2666: A Novel

finishing 2666 leaves you both glad its over and wanting more. Bolano's final work is a true capstone; worthy of the praise heaped on it and yet still imperfect, flawed in some ways that almost make the book better. But I get ahead of myself.

The book is divided into 5 sections; each one orbits around parts of the story. Santa Teresa, and to a lesser degree, the enigmatic author Archimboldi for the center of the mass.

The first book, "The Part About the Critics", is, by far, the "happiest" part and, to me, the most enjoyable. Bolano is laying the groundwork for his apocalyptic story. Here we see 4 critics slowly loose themselves; first in the work of another and then in general. We also hear whispers of the the deaths of women.

The second book, "The Part about Amalfitano" deals will a character introduced in the first part; a professor in Santa Teresa. Here, the hell is different, its the mind that goes.

The third book, "The Part About Fate" holds up the funhouse mirror to the world; what we find important (or don't). It's as much a critique on society as it is our introduction to the anti-christ character (or as close as one can come in literature without coming out and naming a person as such). Klaus Haas is this person. Maybe a killer, maybe not. Detached and cool he takes control, he is control and he may or may not be beyond human. Its also in this book that I began to feel that the 2666 was incomplete. The third book felt like parts were missing.

The fourth book, "The Part About the Crimes" is the where the book both comes into itself and begins to drag on. Here we learn all about the murder of women in Santa Teresa. Almost every entry reads like a police blotter. Interspersed are stories that meander and eventually get lost or simply die out. This book is both numbing in the way death becomes present in everything, and almost too much; too rich in detail. Throughout it all we keep coming back to Klaus; he is the murders even if he is not the murderer. You feel that he, and no one else, controls all. Still, this book was too long and to a degree, too much. It feels like another pass with an editor would have done wonders.

The fifth book, "The Part About Archimboldi" ties together some of the threads (only a few) and leaves even more left open. Here we go back to WW2; revisiting hell in both Germany and Russia. Again we have the almost workmanlike, reportage style of writing. In some ways this distance feels good; we aren't getting our hands too dirty. Then, in this chapter, you remember this is true (in the grand scheme if not in the actual fact).

2666 is a powerful book. Its truly deserving of all the hype and was better than I expected. However it's not without flaws. A good edit would help a lot. Still, even with that, this is a book not to be missed. Its dark, its a vision of the earth that leaves no room for hope, and it's compelling.

I absolutely loved this book. It felt like such an accomplishment to get through it, which may have largely added to why I felt so great when I finished it.

There are many different story lines running through this book. The biggest questions being, "Who is murdering these girls in Mexico?" You'll meet many different characters. Sometimes, the pace is really slow. I personally loved section four where it listed all of the different police reports of the murders. (Maybe because I was coming at it from a psychological angle?) I found myself very horrified at the beginning of this section, with all of the details of the crimes. By the end, I had heard of so many murders, they all sounded the same, and it was almost like I was numb. The part of my mind that should feel a surge of emotion was practically desensitized to the gruesomeness. I am not 100% sure that this was the effect Bolano was going for, but considering Americans hear about so much violence every day, it wouldn't surprise me if this was his intention.

I won't lie- this is a hard book. You'll spend many moments wanting to put it down. It may also not be for you. My mother just couldn't get into it. If you like dark, twisted, surreal roller coasters, however, give this a chance. In my opinion, this is truly a masterpiece!

Let me be totally clear, I am not an English major or a writer. This fact is important because I feel all the hype around this book came from people with those types of credentials who value the book for its literary merit an not its actual story. Be warned the book was not finished prior to the authors death and so you will get no resolution on most of the plot points, which I found to be extremely frustrating. I slogged through the nearly 1,000 pages out of pure spite, but I want to save you from the same Herculean feat. The stories that do intertwine are interesting but not satisfying and the large portion of the book that is dedicated to describing the rapes and murders of women in Mexico is disturbing at best. If you are a literature professor or an intellectual trying to prove your smarts, then feel free to pick this one up, but anyone else should stay away. Get your mystery fix with Ready Player One or an Agatha Christie novel instead.

Deeply rich with points and counterpoints, side stories, main stories, and a host of ways to explore this 900 page book the reader can often get lost thinking about the counterpoints that they are reading. This is not a typical book, there are no happy endings here, nothing gets tidied up, and few things get resolved. What the book does provide though is a rich context, nearly luxurious in its writing, it is like slipping into an alternative universe where we are both better than we really are and stranger than we really are.

The book is written in the third person, we learn the story from the view point of being told what the points in the story are. You don't have to think about what is being said, rather you starting thinking what you would do in a similar situation, how you would do the same thing. That is the beauty of this book, it is deeply internalizable, you sympathize, you learn with the characters. There is nothing monotonous about the book, but you will find yourself getting emotionally involved with the characters throughout the five stories in the book. That is what great literature is about, getting involved, finding a connection, understanding where the characters are coming from because they hit an emotional nerve on the part of the reader. This book certainly did that for me, I found myself becoming emotionally involved, and rereading sections of the book to see if I could find more, learn more, understand the situation better as the story line becomes your own.

Overall I found the book compelling, long, thought provoking. Few books reach this standard, and unfortunately this is the last book from Roberto Bolaño. Sad, but if you are going to leave a legacy, this is the book you want to leave. Well worth buying, make sure you have the time to read it if you do. Some will fade out after the first story, but if you want to stretch your imagination, and have a book that you can lose yourself in, this is the book you want to get.

2666, originally published in Spanish in 2003, is the last novel of Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre, completed just before his death of that same year. Translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2008, the deceased Chilean author's 900-page magnum opus has, since its November 11th release in the United States, received unanimous acclaim. TIME, for instance, proclaimed it the best novel of 2008 as did The New York Times, setting it beside four others. Some are considering it the entire re-invention of the novel...the novel not of America, no...it's not the next great American novel, nor is it the next great Latin American novel, not anything like that...the novel of the WORLD (as someone else has said here). The next great World novel. The Book is around 900 pages and is separated into 5 parts, all of which are distinctive by themselves with their own set of characters but connect together in a gigantic thematic web reaching across the tome's pages. And the pages themselves across the entire world.

Much of the novel is centered around what Bolaño called "The World's Graveyard," Ciudad Juarez, which is given, in the book, the fictionalized name "Santa Teresa," an industrial city on the border of Mexico and the US. There, for the past 10 years or so, women have been subject to a growing number of serial killings, more than 500 documented thus far. The novel consists of five separate, overlapping story arcs, each, in subtle ways, more dark and violent than the one preceding, that is, until the fourth part "The Part About the Crimes," the climax, where some 200 dead women are documented in the fashion of a police or autopsy report with flat, objective prose. It's this lack of emotion in the telling of the horrible violence that ironically brings forth sympathy from the reader. It's a dark outlook on the violence present in humanity, especially that in Mexico which often is brushed aside. Is this the first time YOU'VE ever heard of Ciudad Juarez?

And, yet, just as well, it is a meditation on literature. Each section's main characters are scholars, professors, journalists, novelists, &c., and it's through these narratives that Bolaño expresses his own feelings of current writing. He felt that too much literature isn't as free-wheeling and raw as it should be. Or that the risky works aren't read as much as they should. Or that there are too many rules for ambitious writers. Rules that Bolaño disregards. Writing is not a perfected art and should never be created with that type of goal in mind for the end product. 2666 isn't perfect; in fact, it's an ugly and messy and battled work of art, so anyone who reads 2666 should expect Lynchian non-sequiturs, digressions galore, and unanswered questions. If none of the above is "your thing," this book you should, at all costs, stay away from. In it, a character Amifaltano thinks the following:

"Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

--I don't doubt this quote will become a classic one as I've seen it in most every review I've read so far.

It's the epitome of what Literature is supposed to do, and what most don't. "Masterpiece," "spellbinding," "wonderful," blah blah blah...but most importanly, it is: a testament of what literature can truly do. And that, Bolaño has proven, is a lot.

