2666 by Roberto Bolano (2011-09-01)

Libros acerca de otros libros suelen perderse en sus proprios signos. Pero lo que Bolaño hace és diferente, un exercicio intelectual y todavia cardiovascular. Una obra maestra contemporanea. Que los Detectives y el Nocturno e todo mas estea en español para Kindle también.

This work, by one of a handful of brilliant writers, spans the whole of the imagination. Clearly without equal, the late Robeto Bolano, has made concrete dreams and razor edged light seem commonplace. Pervasive, funny and savage all at the same instant

It is an excellent book to understand the lives of artists and the faculty involved in the arts. It spans the globe with modern problems and lives in transition. Bolano makes the world in this work of fiction seem current and real.

My review is admittedly influenced by the fact that I had never read the author previously and did not know what to expect. It is a very long read, with sections which require perseverance to get through. The run-on sentence style can be distracting. But 2666 is also not without rewards. Bolano has a truly unique way of describing things and presenting characters. The stories often go in directions that are unexpected and imaginative. And Bolano ties these diverse stories together, albeit loosely, in the end.

Am still working my way through this work. I ordered the three volume edition so I could carry it with me on buses and subways. An incredible monument to 20th century literature. Can't really describe the puree of magical realism, true crime, and surrealism, but see Patti Smith's 3 part review on her website. A major achievement.

A masterpiece of modern fiction based on the same theme as The Counselor written by Cormac McCarthy who is making his own reply to Bolano and to his own Blood Meridian and to all of us who still don't get it. Ciudad Juarez and the murdered girls and young women who star in the snuff movies, are sex slaves, or just victims of serial killers that the Mexican govt does nothing to really stop as they are in cahoots with the drug cartels. So remember all that when you sniff some, smoke some Columbian, watch a snuff film or hard core porno films. You think the girls in them are free? Walking around free? Watchers are part of the problem.

My guess is that there are few writers of literary fiction who read Roberto Bolano's 2666 that will not be measurably influenced by the velocity and polyphonic range of this work's narrative. The finest art often tilts the perception of how one sees. As 2666 surely does.

Think huge, Dickensian in complexity, at times surreal and beautiful and
at others chilling and sad. I consider it a masterpiece of the wise author's words and the traslator as well. The novel as art. Just so stagerring in it's enormity and imagination. You must invest in it true,
but if you love literature, you must read it. One for the ages.

This book changed how I view literature. I completely understand why others don't care for it, and that's fine. But for me, this is the most important book that I've ever experienced, and I'm currently on my 3rd read through.

This book changed how I view literature. I completely understand why others don't care for it, and that's fine. But for me, this is the most important book that I've ever experienced, and I'm currently on my 3rd read through.

Un libro probablemente escaneado, sin ningún tipo de corrección de estilo y corrección de errores ortográficos. Esta es una desventaja con los libros electrónicos subidos en the store, ya que no han pasado por alguna editorial que garantice una buena calidad del texto. Es lamentable que esto ocurra, y grandes libros de la literatura se vean afectados por este fenómeno.

Undeveloped characters drift, unmotivated, through meaningless situations.

They don't have emotions, but they see or dream things that might be symbolic, of something, or might not.

You might get an 'A' if you write a properly contrived essay about it for a properly gullible literature professor.

Otherwise, what's the point?

I was comparing the English translation of 2666 with the Spanish original, and I was quite disappointed to see that on pg. 191, the name of art critic Calvin Tomkins has been written incorrectly after the first occurrence (line 7 and 18).

In the English translation of 2666 (pg. 318) the name of one character, Omar Abdul, is written as Oscar Abdul; (pg. 525) the name of one character, Luisa Cardona, is written as Laura Cardona.

I don't understand how someone would think people would buy this in a series of 5 books. I found it very confusing, nothing came together and I finally put it down after finishing the first four books. What was it that the critics liked?

Horrible! Una basura! Una verborrea sin sentido. Consideré dejar de leerlo cuando había leído una tercera parte del libro. No lo deje de leer porque a consecuencia del huracán Maria en mi isla, y la falta de luz e internet, leí todo lo que tuve a la mano incluyendo este libro, Me tomó mucho tiempo forzarme a leerlo. Una perdida de tiempo.

The package was in time and they took extra care. Thanks guys

P.S.

I did not start reading the book, saving for spring (common park, a blanket and the book what a girl can ask for more? :)

I was really looking forward to reading "2666." Not only did this book make the 2008 top-10 list of just about every fiction critic in the country, but the book's ostensible subject matter, the unsolved rape/murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican state of Sonora, certainly deserves serious literary attention. It took me two months to read, however, and while parts of it were interesting, even compelling, most of it was a slog, and there never comes a point at which it all came together in any way at all for me, let alone one that cried "genius."

