2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
Book Summary Information
Author: Roberto BolanoTranslator: Natasha Wimmer
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-11
ISBN: 0374100144
Number of pages: 912
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374100148
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: Consider: maybe this book is not for you...
Summary: 5 Stars
A massive novel in five parts but compulsively readable once you overcome your resistance to large bricks of paper and actually start reading. *2666* is not the sort of book for lovers of tidy conclusions or linear narrative, for those unwilling or unable to let go of their preconceptions of what a novel is or isn't, should or shouldn't be. Characters are introduced, developed, disappear, and occasionally reappear again in different, sometimes enlightening, new contexts. Some mysteries are answered; many more are not.
This is a big gangly tarantula spider of a book, hairy and unpredictable. The plot reaches from present-day Mexico to Hitler's Germany. The centerpiece of *2666* is a section dealing with the ongoing murders of a veritable holocaust of young women--and the corrupt, violent, indolent detectives trying to catch what they presume must be a serial killer. The opening of the novel is haunted by a reclusive author, Benno von Archimboldi, the final section of the novel locates Archimboldi and recounts his picaresque adventures.
In fact, the story "ends" in what might be considered medias res and continues on in the speculative imagination of the reader. For that reason, among others, it will be as supremely unsatisfying to one sort of reader, as exhilarating to another. Bolano isn't so much concerned with getting from point a to z, as he is in combining and recombining all the letters in between. *2666* puts the adage "it's the journey not the destination that counts" into novelistic form.
If you demand to have control over a story, then I would say *2666* is not for you. But if you're willing to put yourself into the hands of a master and let him carry you away, you'll want to give Bolano's magnum opus a try.
Summary of 2666: A Novel
THE? POSTHUMOUS?MASTERWORK FROM "ONE?OF THE?GREATEST?AND?MOST?INFLUENTIAL MODERN?WRITERS"?(JAMES?WOOD,?THE?NEW?YORK TIMES?BOOK?REVIEW)
?
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bola?o's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa-a fictional Ju?rez-on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: It was one thing to read Roberto Bola?o's novel The Savage Detectives last year and have your mind thrilled and expanded by a sexy, meandering masterpiece born whole into the English language. It was still another to read it and know, from the advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bola?o's true masterpiece was still to come. And here it is: 2666, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bola?o's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread. But where the motion of The Savage Detectives is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, 2666, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of maquiladoras and la migra in northern Mexico. He takes his time getting there--he tells three often charming book-length tales before arriving at the murders--but when he does, in a brutal and quietly strange landscape where neither David Lynch nor Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh would feel out of place, he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane. --Tom Nissley
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