If there was a point to this novel, I could not decipher it. I'm willing to admit this personal shortcoming, but I'm just egotistical enough to dismiss it as a jumbled collection of strung together concepts. The kind of random ramblings a literary genius writes as his brain misfires, starved for oxygen, or overwhelmed by his own toxic blood as tries to make sense of death.

Being a speed reader, I may have not spent enough time "digesting" the words to allow them to absorb completely, but regardless, my opinion is my own. My opinion is the majority of the words are so much filler. While there are some beautiful tapestries painted by the words as translated by Natasha Wimmer, the majority are annoying details, provided for no known reason. If there is any rhyme or reason, it seems to be to communicate the author's own grief, which is constant and nullifying. The plot of the book, a string of serial killings, seems like an excuse to keep on writing. There is no end or progression to the theme. Just a constant retelling, with a painfully slow revealing of trivial details.

Considering the author's motivations, which were to support his children and to release the book slowly across a period of 25+ years, I think the result is pretty transparent. It's almost as if the author believes that he can extend his own life by giving himself a unending task. Do not submit yourself to his toil.

I don't understand the fear of big books, December 13, 2009
By Jakfo (NJ USA) - See all my reviews

I refrain from writing reviews but was prompted by the many reviews of 2666 that referred to its daunting length as a negative and comments about the novel's inherent intimidating time consuming task a reader faces to get through the book. I have a different opinion, a positive opinion about 2666.

2666 is a masterpiece of powerful writing by way of its narrative form and style and its overall originality in all aspects as a novel. 2666 is "new" in its form and content, enabling it to explore profoundly the multitude contemporary society and relate as well to universal human conditions. 2666 is a global novel; its places of action are located throughout the world. Yet its portrayal of contemporary Mexico in all its corruption and murderous dangers reveals that nation as socially, legally and morally collapsing through its drug driven outlaw conditions. Mexico is reflected as a self destructive nation servicing America's decadence and drug dependencies with serial sociopathic homicidal will. What the world media refuses to probe in our present global amoral society, Bolano voices with an artist's clarity by examining the reasons and behaviors of a world without a moral compass. The multitude of locations wonderfully universalizes the state of amorality Bolano observes through the world in his novel. The interrelation of the world as macrocosm and Mexico as microcosm work wonderfully as structural and narrative organizing devices that relay Bolano's artistic vision and voice. In fact, 2666 is truly a very serious, epic, original novel; it ranks in the realm of great serious world literature.

Finally, I will warn anyone reading this review, I have no issue with length in a novel and I hate, a strong accurate word, boring novels--they waste my time and life. I have read and loved and recommend War and Peace, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Recognitions, You Bright and Risen Angels, Infinite Jest--Gravity's Rainbow was ok, liked V better--among others. I take reading seriously. I take Bolano seriously. To me, size only matters when after you finish a book you deeply appreciate, you feel empty and nervous, concerned that the book is done and you won't be able to find another that can match its creativity, imagination, originality and the absorbing entertainment it gave as a great story and as a work of art. I could have and would have enjoyed reading 2666 if it was double or triple the size--my only option after finishing 2666 was to read all of Bolano's other works, which I did.

The only size truly matters is when a book is boring, then 1 page or 1000 pages is too many.

Forget the size, read 2666 for a very big, original story written by a literary genius.

Engrossing many-threaded story with few neat endings. Many great characters kept drawing me in. The longest section, Part 4, a fast cutting litany of femicides leaves me with the idea that extending the idea of Murder on the Orient Express the killers may be an entire society.

Roberto Bolaño is an iconoclast among Latin American authors. While many have hailed him as the successor to the Colombian firebrand Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Chilean author's literary oeuvre suffers to be pigeonholed within the school of magical realism pioneered and extensively explored by the former. In fact, Bolaño shares more in common with the brand of cosmopolitan meta-fiction championed by the Argentineans Julio Cortázar (the random chapters of Hopscotch, their structure, or lack of it thereof) and Jorge Luis Borges (a fiction within a fiction, the paradoxically terse, yet labyrinthine scope of his writing).

Bolaño's writing not only divagates from the Boom archetypes of Spanish American literature; it also rakes a new path for the continent's new writers to explore a post-nationalist, generational paradigm shift in Hispanic though and culture without standing under the shadow of Marquez and contemporaries like Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. Nowhere else is his writing more decadently sampled than with his major novels--The Savage Detectives and his magnum opus, 2666, both translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 2666, the author's posthumously published novel, garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2008. This massive, well-stuffed tome ingeniously covers a great deal of terrain that deals with a diverse pool of 21st century themes and tropes without ever providing closure--which, in a way, perhaps represents the most rewarding aspect of this novel.

The meandering storyline of 2666 plunges the mind into somnambulating within a world of quasi-surrealist dreams, entombing us within a parallel reality that "terrifies us all...amid blood and mortal wounds and stench." Indeed, what Bolaño accomplishes within the massive scope of his curiously varied literary terrain drowns us in the flood of questions--questions that urge us to digest on the tragic motifs of our broken humanity. Scenes exist in 2666 where the author waxes on that which is utterly grotesque and nauseating that we are awakened to a reminder of how we now live in an age that has become brutal by convention.

The novel is not seamless. It is a murder mystery, a fictional biography, a bibliophilic compendium of writers, and most of all a chronicle of the secret and parallel lives of Bolaño's fascinating characters who eventually converge to the city of Santa Teresa, Mexico. Within the sweep of its voluble, disturbing, experimental, and poetic prose, the author manages to create a stark contrast between a monochromatic and barren literary desert that is studded with the grotesque and the unnatural. His writing is verbose (some sentences tend to run for lines on end) and executed with a reckless abandon, but at the same time it is also dry and digressive; there is an abundance of characters who enrich the fictional landscape with their idiosyncrasies. Yet, he seems to ascribe little feeling to them, allowing the majority to wander about faceless. There are a few exceptions, however. Those that he does award with more than what is sparsely informative takes us across a whirlwind of images and dreams that push us further into unknown paths hemmed by obscure, shady, yet paradoxically drawing and lucid images.

The novel is divided into five distinct parts. The first book narrates a story about four obsessive academics who venture on a fruitless quest searching for the identity of the brilliant, mysterious, and elusive Thomas Pynchon-like persona Benno von Archimboldi. The trail leads them to Santa Teresa. At one point in this quixotic journey, the search is regarded as futile; the academics are then hinted about a wave of crimes that have ravaged the city. The next book tells the tale of a professor of letters in the University of Santa Teresa; he is a critic of the town's degenerate corruption, yet he is at the same time inescapably trapped within like a permanent fixture. Outside of his profession, his mind is rendered into a dull, drab graveyard apathetic to the ebb and flow of life. The third section introduces us to a New York sports writer who is sent to the city of Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match.

For the next three hundred pages, the novel turns into a dark and macabre vignette of impersonal images of death. Women are brutally murdered, raped, and nonchalantly disposed in the city, the desert, and the public areas of this drug cartel-infested cesspool. The women are either clandestine whores or helpless maquiladora (factory) workers who have come to the thriving industrial scene of Santa Teresa in search of money. For years, the crimes remain unsolved, and in the end, they never are. The fifth and last section is perhaps the finest and best crafted of the five novellas, revealing to us finally the identity of Benno von Archimboldi in a narrative that likewise reveals the true story of 2666.

While the five books within this novel paint a surreal picture within Bolaño's fictional universe, we are likewise able to draw parallelisms between his world and ours. For instance, the city of Santa Teresa that serves as its spatial locus strongly mirrors Mexico's Ciudad Juárez. But it is more than just that. It is a hell, a black hole that draws migrants to slave in foreign-owned maquiladoras that exploit them in the service of a global economic order oiled by the capitalist machinations of affluent industrialists. Santa Teresa is symbolic of the backroom where much of the real activity happens--the warehouse, the production line, the intricate system of cogs that keep the Western world afloat with an unjustly arrogated affluence. Like a black hole, it inevitably draws people into a promise of wealth that is coeval with the corruptive, fetid stench of a system stained by greed. Yet we are tempted to keep rummaging, to continue in our quest for moral ideals buried in Bolaño's fictional pandemonium.

