2666: A Novel
by Roberto Bolano
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Book Reviews of 2666: A Novel
Book Review: Five wonderful novels that have brought the evolution of the novel a step forward
Summary: 5 Stars
Balano orginally wished to publish these books as five seperate novels to be released 1 year apart. His heirs decided that one "novel' in 5 parts was a better way to bring this to market.
The five novels in these books are releated to each other by sharing minor characters and minor characters. But each novel could stand alone.
The translation is wonderful and riveting also.
I think that the humor in the first book The Part About the Critics is misundersood. Balano has chritics who are self important and name drop who are supposedly enlightented and forward thinking. But they are stimied in idiotic sexual leasions and brutal attacks sometimes verbal and often physical. The first book is a parody of the relation of critics giving there lives to an authors work they neither understand nor can own.
The second book often I think throughs readers because it is no longer a parody but a story of a man going into madness. He is driven made by the city Santa Teresa which is corrupt and deadly. His enlightened mind falls appart because of his enviroment. It shows how men who aproach insanity can function normally but slowly loss a grip of the world. Also there is a cautionary note that the insane often know things about reality that the rest of us try to ignore.
The third book is about a reporter who is almost destroyed by Santa Teresa. It validates the second books main characters insanity. As well as shows the danger the same city Santa Teresa has for the sane.
The Santa Teresa saga continues in the fourth part about the crimes. Where we see that Santa Teresa is a vailed description of Jarez Mexico and the killings of women that are still to this day going on. This section is graphic and chilling. But as you read of the murders you become more and more empatheic with their plight.
The final section is about a reclusive author who haunts the first five books and ties everything together but leaves the ending of the book open to our minds.
The books are allgedly unfinished but my opinion is that the last book was finished but some final cuts were not made. I believe the story is intact and an extra 20 pages that were not edited out of this 900 page book make little difference to the story. the first five books are highly polished and the last book is great but could have had a few unnecessary things cut. Again this does not distract greatly from the beauty of the last book nor the sum of all five novels.
This book is a new step forward in the idea of the novel. I am sorry that Balano will not write again, his death is a tragedy to literature. His previous books I found distracted and lacked what this book did not. this is a mature writers legacy. I am sure Balano's imment death greatly shaped the book and brought it a richness that deserves a place in anyones libary.
The book begins with three Quitoxe and ends with a reluctant Cyrano.
This is the best book I have read this year. I have to say that the joy of reading this book and Nathan Englanders Ministry of Special Cases has made my recent reading completely satifying and exillerating.
Book Review: Good in part
Summary: 3 Stars
Had the five parts of this long work been published as five separate novels- as it could well have been without giving room for any sense of being disjointed- part five would have got 5 stars, part one 3 stars and the rest no stars at all.
Part 1 describes the activities of three critics-two men and a woman- united in their common interest and adulation of a postwar German writer who goes by the surprising name , Benno von Archimboldi.Their common interest in literature develops into a common interest in sex amongst themselves.But the two male critics continue their friendship while each of them sleeps with the female critic to the knowledge of the other.They seem immune to natural jealousy. Is it because of their maturity or because their common interest in Archimboldi overrides all petty feelings? At one point they even suggest a menage a trois!.Ultimately, the two male critics go to Mexico in the hope that they will be able to meet Archimboldi face to face.
Part 4 is nearly 300 pages long and gives details of the many women killed at Santa Teresa close to the U.S.-Mexican border. Most of the women killed were prostitutes and all most all of them had been raped and strangled.Bolano's description of how the corpses were dressed is complete. But this part contributes nothing vital to Archimboldi's story except through Klaus Haas who is arrested as a suspect killer.
Part 5 is the best of 2666.The reclusive dreamer, Hans Reiter, becomes a war hero and finally finds his metier as Archimboldi.He is in the German advance into Russia, sees his comrades killed in the fight,is himself wounded seriously. While recuperating he comes across the diary of the Russian Ansky and learns how Ivanov first feted as a writer in the early of years of the Soviet Revolution, was killed in the purge of 1936 because his work was thought suspect by the powers that be. So, Reiter, presumably, understands that the Soviet power structure was as ruthless as Nazism.Interestingly, Reiter claims to have strangled Leo Sammer, a German civil servant, who confessed to having killed several Jews on orders from above. Perhaps because as a civil servant Sammer might have escaped the dragnet cast by the allies to catch perpetrators of atrocities Reiter metes out unilateral justice! Part 5 shows the horrors of war on the eastern front, the indiscipline of defeat and the total loss of moral values leading to the crucifixion of the commander of the defeated division.Bolano indulges in digressions with sentences Proustian in length though not equally involved. He gives a non-Homeric lineage to Ulysees saying he is the son of Sisyphus. Such digressions detract from the flow of the work.
Klaus Hans, the suspect serial Killer of Mexico is revealed to be Archimboldi's nephew who is persuaded by his sister to go to Mexico to assist in Hans' defence. And thus the murders in Mexico become the coalescing point for 2666.B.T.Sampath
Book Review: Astonishing
Summary: 5 Stars
I was initially reticent about reading this book because I struggled through The Savage Detectives, which was maddeningly abstruse. Not being familiar with esoteric Spanish/Mexican literati, much of its sly wit escaped me. But I was willing to engage myself in Bolano's final masterpiece because he is so probing and original. I was warmly astonished.