I fully admit that Bolano is smarter and better-read than I am. So is Umberto Eco. But when Eco starts rattling off the names of other literary works, as he does with some frequency in, say, "Foucault's Pendulum," it always feels like it's relevant to the plot. In "2666," it feels like Bolano is just throwing out laundry lists of literature, philosophy, art, history, and even biology and math, solely to impress you with the depth and breadth of his knowledge. It may or may not relate to the plot, which isn't surprising, since there really isn't much of a plot. The five books that make up this volume are only loosely related, and even within the different books, there is not always much cohesion. Bolano will start out talking about one or more characters, but the minute he sees the literary equivalent of a shiny object, he runs off after it. While chasing said shiny object, he may see another shiny object and abandon the chase for the first one. At some point, he might remember what he was doing before he wandered off-course, but not always. The writing is very stream-of-consciousness with lots of accounts of people's dreams. If you don't mind rambling thoughts and "deep" philosophy that goes on for so long that when he does occasionally return to an early character you find yourself wondering who he's talking about, you might be enchanted. But if you need to have characters that you love or like, or even ones you hate, you're out of luck here.

As an example of the character problem, let's take Book 1, which focuses on four scholars who are obsessed with the works of an obscure German writer named Archimboldi. Three of the scholars are male, and all are in love with the one female scholar, although I was never sure why, since Bolano doesn't give her any traits that would seem to inspire that level of devotion. Two of the three men are completely interchangable -- other than the fact that one is Spanish and one is French, they might be the same person. Maybe that was the point, but if so, I missed it. The third one is Italian and in a wheelchair. Otherwise, he is just as sketchily drawn. I didn't like them, I didn't dislike them. I just didn't care about them and when their story suddenly ended, along with Book 1, never to be taken up again, I wondered why Bolano had wasted so much time with them.

Books 2 & 3 fare somewhat better, but Bolano can't stick with the interesting characters. I loved Book 3 when it dealt with Oscar Fate, a writer who gets roped into covering a boxing match in Sonora for his magazine when the sports writer dies, but first Oscar has to spend 75 pages or so with a formerly jailed black radical for no apparent reason. Then it's on to Mexico, where the raped/murdered women still rate barely a sentence background mention. We finally get to those women in Book 4. Boy do we get to them.

Book 4 is l...o...n...g and, as others have noted, filled with lots of gruesome and sad details about the girls & women who've been raped and murdered. At first I thought, "yes -- someone is giving these women an identity and a voice," but after awhile there are so many of them, and so little story to them, that you stop caring. Again, this could be the point. There are some interesting characters in this section, but there are so many people, it's hard to know who or what is important. Maybe none of it is. And when Bolano talks about how the American police profiler was always referred to at home in the U.S. by his young lawyer and doctor neighbors as Mr. ______, you doubt he even knows what he's talking about. Is anyone in your neighborhood under retirement age referred to by everyone else as Mr.? Bolano has clearly read a lot, but it feels like most of what he's writing about he learned in books, rather than by experience, and it creates a sense of distance that doesn't seem intentional but is off-putting nevertheless.

The final book is about Archimboldi's days as a strange, young German named Hans Reiter, but the story wanders all over Romania and Russia with a lot of divergences, most of them unconvincing. I kept waiting for Bolano to tie it all together, but he never did. Ultimately, the book seemed to be a portrait of despair and indifference, which was represented at its most perfect by Sonora.

As a final warning to potential readers, the middle three books are written without paragraphs, and sections often go on for pages. There is even a sentence at one point that is about 5 pages long. 900 pages is not actually that long a book, but those pages are extremely dense and the translation is grammatically awkward in places, making it slower-going still.

If you like rambling, philosophical musings, and don't mind characters, stories and events that just end whenever the writer gets tired of exploring them, you're not in a hurry when you read, and you don't mind reading being hard work, you might like this book. Certainly a lot of people did. I just wasn't one of them.

As any reader would tell you, in America, every reader of literature is in search of the Great American Novel, every reviewer tries to proclaim one work, or another to be almost there, but it always seems to fall short. Post-Modernist of late have been holding the praise, I say this do to the recent death of David Foster Wallace, whose major, nearly unreadable tome Infinite Jest played more like the Emperor's New Clothes to reviewers, than an actual work that examined anything of life and meaning and the world (At least not in the clear and lucid prose that you find here).

Roberto Bolano was a great writer because, unlike the writers in America who take on large scopes, Jonathan Franzen etc., Roberto Bolano believed in the power of the written word. While American writers cried they didn't have an audience and people weren't reading, Roberto Bolano's books delcared the eternal importance of literature, and writing, while at the same time, showing it in both its gritty realism (poverty) and its heaped of forgotteness (writers of importance who may one day become relevant).