One can perhaps say that the language and the style of this novel are ultimately difficult to ascribe into a defined, literary structure. The author deftly alternates between terse glimpses and an excessive, dizzying decadence. Some passages are spiked with a sparse sprinkling of adjectives, and later are deliberately ornamented with a copious outpouring of word paints that leave an abundance of open-ended questions about Bolaño's intentions in character, space, and plot. There is the constant presence of the simile and the metaphor. There is chaos and madness, and ironically there is order and beauty within this madness, challenging us to inspect the map of his jagged fiction with a lens focused on the author's construction of human aesthetics.

Throughout the novel's massive scope, Bolaño communicates a need to address the unexplored recesses of these morbid reveries through a deranged, corruptive maelstrom where reflections of reality become clearer as we wander across the mystical, metaphoric planes of these fabricated dreams. It is in the unexplained and the unknown that we must feel our way across the whispers, the muted details, and the wraith-like allusions in search for a glimmer of light in the pervasive darkness. While redemption is an absent feature in this novel, we are made even more aware of its rare and illuminating beauty in a novel preponderated by blackness and pain. The reader is invited and even coerced to grovel submissively into the grotesque and the grim asked only by the very greatest of books, and we awaken...more aware of the flaws of our broken humanity.

Roberto Bolano's last novel, 2666, evokes so much of life even as it seems to violate form and content prescriptions for writing fiction. It is also a page turner despite its length and the often violent nature of one subtext related to the ongoing unsolved murders of so many young Mexican women, many of whom are poor factory workers. The novel simultaneously embraces literature, encompasses details of contemporary life, and evokes universality.

Professor Mitchell's summary review offers a larger outline of sorts of the books five parts, but I would like to offer a few sections that show readers details behind the more abstract words of praise.

The first part about critics lays bare many problems with current academic literary criticism - its isolated and isolating search for an obscure author who ostensibly "reveals" life, who might become the Nobel recipient, but who is elusive and thus prized or at least greatly discussed in academic circles. The supposed little known German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, becomes the singular life focus of certain critics (from France, Spain, and England as well as Italy) about whom they publish and give talks at conferences. Their personal lives become intensely intertwined as they write about and then search for Archimboldi which becomes, in effect, a search for meaning in their own lives. Near the end of this first section, three of the critics arrive in back-water northern Mexico (University of Santa Teresa), meet a professor there, Amalfitano, supposedly another Archimboldi expert. They initially judge him with the following long sentence in typical Bolano style where he breaks most grammar rules yet yields something more:

"The first impression the critics had was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the awful terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border." (pg. 114)

Bolano ends the paragraph by describing the critics' perceptions: two saw him as failed because though he [Chilean-born, they discovered later] had lived and taught in Europe but had not developed have the necessary tough veneer and "his innate gentleness gave him away in the act." One thought him a sad person whose life was slipping away quickly.

Shortly thereafter in the same first section follows another Bolano extended passage (pgs 120-23), this time as Amalfitano responds to the critics' discussion about Latin American intellectuals. He says that many Mexican (and Latin American) intellectuals just wanted to get by whereas some were more interested in writing. As the critics ask what he means, Amalfitano launches into a three-page discourse on intellectuals there and in Europe, their means of support, particularly state support and university jobs in which they lose their way (what he calls their shadow) and often abuse alcohol to forget their lost shadow. And then Amalfitano then begins a long passage that echoes not only Shakespeare and Plato but also life itself:

"And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it. The state is really a proscenium and upstage there's an enormous tube, something like a mine shaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoetic noise, syllables of rage or of seduction or of seductive rage or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads they can't see anything. The only sounds they hear come from deep in the mine. And they translate and reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they hear a hurricane, they try to be eloquent when they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence..." (121-122) Amalifanto's monologue continues about life and art and their intersection for another page or so, to which one critic then merely replies that she doesn't understand a word he's said.

These are only two examples of how Bolano's novel embraces and conveys life in all its complexity. This does not seem like fiction: it mixes art, life, and universal truths. It is worth not only a first read but many more.
2666: A Novel

Reading this book was an odd experience. I would read some pages, then re-read them because what was being said, or the brilliance with which it was said, was nothing short of genius. Some of the desolation; whether it was done through landscape, murders, or simply with people's relations, was breathtaking. Then there were other moments when I wondered where the author was taking me, and I would skip ahead a few pages to see. A note: I was not turned off by any of the violence shown in this book, it all seemed standard and never overdone. I will definitely read parts of this book again, but as an overall novel/epic it simply didn't cut it for me (the parts where I got bored were too many).

I read a review of 2666 while sitting in the Dentist office, and being impulsive I pucahsed the book. It took a long time to read, and at some tmes I felt I was plodding through something. But end the end i am glad I stuck it out. You can read thee books in any order, and I even switched between book 4 and 5. I cn see that this is a unfinished piece of work, and maybe someone has done some editting after Bolano died. These books cross reference each other, some characters in one book stay in the same hotel room as characters in another book.
For those of you who make comments about lack of punctuation and paragraphs running togather. Stop being petty. Life is not simple, neither is his book. Read it if you can dedicate the time.

This is a deeply troubling work. Not terrifying, quite, nor horrifying, nor shattering. Instead, demanding. Incriminating. An accusation of the most serious kind. Chilling. Mesmerizing. Giant, as it were.

The only thing I've read which approximates the scope or scale of this novel is War and Peace, but the comparison to War and Peace is a rotten one because if you haven't actually read 2666 yet but have read Tolstoy, such a comparison will give you absolutely the wrong idea.

2666 is a haunting, creeping, threatening, silently (and ever more) dangerous whisper that gradually accumulates, begins to hang in the air, the whisper of death, of all of the deaths of modernity, foremost amongst these the deaths of society and of a particular conception of humanity and civilization. It is not so much a eulogy for the modern project as it is the warning of an impending reckoning, a cold, calculated demand for payment, the calm before a dreadful storm that (thankfully) doesn't actually arrive in the novel's pages, but that continues to color the silence that follows, the certainty of its ultimate arrival at some unknown future date all too clear.

It is an implicit, intuitive, wild summary of existential dread, of the uniquely modern aggregation of history atop which we live, of holocausts and nuclear politics and terrorism and slavery and capitalism and totalitarianism and unrestrained virtuality and uncontrollable sexuality and the tyranny, the utter, utter tyranny of individual and collective human agency, which has proven to be restrainable neither with freedom nor with unfreedom, neither with technology nor through romanticized constructions of the "natural."

It is perhaps the most incriminating thing I've ever read, a pronouncement about the human condition in the age of exponential population growth, encroaching climate change, the unchallenged dominance of capital and the banalization of violence. As a sociologist, I found it to be endlessly illuminating and diverting. As a fan of fiction, I found it to be innovative and surprising. As a professional writer, I found it to be the most willfully "incorrect" body of writing that I ever been unable to put down.

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ADDENDUM:

After reading more of the reviews that have appeared here, particularly those that gave the work just one star, I wanted to add to the review that I wrote above (written immediately after finishing the work).

Many of the one-star reviews complain about a lack of plot, suggest that the individual "books" in the work are unconnected, or talk about a lack of resolution or the absence of central characters. Many also frame their review by saying "Maybe I missed the point, but..."

My response would be that they did indeed miss the point. There is one plot here, and it is in fact coherent. It kept me turning pages throughout the entire work, and the more it came together, the more enthralled (and shocked) I became. There is also one character, the protagonist of the book if you will, that is the fulcrum of said plot. Those who didn't notice the plot and didn't identify the protagonist have indeed "missed the point" entirely, and I can understand why they must be frustrated.