These are five books in one with a common thread through all of them--the murder of over 400 women in the past 15 years in the fictional town of Santa Teresa (based on true accounts of these murders in Ciudad Juarez). The first story is a search for the elusive German writer, Benno von Archimboldi, and a love triangle (or quadrangle) of Archimboldi scholars. The second story concerns a Professor who hears voices telling him to hang a geometry book on the clothesline, and is very fetching with bittersweet humor. In the third section, a reporter named Fate goes to the Mexican border to cover a boxing match. All these stories lead us to Santa Teresa, where the fourth and most staggering story takes place. It is a penetrating account of the deaths of these forgotten women and the sociopolitical and socioeconomic forces that shape the investigation. The last section does a full circle to illuminate Archimboldi's life.
Bolano could describe trousers drying and leave you haunted and awash in the beauty of his prose. While reading his words, the way sentences are stitched together like soft resplendent fabric, I felt like I was walking in it, or it was walking in me. This was liquid, fluid, creamy prose. It was very accessible because it was so natural. Never synthetic, never dry, never pretentious. In fact, it felt effortless and gliding. It was stark in its landscape but lush and sinewy in its tone, not one word wasted and yet it draped a world with a hypnotizing glow. It often was surreal; at times I felt I was entering a fifth dimension, but not in a David Lynch/David Foster Wallace/Nabokovian manner (but interesting that Bolano paid homage to Lynch). That is what dazzled me so deeply--that Bolano could rupture all the boundaries while maintaining them, that he could make you feel like you are in a postmodern world but easily so-- by writing with clarity and simplicity and alacrity. (Sometimes it was like being on LSD even though the writing was so pure, which was a feat in itself. You don't need to struggle to understand his novel).
Finally, what made this book so transcendent, so unutterably beautiful, was this massive, monumental heart at its center. There is so much love in it and so much humble wisdom and naked truth, that it cried. It cried for the women and it cried for humanity, and it did this without grandstanding, without asking it from us or telling us with trumpets. It just spoke for itself with mortality and through its mortality, its immortality.
Book Review: Towering, magisterial epic
Summary: 5 Stars
To try to summarise Roberto Bolaño's "2666: A novel" in less than the 900-odd pages in which the book itself unfolds amounts to a more or less futile exercise, so I will not even try! Published posthumously in this English-language translation in a single volume (in contravention of the author's instructions that it be published in five separate volumes to maximise earnings for his heirs) this master-work meanders through just about every topic and subject area imaginable to some extent or another, making a languorous way through intellectual backwaters and cul-de-sacs aplenty on its nevertheless inexorable path towards its conclusion.
If you like your literature simple and your stories direct, then this most certainly is not the book for you. But if you prefer words that need to be mulled over, sentences that needed to pondered (often for their relevance) and facts and figures that need to be sifted for their significance, and you're willing to commit to a heady world-encompassing tour of literary academia, sexual relations, murder, and much more besides, which at times will have you wondering where on earth it is heading (or even if it is heading anywhere at all) then "2666" may be just the ticket. Just bear in mind that it makes otherwise heavyweight books -- Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", for example -- feel positively light and yet ponderous by comparison.
Although the story is often dark and complex, the text is never in any way impenetrable -- in fact just the opposite, with its light, almost conversational style making the story-telling feel very close and intimate, almost at times seeming to be written for the individual personal benefit of the reader. Its division into short blocks of text (rather than chapters) also gives the sensation of a continuous on-going narrative from which it is hard to disconnect for fear of being left behind if one pauses for breath! (And you may sometimes feel you do indeed need a breather; one sentence in particular, at over 2000 words, must qualify as one of the longest outside of any written by James Joyce!) This endless driving narrative, coupled with the constant inclusion of every last detail in the story's scenes and events, gives the book the same surreal and dream-like quality achieved by Alexander Sokurov in his single-take film-work, "Russian Ark".
Originally published in 2004, this book has been a long time coming to press in English; it has been well worth the wait.
Book Review: stunningly awful
Summary: 1 Stars
It's hard to recap the story of 2666, because despite its 900 pages, there is none. It's more a collection of many little stories, each a page, or two, or five, that start to develop, then go nowhere, surrounding 200 pages of monotonous descriptions of hundreds of murdered girls. It's hard to see much of a point other than rape and murder of young women can become mundane and even monotonous even in real life as in a novel, when it gets repeated over and over again, identical each time.
I really don't understand the hype about this book, other than its length and subject matter, and the fact that the author died, making the novel somehow too sacred to criticize. Of the 3 pillars of a novel, characters, plot, and language, it succeeds at none of them. There is no plot to carry the reader through. There are plenty of characters, but none with any depth or development. In the first section, which is the most coherent as a story, it's nearly impossible to differentiate the 4 main characters other than one is French, one German, one female, and one crippled. They think alike, act alike, and speak alike. Perhaps that was the point, but it really felt like Bolano had no point at all. This 90 page section should have been a smart, crisp 25 page short story.
As for the writing, I don't know if it the problem is in original or with the translation, but it comes out stilted, awkward, and difficult to read, like the word-for-word translation that comes out of Google or other machine translation tools. Since the writing has the feel of the first draft that it was rather than a polished novel, I suspect the majority of the problem is in the novel itself, though translating 900 pages while the printing presses are waiting has to be daunting task without the time to reread, revise, and contemplate how to best recreate each sentence or paragraph in English.
The first 400 pages of the book, while rambling and poorly written, do show signs of an interesting story, with different threads that look like they'll converge on the mystery of the murdered girls and the mysterious Archimbaldi. But they don't, and the slow, boring, bumpy ride into the killing fields just leaves us stunned. Maybe that was Bolano's aim, but even if so, it's been done before, in books like Robert Stone's Dog Soldier, and far, far better.
As to comparisons with Kafka's unfinished masterpieces, The Trial and The Castle, that only makes me angry. Those are great novels. This is 900 pages of words that mean nothing. Don't waste your time.