This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious, never do you feel a word was misused or overused, never, as you do with a lot of books that write in the style that Roberto Bolano seemed to perfect, do you feel that he was ever trying to write in the way he was wriitng. Reading 2666, reading any of his works, you feel as if he sat down and what came out came out, as if you're reading a work right from his mind. A writer once said, "Writing's easy, all you have to do is sit down and open a vein," and that's what Roberto Bolano did.

The Critic Section is entertaining, a high praise to literature. Though many critics have pointed out that its second feels disjointed and a bit awkward, I'd be hard press to find such a book that created an interesting beginning about what potentially could've been an uninteresting subject (this seems to be Roberto Bolano's greatest ability, Nazi Literature in the America's, a fictional encyclopedia of far right authors). The Part about Amalfitano had a beautiful allure and moved quickly.

I don't want to give blurbs for each part, it trivializes this great work, there is no doubt if I were talk freely about each part in this review it would be a second book. When I first found Bolano, I came to him, not without urging, but not wanting to commit myself to a six hundred page brick of a book about Spanish Poets called the Savage Detectives right off the bat, so I decided to get Amulet, only because it was cheap and I had a thirty percent off coupon. I read the book in six hours and thought there couldn't be anything more special. I read his book of short stories Last Evenings On Earth and thought the urgency and brilliance of his words shows an aptitude that I haven't seen in a long time in literature. His works renewed a zeal, that feeling one gets when they're reading something they hadn't known existed. I went to the Savage Detectives quickly, and if there wasn't a great Novel of the 21st century, this was certainly it--Not American, not Latin American, Not French or Asian--but a novel, a brilliant work of fiction, from Bolano's mind to the page. A novel which broke rules that seemed so impossible to break and did it in such a way it was too beautiful to ignore. Now this book, 2666, a behemouth, a dying man's last work, a work he fought hard to get done, and left partially unfinished (though you really can't tell). This work, we can all hope, is the beginning of something, and not the final statement of a dead man, but the awakening statement to a world of writers to stop chasing the Great French or American or Mexican or Canadian or Chinese novel, and start writing the Great World Novel. This is what 2666 is, the first and maybe only great world novel. It eclipses his former works and unites them in a way that no other novel has probably ever done for an authors body of work. It came in the 21st century. It's either a start of something great to come, or the remnants of the end of the 20th century. I hope for the former, fear the latter.

Buy this book, devour it, and enjoy. It deserves to be read by anyone who has ever read a book of literature and found themselves tired with the latest strand of same old same old literary fodder. This book steps out, its a blood letting for the masses, its a speedball ride into the lurid and entertaining, into the frightening and the joyful, into the horrors of this world and into its beauties. It's a portrait and serial, pulp and high form, horrorific journalism and perfected prose, lucid and direct, a work that will have you finish and turn to the front page to start over again.

When all the professional reviewers - from Oprah's "O" magazine to the highbrow (some, not I, say elitist) New York Review of Books are all, to a one, thinking and writing the exact same thing about a book (or anything, for that matter) the chances are very high that some of them are NOT thinking at all, merely going along with the absurdly proliferative plaudits of this confused and confusing work as a "masterpiece," afraid of contradicting the self-appointed high priests in the literary establishment. So I find it to be upon spending over a week engrossed in the work and finally finishing it.

The biggest problem with the work for me is that it is simply not well-written by my own - no doubt idiosyncratic -standards. It is - as other the store reviewers have pointed out - written in a type of journalese. There is absolutely no stylistic virtuosity to it. The second problem I have with the work with it is that I do not buy into the argument for the worth of the longest and central chapter in the book - Chapter 4 - wherein the endless rapes and murders in the Mexican border town called Santa Teresa in the novel are recounted and recounted and recounted. The argument goes something like this: "By taking the reader on a crass, vulgar, mind-numbingly brutal journey of nearly 400 pages, Bolano masterfully enlightens the reader as to the crass, vulgar, mind-numbingly brutal nature of a certain part of the world at a certain time, which, in turn, serves as synecdoche for the entire world as it exists today." No, it doesn't. It's merely wearisome reportage. This is not the way we all live now. In fact, there simply is no such thing as the way WE ALL live now. And since all the other chapters lead, in one way or another, back to Chapter 4, this leads me to question the entire premise of the work.

But wait! There is no premise. 2666 is the mystical, verbal titular amulet here. Nobody knows what it means, though there are some very strained educated guesses in the reviews and in Wikipedia. What a great way to wow the critics - "We have here in this book a revelation so recondite and profound that it cannot be put into words." What rubbish!

But, to return, finally, to the writing: All this literary silliness might be at least in part excusable if the book were well-penned. If you like your literary masterpieces to resemble journalism tinged with a rather daft magical realism, then perhaps Bolano shall enthrall you - "enthrall" meant literally here.