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

Anyone reading the previous reviews should know how difficult this book is to critique. It defies categorization - on purpose. My remarks won't attempt to take a reader through all 5 sections. This book isn't about story or plot, anyway. It's about details. The author absolutely loved details, and he would often stop on a dime and head sideways into something he found delicious and stay there for a paragraph, or a page, or more. Then he'd return, after relishing the minutiae, as if nothing has happened. If the thought of such excursions intimidates you, don't buy this book. Also, if you want a simple plot, followed in a linear manner, and tied up neatly at the end, run from this as fast as you can.
But, if you love language and are willing to give the author his head to plow into unknown regions, ever ready for the mundane and bizarre to be mixed inextricably, then read on. The language is not terribly demanding itself. The style is that of reportage - surprisingly direct for such a steadfastly non-conformist work.
The best reason I can think of to read this book is that it's unlike anything else you'll ever read. I won't attempt to guess what Bolano "meant" as he raced to finish this before dying. But, I will quote a hint that I think he offered toward the end of the final section:
"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 moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness."

the fact is that to suggest that bolaño "finished" this book is basically untrue. he finished the first draft a wildly complex and ambitious 1,000+ page novel a matter of weeks before he died. extraordinarily few published writers would say that having completed a first draft, even of a short story, would qualify the work as "finished." the bottom line is that bolaño is probably the best writer of the period straddling the two centuries and because of this, critics and academics sort of assign masterpiece status to a grand final magnum opus long before it has had any time to be digested. this book was being called his masterpiece in the american press more than a year before the first english language version appeared.

having said all that, i will now say that '2666' is an impressive piece of literature and there are moments of actual brilliance in the book. the first and final books (especially the final book)--the two which are focussed mainly on writers, bolaño's favorite subject and the one at which he is most adept--are very strong and tight and are likely the most successful in the novel. the third book ("the part about fate") starts really weak--i literally found myself thinking, okay, bolaño has finally bitten off more than he can chew in attempting to write a story about a black american in an american idiom--and i was almost ready to give up on it but then, just when you least expect it, it redeems itself and the middle and ending sections of this part are amongst the most affecting and powerful in the novel. what, then, can one say about "the part about the crimes." first of all, one can say that just about every reviewer has gotten it wrong. it is neither the nihilistic, but no less impressive narration of an unspeakable nightmare, nor is it simply a collection of one autopsy report after another. look, the book is clearly about death and particularly bolaño's own looming demise. but bolaño has always shoveled his symbolism down his readers' throats (a somewhat ironic trait in an otherwise deceptively subtle craftsman). there is a lot of death, there is a lot of parody and there is also a lot of humanity and a real presentation of the almost insurmountable challenge that an honest law-enforcement or government official faces in the northern mexican states.

perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the novel and one that would escape all but those very sensitive readers who have not just read, but read, re-read and savoured each of his other works, is his approach to archimboldi in the novel's final part. the bolaño of "savage detectives," "nazi literature . . . ," "distant star" and even "by night in chile" would likely have simply labelled this former german soldier and quasi-nazi as a fascist and thereby dispensed with any discussion of human redemption or the actual complexities of war and human choices. bolaño's sympathetic approach to archimboldi can be read, perhaps, as his final act of making peace with his turbulent and life-and-art-defining past.

No hay que dejarse llevar por el tamano. Esta es una novela compleja pero que capta la atencion del lector por los asesinatos "misteriosos" en una poblacon ficticia de Mexico. Me gusta la modernidad de la novela pues combina la fantasia, de Bolano, con la tragica ola de asesinatos de mujeres en Ciudad Juarez. Las conexiones con la politica y la policia del Mexico actual estan delieadas y desgraciadamente no resueltas (en la vida real). Al igual que "El Gringo Latino," 2666, es una novela que hace meditar hacia donde va Mexico. La recomiendo para todos los interesados en literatura y en la vida actual de Mexico. El Gringo Latino: A Novel (Spanish Edition)

The first and second sections of this five sectioned book work independently of each other in a finely written and lyrical manner. The third section meanders in way that one could accept if there had been some aspect of continuity no matter how obscure to the subsequent chapters. As the reader moves on to the fourth and last sections of the book there is an abrupt flow of imagery and narrative. Its almost a list of things Bolano was considering writing about but never got around to. While I don't expect traditional sequential narratives in my reading choices,(loved Cloud Atlas, Kafka on the Shore, History of Love, One Hundred Years of Solitude for example) this book turned into a list of deaths, a never ending police report, if you will. The beginning lyricism and flow of the novel fizzles out by the end a lost train of thought? I am not sure. I think it was over hyped and "intellectuals" will love parsing its most unstructured and sloppily rendered story as something daring and important, when i fact, it was notes of an unfinished work.

Wouldn't want to write anything on the 2666 material for fear of disclosing something, even a tiny, small phrase or word, that i feel you the reader should not be deprived of the pleasure of discovering yourself.

All I'll say is, that yes, this is most probably the first real masterpiece of this century. Oh no doubt about it.

So what makes a masterpiece?
Here I can write a whole paragraph, but in truth, as I see and feel it, only one thing : at the end, you'd want to meet the writer personally and wish he/she were your friend so that you could discuss his/her work for days and nights on end.
Now how many times have we really felt that about a book?

Too often we murder the meaning of a word by its endless usage. Well I use this word sparingly, so I'll just say that 2666 is BEAUTIFUL.

Before this book came out, I wanted it so badly. I was (and still am) a spanish student in high school, who loved reading and english as much as I loved foreign languages. Although I wasn't ready to undertake reading a 1000 page novel in spanish, I was eagerly anticipating reading a translation of the same novel about spanish-speaking people with troubles in spanish-speaking culture.

Ultimately, when I received 2665 for Christmas 2-3 years ago, My initial response was dissapointed. 6 Months Later, when I finally finished the book, I was confused and jarred. After a year or two of thought (and the reception of an the store.com account) I've finally made my mind up on this complex, mesmerizing novel.

The book is split into 5 separate sections: The Part about the Critics, The Part about Amalfitano, The Part about Hope, The Part about the Crimes, and the Part about Archomboldi.

Among these wandering paragraphs of violence and injustice, the central story is about relationships. The ties, however loose, that can bind us to each other and can bring german authors, anglo-saxon critics, and mexican professors together. It is primarily about the generations of people that have been influenced by a certain german author, Benno Von Archimboldi, an interesting character with an italian name. It is also about the murders of 400+ women in Santa Teresa, based on the real life crimes of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The writing is simplistic, minimalist almost to a flaw, creating a detached, existentialist feeling that at times seems nihilistic. Occasionally, this brevity works to an absolute positive when dealing with such powerful scenes as when the literature critics beat up a taxi driver, or when describing some of the grisly crimes this book is focused on. However, at certain points in the novel, when not much is happening, or the only action is for thematic puroposes, this seemingly care-less writing made me wonder why I should care, too.

Undoubtedly, Bolano has some real talent as an author. It only barely shows in this mammoth of a work.

Many other reviewers have expressed similar thoughts as this: If Bolano hadn't passed away, maybe he could have edited this down to a more interesting plot with better flow, and perhaps mixed some of the elements together.

One of the biggest flaws of the novel is something that probably would have been changed if Bolano were still alive today: the question of Why?

Why did Bolano write this novel? If it were to show people the crimes of Santa Teresa/Ciudad Juarez, the why not write more on that subject? Why is it called 2666? Why did he employ certain devices and not others?

If Bolano were alive, the way a lot of people view this book, even in present condition, could be radically altered. A Verbal explanation of something, any of the mysteries this book presents would be helpful. Until then, we must rely on our own insights, on the symbols that mean things to us.

But the way this novel is presented, right as one gets comfortable in one of the five "parts", that story/plot line ends and a new character is introduced, a new relationship extorted. What this novel lacks most is focus. And without that, it almost turns into incoherent ramblings of a dying man, multiple thoughts and ideas that could have been amazing if slightly more developed, but instead, they remain as one of the many run on sentences or paragraphs that litter the mostly inked pages of this large novel.

