awards for covering. People need to know about the fact that hundreds and thousands of women were being brutally raped and murdered and perhaps this is a fictional version of why there was no resolution, it is so shocking to think of the factual side. And this book is about more. So much more. Everything ends up tying back to the women, but there is so much ground to cover, don't just think you are getting into a detective story.

Bolano is at times poetic, at times earth shatteringly raw at a base of humanity level, at times detailed, at times 5 page run on sentence. I love the total package.

I want to know more about this Mexican culture in which apparently just over the US border there all of these factories. I mean, I've heard of sweat shops, I just never thought much about them other the concept of them.

I could really go on forever about this book, after all it was nearly 1000 pages and I spent somewhere around a month with it. I still look fondly at the spine everytime I walk by it and my mouth waters and my veins start to pop out just at the thought of picking up The Savage Detectives. But all in due time. I think a boat load of credit needs to go to Natasha Wimmer. While I can't say how precise she was in her translation I would have to imagine it was not easy to do and that the wrong person could have made this an unenjoyable read. Also, the cover itself was amazing. Picador really did an excellent job with this one and I very much appreciate that I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Otherwise, I am not sure how long it would have taken me to get to Bolano.

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Nov 11, 2009 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Feb 08, 2013 Seth Hahne rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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About Roberto Bolaño

For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.

H...more For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain.

Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.

He continued with poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "abandoned his parsimonious beatnik existence" because the birth of his son in 1990 made him "decide that he was responsible for his family's future and that it would be easier to earn a living by writing fiction." However, he continued to think of himself primarily as a poet, and a collection of his verse, spanning 20 years, was published in 2000 under the title The Romantic Dogs.

Regarding his native country Chile, which he visited just once after going into voluntary exile, Bolaño had conflicted feelings. He was notorious in Chile for his fierce attacks on Isabel Allende and other members of the literary establishment.

In 2003, after a long period of declining health, Bolaño died. It has been suggested that he was at one time a heroin addict and that the cause of his death was a liver illness resulting from Hepatitis C, with which he was infected as a result of sharing needles during his "mainlining" days. However, the accuracy of this has been called into question. It is true that he suffered from liver failure and was close to the top of a transplant list at the time of his death.

Bolaño was survived by his Spanish wife and their two children, whom he once called "my only motherland."

Although deep down he always felt like a poet, his reputation ultimately rests on his novels, novellas and short story collections. Although Bolaño espoused the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible for all his adult life, he only began to produce substantial works of fiction in the 1990s. He almost immediately became a highly regarded figure in Spanish and Latin American letters.

In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night In Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes.

In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers.(less)

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Quotes from 2666

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” — 162 people liked it

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.” — 148 people liked it

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avg rating	preview: 2666 Goodreads rating: 4.18 (11058 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6372225-2666?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1311981181l/6372225.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6372225-2666?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]2666 by Roberto Bolaño[/url]

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