Towards the end of Chapter 2, Bolano has one of his characters expostulating: "I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time. Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. I don't know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry - and let me be clear, only some of it - is good for you, only poetry isn't merde." (French substitution made in order that the store will post this review.)

But you won't find any real poetry here, reader. And if you believe that this is the whole point behind 900 pages of distinctly non-literary masochism, then take the plunge into this monument to pretentious mediocrity.

Somewhere I read an essay that talked about the big, fat difficult novels of the 20th century and how we sell ourselves short in failing to read them because of their length. The list of writers included David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, William Vollman and Roberto Bolano amongst others.
I downloaded 2666 having no expectations but after a week decided to google Bolano and some of the reviews. I was enjoying the first part of the book. Bolano's "academics" were quirky and their interest in the erudite and obscure Benno von Archimboldi drew me in with it's humor. (Yes, these 4 literary critics had no sense of humor and I smiled through the first section). The section ends and like people you meet on vacation you never hear from them again. The second part takes you to Santa Teresa, a doppelgänger for Ciudad Jauarez where we meet a professor and his daughter and we begin to hear about killings of women. In the third part we meet an American journalist who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match but becomes interested in the crimes. In the fourth part we learn about the murders. Bolano describes 100s of murders, their age, physical description, what they were wearing and where they were found. Sometimes he adds the little biographical details that the newspapers reported. We meet the detectives who try to solve each murder till they realize that these are both serial murders mixed in with crimes of passion, domestic crimes, gang violence, organized crime and senseless drive-bys. What they all have in common is that the victims are all women. The last part is about Archimboldi, a physically imposingly tall German, the author our critics were looking for in the first part of the book. It is not a spoiler to tell you that Archimboldi ends up in Santa Teresa but after 900+ pages I was delighted how the 5 stories sort of come together. It's not wrapped up with a pretty ribbon. Bolano gives you plenty to wonder about along the way while he keeps a good pace.
I remember the murders of Ciudad Juarez and the sheer numbers Both shocked and inured me. Bolano, born in Chile, raised in Mexico and moved to Spain never went to Ciudad Juarez. Santa Teresa is fictional but he describes ever neighborhood as if he fact checked with a map. We crisscross this imaginary city, read about his imaginary girls and women and Santa Teresa, on the border of Mexico and Tucson is as real as Juarez on the border near El Paso.
This is not a difficult book to read but it's look at a culture that so disregards women that anybody can kill a woman and the odds of getting away with it are pretty good. This made it a very hard book to think about.
Is Benno Archimboldi our author in disguise. Oh what a thought but no. This is not autobiography but the challenges of getting published, getting reviewed "critically", getting read and actually making a living as a writer are part of this great adventure.
Oh...I didn't talk about WWII. Read the book.

"A torrential work that blazes paths into the unknown...A book to spur us on, amid blood and motral wounds and stench..." Already on my list of favorite books of all time, 2666 is a masterpiece of literary fiction. Five books linked together through motifs and themes, through a small Mexican city...A breathtaking true work of art. I cannot praise this book highly enough. Even though there are five books within the massive 2666, I had forgotten that nearly halfway through, because every one of the books inside has multiple protagonists, multiple flowing storylines, and more than anything, there is a feeling that twists me up inside and carries me from one page to the next. So it felt like it all belonged together. Like having them together was necessary.

There is no doubt in my mind that this book will be studied and revered more and more decade by decade. It's complexities and meandering story will scare off a lot of readers. In one of the middle books, I nearly threw the book at the wall (not really, but it was something like that), because I grew frustrated at how every other page, every mini-chapter, became ultra repetitive. I wanted to quit. It isn't an easy read. But it is astounding and rewarding and moving the way proper art should be. It makes you ponder the world and our place in it. I realized how stupid I was being, and I am so glad I continued reading, even after I was sure Bolano had dropped the ball.

There isn't anything formulaic in here. The prose is very poetic at times(Bolano was known more as a poet, I think...) and he experiments with writing throughout to make you feel what the protagonists are feeling. It is a love letter to writing, to reading, and it is a warning as well. Warning us of ourselves and revealing the darkest and brightest parts of the human experience, and how that shapes us.

Look, I realize I am rambling. This book is the 100 Years of Solitude for the next generation. It is important in the literary canon. Especially for South American writers. But having said that, I have to admit, is underselling it. It is completely unique to itself. It is above all else, inspiring. I want to read it again right now. You should too.

Due to the accolades this book had received, I refused to give up on it despite my increasing frustration. I kept looking for the gold and never found it. Finally, two-thirds of the way through, I quit. I found it to be boring, repetitive, pointless, misogynistic, indulgent blather and not worth my time. I don't have enough days on this earth to waste on such overrated drivel. I can see how this might have been written by a very ill man.