*************************************

One quick comment: there is a particularly moving monologue on Page 120 (Hardcover, First Edition) made by Amalfitano about Literature losing to the Television generation. Beautiful. If you can only read one snippet of this book, let it be that.

The reviewers are wrong. There are several things wrong with this book. However the main problem was that I did not look forward to reading it every night so I gave up about halfway through. The words are strung together well enough, but I had trouble envisioning the characters because they were poorly developed. Also to be honest I've read several books that have college professors as main characters and they are nearly as unsuccessful as having authors as main characters. Finally, the book is dpressing.

2666 is an unusual book, in some ways very engaging: an accessible language regardless of a number of style variations; teasingly interesting images, plots, and subplots; ambitious in scope; seemingly honest in trying to lift "a voice against injustice"; a text that accelerates, baffles, incites.

Yet in his worldview Bolano seems to be William Blake's contrary, "without which there can be no progression."

While the two writers share a concern with the problem of evil or the many "errors" in the world, in at least one fundamental way they appear to be polar opposites: Blake, to me, is the quintessential poet of being wholly present, here and now in a holy presence, while Bolano seems one of many who express a broken, "ever becoming" present, the here and now in an unholy presence.

Blake says, "As a man is, so he sees" . . . "Thought is act". . . "We become what we behold" . . . "Will is always Evil. It is pernicious to others or selfish. If God is any thing he is Understanding. He is the Influx from that into the Will . . . Understanding or Thought is not natural to Man it is acquired by means of Suffering & Distress i.e., Experience. Will, Desire, Love, Rage, Envy, & all other Affections are Natural."

With "Affections" run amok in 2666 we are shown the seductive nature of excess that both circumscribes and hollows out one abyss after another, a labyrinth of unenlightened senses, hateful hearts, warped reasons, disturbed imaginations--a global perspective of nightmare asylums, prisons, party ranches. Particularly evident are the abysmal lusts for sex and power, and their infinitely criminal combinations seen in every deviant rape, torture, and murder cataloged in the novel. Conversely, whatever is "good" in the book is being ever subverted, undermined, canceled out, either by the author's abandonment, malevolent fate, animal impulse, or simply the overwhelming weight of malignancy that Bolano chooses to present to his reader. Any form of goodness, he seems to be saying, can only be viewed as an act of sentimentality, against which 2666 appears to be waging war.

However, as Blake implies, it is not primal urges (for survival, sex, power) that are evil but the feral excess that comes from a lack of understanding and subsequent sublimation. A set of human errors depicted in a powerful art form might serve as a healthy negative witness, but error all too impassively depicted, unrefined and unresolved, can slip into its own vortex of negation, art as exercised error itself, an art that eventually spreads into popularized lower forms of mass entertainment which can head underground and undermine first the home and educational system (youth being most vulnerable) and then the broader, more ideal forms of community.

Ironically, Bolano holds up the publisher and booksellers as "pillars" of safe-haven, but saving what? The artist's lifeblood, his freedom, his continued existence? In several characters such as Ivanov, Bolano satirizes successful artists (as well as their critics) who become famous and thus political or corrupted. But hasn't his excessively presentational style, his efforts at remaining absent or hidden or voiceless in the novel, come to the same thing? In fact, I think in the successful commercialization of 2666 one can see how easily the literary establishment and entertainment industry can join to become the very errors they behold, i.e., unwitting instruments for deconstructing the healthiest of cultural warrants and replacing them with unhealthy, anti-social errors of excess based on animal energies, a devolution that can only offend our broader, more wholesome sense of truth and balance, our need for believing in human dignity, our intimation of divine potential.

Perhaps the one thing that Bolano most thoroughly understands (as he claims the painter Archimbaldo understood one thing) is that seduction is the necessary first step into the labyrinth of evil whose many lost paths inevitably end in one dark abyss or another. Each dead end forms the sort of vortex into which anyone not cautious could be drawn and out of which it is almost impossible to escape (e.g., consider his portrayal of prison life). Bolano's seemingly endless catalog of abysmal seductions, particularly of sexual excess and sadistic power, is impressive (a few are listed here, somewhat in order):

* Group sex of the critics, brutalizing the cabby
* Cousin of the supposed killer "aroused" into participation
* Klaus's criminal acts in prison, his exercise of power over the prisoners, even his lawyer
* The spectators at the torture and murder of the gang members
* Rosa Mendez seduced by her cops, "narcos," and Boleros
* Kelly, the friend of the Senator, becoming a madam-pimp
* The "snuff film" enticement
* The bureaucrat Sammer sucked into mass murder
* Peasants slipping into complicity with Sammer
* Archimbaldi's avenging murder of Sammer

While one can bless Bolano's understanding of the excess trap, one is forced to curse him for having fallen into it himself. Thus his art form of fragments and insistently brutal depictions begins to feel more like a pummeling appeal or celebration (hopefully unintended) than sound critique.

This is one of the worst books I've read in years!!
I totally cannot comprehend what is so intriguing and fascinating about the unending detached accounts and descriptions of hundreds of murders of women. On xx date, the body of xxx was found, mutilated in the dumps. On another date, another body was found. On another date, another body of a mutilated woman was found......and it goes on and on and on and on for hundreds of pages!! What sick psychopath would enjoy this kind of never ending and super boring accounts of murdered women?? This is totally meaningless and irrelevant. How is this relevant to the entire story, if there is a story?

As this was published after the writer's death, I don't believe this is the final version of what should have been published!!

I had high expectations for this book after having read positive reviews and having very much enjoyed The Savage Detectives. I was however disappointed after finishing it. It felt like it was not well conceived. Had Bolano lived longer I believe he would have edited the various sections so that they related better to one another. His intention to have the five sections published as five stand alone books could have been workable but as published in one volume the action of the various sections seems uncoordinated. The plot such as it is unfolds as a mystery regarding the murders of young women in the northern Mexican city of Santa Teresa. Bolano provides descriptions of a many of the murders with details concerning the victims and the manner in which they were raped and killed. The characters of several detectives are developed as well as their means of investigation. The story then shifts to Nazi Germany and Romania and ultimately returns to Mexico but does so in a way that the suspense that had been built concerning who had been commiting the murders in Mexico is dissipated. I found the resolution of the plot to be unsatisfying and the book to be overly long. There are flashes of literary brilliance here and for fans of Bolano-and I am one-they may be enough to make this a worthwhile read. I was however disappointed and found this to be lacking in overall conception, especially when compared to The Savage Detectives which featured both stylistic pyrotechnics and a plot that held me spellbound from start to the spectacular finish.

ENFANT TERRIBLE: ROBERTO BOLAÑO AND THE LITERARY IMAGINARY

Review of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, Translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 912 pages, $30. Posted on Pluma Fronteriza, October 12, 2010.

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
Scholar in Residence, Western New Mexico University

2666 was the last novel by Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean writer who made his home in Mexico City for 10 years and the last two decades of his life in Spain. He died in 2003 at age 50 from complications of life (liver failure). 2666 was published posthumously in 2004 in Barcelona. The Spanish edition runs to 1,125 pages. Bolaño’s literary trajectory was no cake walk, made difficult by his own insouciance.

In 1999, he received the Rómulo Gallegos Prize from the government of Venezuela for The Savage Detectives, best Spanish-language novel of the year in Latin America or Spain. In his acceptance speech for the prize, Bolaño explained part of his literary trajectory by describing writing as: “[thrusting] your head into the darkness, [knowing] how to leap into the void, and [understanding] that literature is basically a dangerous calling.”

Bolaño thought of himself as an infrarealist (visceral realism), an iconoclastic movement in literature (much like Dadaism was in art) of which he was a founding member when he was a Trotskyite in Mexico City during the 70’s. Francisco Goldman sees in Bolaño’s literary trajectory the inseparable forces of life and literature (“The Great Bolaño,” The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2007).

In many ways infrarealism is a mish-mash of literary tropes, sort of like a black hole of minestroni into which one throws whatever left-overs are available, proclaiming it in the end a soup du jour that surpasses all other soups du jour. Why not? If you're kicking the old horses out of the stable, who other than oneself to proclaim you "king of the hill"?

Nevertheless, Roberto Bolaño was in the vanguard of Latin American writers who were trying to break out of what they perceived as the constraints of "magical realism." That's why Bolaño had such harsh words about Gabriel Garcia Márquez who like the salt machine that fell into the ocean churning out endless salt was the salt machine of literature churning out “a long line of commercially promoted Garcia Márquez imitators,” according to Bolaño (Goldman, note 9).

There's a lot to be said for innovation. Magical realism was an extraordinary breakthrough at the time when the novel of realism was surfeiting us. In this sense, infrarealism is an ef-fort to tap into the inner realism of the self (infrascope), seeking to evade or avoid the real-ism of externalities or the deux ex machina of classical narratives.

In a way, Bolaño is to contemporary literature as Jackson Pollack was to art. That posits the question of aesthetic judgment. Pollack's art is not everyone's cup or tea (to mix the metaphors). The same is true of Bolaño's art.

It seems to me that as a writer, Bolaño was playing the part of the mischievous imp of literature (maudit), much like Poe's "imp of the perverse." There's no doubt that Bolaño was an enfant terrible. It was a role he cultivated. Whether that will shore up over time his charac-terization as genius is anybody's guess.

Part of that role was being compared to Jorge Luis Borges, the dendritical Argentinian writer par excellence in flummoxing the expectations of his readers by invariably leading them up blind alleys. Another part of that role was in beating up on Octavio Paz, sanctifier of official Mexican culture.

Though 2666 is a quester novel, that is, a search for some ignis fatuus always just beyond our reach, the novel is rife with cleverness. Take the title, for example. The three 6’s are supposedly the mark of Cain and are said to be the numerals of evil. Their sum is 18. Add the number 2 to that sum and the total is 20, a reference to the 20th century. Is Bolaño’s title meant to convey the intent of the novel — a story of the evil(s) of the 20th century and its violence? And what about the name of the mysterious German novelist “Archimboldi”? Half the name suggests the name of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Archemides — Mr. Bathtub himself! Here Bolaño reminds me of Jonathan Swift creating linguistic puz-zles for the readers of Gulliver’s Travels.

Like so many quester novels, 2666 ends open-endedly, suggesting that the novel is not about the destination but the journey — the search. Unlike Diogenes, however, searching for an honest man, Bolaño’s search is for himself — the inframensch. Which may be why the story of 2666 is told like "Roshomon" from a number of perspectives. Which is the true telling? Perhaps all. One critic describes the novel as “rambling without urgency,” perhaps much the way Don Quixote rambles.

Presented in 5 discrete parts, each of which could stand alone as texts, the novel traverses the literary imaginary of Bolaño’s conspective eye, ending with its focus on Hans Reiter, aka Archimboldi after the Italian painter Archimboldo who painted “the four seasons,” and his sister “Lotte Reiter” — which could be read as “lot of writer.”

Just as the center could not hold for Yeats, everything collapses in pain for Bolaño. In his effort to be transcendent, Bolaño has made of life a minestroni, tossing in this and that thinking he was the chef supreme of the soup du jour

2666 is not the “the first great book of the twenty-first century.” It’s the work of an icono-clast who believed that breaking icons was just as good as making them — if not better.
____________________________________________________
Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D. (English/Comparative Literature), Scholar in Residence, Western New Mexico University, [email protected]

Perhaps Bolano's own words best describes this work:

"Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

Bolano's final, colossal work is just that. Weaving five disparate narratives that brush, grate, and engage in shadow play with each other around the still turning point of this work- Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juarez), Mexico- Bolano has undoubtedly attempted to impart upon the reader those feelings most essential to Death and Man's existence within a Universe dictated by Nature, Chance, and Uncertainty. The words painted across this ambitious masterpiece are unmistakably those of a dying man. After reading this work, I am left with more questions than when I began. Counterintuitively enough, that is a good thing. While this work by no means exhibits perfection, it spurs us on, coaxing us through its multitudes, to excavate and face our own questions, whatever those may be.

On a lighter note, the obscure literary, philosophical, and historical references make for interesting detective work as the novel is read. This is not a work to be missed and these sort are few and far between.

This was the best book I have read this year (2009). In fact, it is one of the best books I have ever read, and most other literature pales in comparison. However, it is probably not something everyone will enjoy as much as I did. It may appear to be a cumbersome exercise in multiple storylines that never neatly meet, but anyone who appreciates the art of the written word will savor every sentence. This is as much a triumph of translation for Natasha Wimmer as it is a magnum opus by Roberto Bolano.

One of the main reasons it appealed so much to me--aside from the skillfully crafted prose--is the dimensions of the narratives. The stories within stories regarding situations and people adds to the air of mystique. Another large appeal to me were the premises of each of the sections. One should consider the juxtaposition of numerous protagonists in each section: the European academics, the Mexican professor, the American Journalist, and the Soldier come Author. Each contributes to a greater narrative at hand. Though the police reports of section four may seem dross and eternal, they serve a function like the other sections.

Bolano deftly uses language--able to inject humor, sex, adventure, and introspection--with utmost skill and fluidity.

This is a novel to be closely read and appreciated. Take time for 2666.

This novel is about the evil of indifference. The lovers pursue their affairs with indifference and lose their lover; the police in Santa Teresa pursue the serial killer with indifference and never catch the evil-doer; the great author lives his life with indifference and watched unspeakable evils and the professors are unable to find him or true satisfaction in their own lives. Absent from the nearly 300 pages of the cold description of the crimes is the impact on the families that lost their little girls to such brutal rapes and murders; many are lost to no one as they are never even identified. What could be more sad than being murdered and no one even misses you--the file is shortly closed on your life, which has no past, present or future. As Elie Wiesel said in his speech at the Seventh White House Millennium Evening on April 12, 1999, "to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman." Those characters in the novel who try to make a difference are chastised for it, as when Lalo Cura tries to actually investigate the murders and is told to never do it again. Isn't that why the the final chapter harkens back to World War II? To remind the reader of Hitler, one of histories personifications of evil and the worlds indifference to what was going on in the death camps? There is no character that maintains an interest in stopping the deaths of the women and girls--even those that have an initial fascination, such as the journalist, soon move on with their lives without being deeply touched by the tragedies. None of that, however, makes it the best novel I have ever read. It is gruesome and unsatisfying, but not so profound as to move me to want to change the world. That would have made it a great novel and masterpiece.

Pido ayuda a todos los demás que han escrito los review arriba. Compré la novela porqué descubrí Bolaño leyendo Soldados de Salamina de Javier Cercas. Empezé a leer 2666, la primera novela bajó, pero justo bajó. Sin demasiado entusiasmo. Empezé la de Amalfitano...y en un vuelo miraba con celos mi vecino que leia su novela con gusto, mientras yo me aburría, no entendía que pretendía contarme Bolaño con todas esas palabras. Por supuesto en un excelente español y conste que no es mi idioma materno.
Así dejé el libro en casa de mis padres.
Hace días me puse a hablar con un señor en el aeropuerto, salió el tema novelas y me dijo todo el bien posible de Boloña y de 2666. Yo, con humildad le escuché, me dije que igual me pierdo algo o no entiendo. Luego salió el avión y no conseguí que me motivara más su opinion. En fin recogí la novela desde casa de mis padres y quiero ir más alla de la pagina 300.
Por favor, me explicaís? Me empujaís a ir adelante y porqué tendría que hacerlo? Porqué en la partede Amalfitano yo no podía más.
Mi rating de 2 estrellas se puede cambiar como consigua ir adelante y entender.
Gracias

Finished this book last night, could have read 5 more parts about whatever the author had on his mind. I can understand that this book is not for everyone. The first part may have people wondering if this book is only going to be about people with PHDs in Literature (its not, nor is the 1st part itself). The 2nd part can drag a little and seemed the most out of focus, but I guess that works thematically because its about people losing their minds. The 3rd part is silky smooth (once you get past the protagonist being named Fate) and does a great job of bringing the dread (also loved the former black panther's speech). The 4th part is very brutal, reminded me a little of Cormac McCarthy but just a touch more light hearted if that makes any sense. The fifth part is just really good. Taken as a whole this book is quite an achievement. Was really impressed with moments of the book where Bolano seemed to briefly show his hand and speak to the reader directly about what he was attempting to do with this book, one such section is highlighted in end notes of the first edition that I read. If you are an adventurous reader willing to put in the time I doubt you will be disappointed. I am looking forward to reading more of his books but I am going to wait a bit unitl I shake this one.

This book was pure entertainment for me and I enjoyed every page. Not everyone will.
I first read the English translation then after some time picked up a Spanish language copy but I think I spoilt the experience for myself by first reading in English because the Spanish version didn't seem as dark or as funny to me .. my lack of sensitivity to Spanish nuance is the probable cause.
As an Englishman living in Mexico I had to marvel at well Bolano understood Mexicans.

By all means read this fascinating masterpiece in whatever edition you can. It is a labyrinth of wonders in which you may willingly lose your bearings, knowing that you will emerge transformed. But if at all possible, buy the boxed set. The three separate volumes fit much more easily into the hand, and the gorgeous covers are a meaningful commentary on the diverse qualities of each of the major sections. See my more detailed review in this context.

I'm no critic, haven't read many fundmental books, but for me the final part is very good. It reverberates in your mind.

So if you have trouble with the other parts, finding it hard to go through the crimes, just jump there. Still, this notion that violence is not exclusive of World War II but is (and will be) around makes it worthwhile to go through the description of the crimes. Do note that these are very closely modelled in real events. If you can't read about it, you can imagine what it is to live there, to go to work and be forced to leave your daughter in that predatory land.

Read the final part. Don't abandon the book without reading it.

2666 is a masterpiece: an epic examination of violence, art, culture, dreams, and gender.

Stylistically, it is unique. Each book operates in a distinct mode, but each is filled with a sense of dread or fatalism that exists in the penumbra of its stories and digressions.

It took me a while to warm up to it, starting out in the Part about the Critics--my least favorite of the five books. The Part about Fate is my favorite. They all contribute to an engaging and wondrous whole.

Read it, you may love it.
Read it, it is good for you.

The last book by the chilean Roberto Bolaño, was also his last will. It is said that Bolaño spent the last three or four years of his short life almost enterily devoted to the task of writing this humongous novel and hoping he would have the chance of finishing it before he died. Fortunately, he did.

Divided in 5 independent nouvelles, 2666 is an excesive example of what modern literature is made for. Bolaño explores several styles and genres blending them smoothly. It is also an apocalyptic noir tale (full of deeply dark humor) of coincidences and hidden references that, in some sense, compiles everything Bolaño did before.

The core of the book, the place where everything converges, is a series of murders of young women in an industrial mexican city close to the US border. An intrincate network of searches and dissapearances correlates and connects the nouvelles in a strange and loose way.

If you like Perec, Calvino, Borges and Cortazar, you will certainly like Bolaño's work. However, before reading this, you should probably check his early works. Nocturno de Chile, La literatura nazi en America and Los detectives salvajes are good starting points. Leave 2666 for the closing, it deserves the honor.

I have never been compelled to write a review on the store, until today, upon completing 2666. For those who have difficulty reading 'The Part About The Crimes' - which for me, induced nightmares - I'd like to offer a passage from the fifth section, 'The Part About Archimboldi', in which the Baroness reveals the artistic output of Conrad Halder:

"Occasionally news came of him, always preceded by some small scandal. His Berlin paintings were left in the care of my father, who didn't have the heart to burn them. Once I asked where he kept them. He wouldn't tell me. I asked him what they were like. My father looked at me and said they were just dead women. Portraits of my aunt? No, said my father, other women, all dead." (Bolano, 683)

This passage, among others within the fifth section, helped fashion my appreciation for Bolano's exacting description of death in Santa Teresa: death, upon death, upon death. Such deaths do occur, they have occurred, and their history must not be forgotten; moreover, work that attempts to examine such death, though some may find it 'degenerate' or displeasing, should not be hidden, buried, or burnt. As Entrescu offered, "culture [is] life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar." (Bolano, 683-684)

Although they may be unpleasant, devastating, and tremendously sad, even the most horrible moments in our history deserve remembrance through our culture, through our literature, through our art.

I hope Bolano's choice to recount the murders of Ciudad Juarez through Santa Teresa does not dissuade you from acquiring the novel or completing it. 2666 was wholly satisfying, often astounding; it deserves a second read. I cannot recall the last time I've been so enthralled by text, and I do hope you enjoy a similar experience.

When I finished this 898-page mammoth I thought, "What a relief! Now I don't have to read about any more murdered women." I felt beat up after spending a week reading my way through this brutality-filled book.

"2666" is divided into five distinct parts that are all related to one another and in some way touch on the murders of hundreds of women in the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa.

One section is about a group of European literary scholars who are tracking a reclusive German author. The second section is about a Spanish college professor in Santa Teresa. The third section is about a New York City reporter who comes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. The fourth part focuses on the murder victims and people around the murders. The final section is the life story of a boy who grew up in Germany.

"2666" has grown on me tremendously since the initial relief of turning the final page. I find myself wondering if my perceptions would change if the sections were read in a different order. I've started seeing new connections and similarities between the sections. How many stories were there in this book?...hundreds at least. Bolano's imagination takes the reader all over the world.

This is a book that begs to be read again and would be ideal for a discussion group if you could find a few other people willing to fight their way through to the end.

Much of the experience of this book is very unpleasant which is why I would rate it three stars. However, the contemplation of the book afterward is very interesting and worth five stars, for an average of four stars overall.

I am really sorry, my american and whoever not spanish speaking friends, for you, not being able to read this book in the original language. Be aware that it is sincerely not the same and, my dear gringos, start to whine about it!

Pesqué esta novela al tún tún de un estante de mi hermana, sin conocer al autor (¡qué verguenza!).
Un castellano perfecto. El libro es una droga. Si hasta ahora Vargas Llosa era mi referencia en cuanto a literatura castellana, Bolaño le ha tomado la medida.

Me resulta difícil creer que pueda se traducida sin perder mucha, demasiada esencia, en fín, que se jodan los gringos y demás no castellano-hablantes (jejeje). Como traducen el nombre de Lalo Cura?

Por supuesto, la parte de los crímenes me causa pesadillas, depresiones (tengo hijas) y paso las descripciones a toda leche ¡zas zas zas, siguiente párrafo, plis!

A shocking compelling book. The 900 hundred page novel written by Robert Bolano is the story of a violent, sexist Mexico that I, a naive tourist would never associate to the smiling people and lavish resorts of a all inclusive Americanized Mexico. The book is written in 5 parts. With a underlying thread of violence that connects them all. The story is both shocking and tender. The violence of part 4 is at times almost unbearable to read. I loved this book! I was deeply touched by one page and thoroughly disgusted by another. This is a difficult book to read but well worth every moment spent. I ended the book feeling connected to the writer and the country. The next time I visit Mexico I want experience the real country and the people. If you love long emotional tempestuous novels you must read it! Unfortunately Robert Balano died in 2003, but his legacy is a masterwork. This was for me one of the rare books that filled my mind with possibilities.

I absolutely LOVED 2666. I thought it was a very rich novel, with many characters and many side-stories. This makes me think of a pastiche that forms a greater image, one with powerful connotations. I have to say my favorite parts were the first, second, and fifth parts, which moved a little faster. However, I also took pleasure in reading the third and fourth part, though the fourth part is maybe the most difficult, since it tells, with side-stories at intervals, detailed reports of each of the women killed in Santa Teresa.

If you are considering reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666, no doubt you are already aware of the overwhelming, even rapturous praise this book has received from literary critics. Bolaño is something of a cult-hero among literary intellectuals and has been elevated to a near-mythical status; the book has been heralded as both revolutionary and brilliant. Given such praise, this reader was left sorely disappointed by the book and mystified by the intensity of the praise.

Bolaño attempts to write a `cosmic' novel that stretches far beyond the narrow confines of a single character or narrative. This book is hugely ambitious, although that wasn't readily obvious for much of the reading. Bolaño's cosmos is disorderly, mostly random, emotionally flat, and depressive - one might say that it is filled with despair, except that despair suggests stronger emotions than the narrative ever shows. Rambling across the 900 pages of Bolano's 2666 are 5 different novels, each one only loosely connected to the others. The book opens with 500 pages of narrative that is banal, boring and mostly pointless. The narrative often works through digressions and random connections, a technique that could be interesting enough (and occasionally during the 900 pages is). At their best (the fifth book) the tangents can be rather fun as one story gets sidetracked into another. In other instances this strategy produces disturbing results - a feeling of the general inconclusiveness of human projects, even a sense of meaninglessness. However, for the most part the digressions feel pointless, almost all of them unenlightening. At its worst, this habit of digressing just resembles (very strongly) bad writing; so much so, I find it indistinguishable. One has little idea why the author has chosen to relate one set of details or occurrences instead of another. Imagine reading a 500 page twitter feed and you begin to get an idea.

Like the narrative, the characters who inhabit this novel are mostly underdeveloped and for the most part totally unconvincing (with few exceptions). One has to believe that Bolaño intended this - but that it happened somewhat by default. He just couldn't be bothered or didn't care to flesh out his characters in a way that his readers might actually relate to or feel for them. They wander through his narrative landscape confused, directionless, and emotionally flat. Perhaps they are tribe of "strangers" out of Camus; perhaps they are simply the creations of an extreme depressive. I'm not sure.

I was left with two questions that are not about the book so much as its relation to the current cultural context. First: what did Bolaño think he was doing? Second: why has the literary establishment been creaming itself over this book (excuse the vulgarity)? I don't have any good answers to the first question. The closest I can come is that the author is subverting classical narrative urges and writing a novel where narratives have no closure; either they sidetrack into tangents or they simply lose volition and peter out. Given that this probably willful, one cannot accuse the author of lacking skill or craft. The second question has led me to a hasty review of the reviews of this book. The literature is extensive, but the following seem rather typical: In the New York Review of Books, Sarah Kerr writes "Amalfitano calls to mind a medieval squire, wanting but failing to protect the girl..." Of course, if you haven't read the book this makes no sense. But it makes no more sense if you have read the book as there is nothing about medieval squires in this book. It is basically a free-association (as is much of the book). Writing in the more middlebrow Time, Lev Grossman, turns vice into virtue, writing that, "the relentless gratuitousness of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which builds into something overwhelming that hits you all the harder because you don't see it coming." Actually, I didn't see it coming, didn't see it when it came, and didn't see it when it had already come. There was nothing to see. The New York Times praises 'narrative velocity". This in a book where nothing happens for 500 pages.

Perhaps this really is the birth of a new literature (that's another bit of praise from the critics). But my own take is that these people read so much literature good and bad that they are just really bored of the conventional elements that make most of us enjoy a story: well drawn, convincing characters, a fascinating narrative that is neither too obvious or overly incoherent, expressive language, philosophical depth, an engagement with other narratives - historical, psychological, philosophical and yes, even literary, -- and perhaps some linguistic or intellectual treats for the attentive reader. However, such effusive praise for a book like this is an insult to good writers (and good writing); writers who succeed on multiple levels of telling a good story, giving us characters we care about, insights into the world around us, and food for the intellect to chew on. For large stretches, even most of 2666, Bolaño gives the reader none of that. Are the critiques all afraid to say what is so blatantly obvious, afraid of their own reputations in front of their peers?

Read this book if you want to be part of this conversation. It's not hard. But there are lots of other good, great, and even 'cosmic' novels you could spend your time with.

There was plenty of hype around the U.S. launch of this marathon contemporary Chilean novel--and even more hype abound the self-destruction of its author--and yet the book deserves much of the attention it recieved. It's a high-reaching, soul-searching novel about a poverty-stricken society that is devouring itself alive. Destructive and compelling.

If you don't know Bolano, this is an excellent book to get to know him. However you must be patient because the first half of the book is very slow and the next three parts are not that fast either, but Bolano's writing if effect is excellent, he is a master of the Spanish language and the Novela. Good luck. I recommend this book.

Imagine this: you're dreaming a dream that never ends. Disconnected and tedious. You're at a railway station and the light is dim and brown. All around you are people doing things that make no sense, mouthing things at you in dream language. You board the train and it moves at a snail's pace. People make movements as if to either leave the train, or get on the train but never quite manage to do so. The sheer tedium burns out your nerve endings so that the only excitement you feel at signs that promise deliverance, or a change in pace, or something! only elicits a faint vibrato of interest. Numbing dumbness. At some point, you suspect that the train will coast to a stop somewhere in the middle of the dream and you'll realize that there never was a driver. That's this book. I feel like I lost time and I don't want my money back (only because I borrowed it from the library) but I really feel like I lost a significant chunk of my time reading all 898 pages of this book.

those who are unhappy with this book because it is unfinished missed the point, i think. stop trying to "get it" and just read. i think that the seemingly arbitrary nature of the book is what makes it so great. why? i don't know, i just do! if you can let go of all those book reviews you read and approach this with your eyes open, you'll probably enjoy... forget about what some book reviewer in the NY Times said... all of that has nothing to do with this book. i like the idea of the desert that comes to my mind every time i think back on it... no need to squeeze this into some sort of preconceived cultural context.
There's nothing in this book that tries to tell you how to feel, how to react. If you can deal with that, you'll like it.
Is it a "masterpiece"? Why not let someone else think about that and just read it for it's own sake?

Brilliant, perhaps, but lifeless, like most postmodernist stuff. Reminiscent of Pynchon and equally tired. Still, good enough to evoke two books, two authors, that may shine the light that is barely flickering here. Pavic, of Khazar fame. And the immensely superior d'Arrigo of ever more relevant and absorbing Horcynus Orca. Still untranslated, well, true gems are often hidden.

Though beautifully written and certainly a book I could imagine being discussed in the educational system someday, it was just too painstakingly slow for me to read.
If you love beautiful writing and don't need a lot of excitement you will enjoy it.
If, like me, you need action and lots of story, 2666 is just too long and too much waiting.

I had to struggle to finish The Savage Detectives, but by the time I was done, I was a fan. I felt I had heard a new voice. I thought it was a work of genius.

2666 on the other hand left me cold. It often seemed to me that Bolaño knew he was writing against the clock, as the writing has a forced, mechanical feel. I also do not feel as I did with The Savage Detectives that there was substance beneath the plot, or lack of plot, or whatever you want to call his structures.

Bolano's unconventional style places him at the lead for avant-guard writers. His rich, powerful narrative makes him the most important Latin American writer today. Prepare for an intense ride filled with well described characters throughout two continents and some of the most important historical moments of our time.

I made it through 2666 and it changed my life. After dragging my way through this pretentious, poorly written, poorly crafted and poorly conceived waste of pulp, I learned that a book either shows promise by the mid point or it does not.

The life changer for me is the freedom to never again have to finish a lousy book because some critic thinks it good because it has to be good, right? I stick with books unless they are obvious pap. I'll invest the time and make the effort. This book is an absolute mess. I am forever free to walk away from a book that is an obvious dud which the critics fear---is it just me? This is 900 pages of crap. I'd better play it safe and talk about the "reach" or the "expanse" so no one really knows that I think it's worthless.

Look at the reviews. When the best a critic can do is recap the book (need those 1,000 words!) and then call it massive or expansive which just means long, skip it. I now understand a code that can steer me clear of future time wastes like 2666.

Save your time. If you want to read Latin literature, turn to Marquez.

If u can get passed the sheer size of it , a great, but difficult, read. It is set of worlds, some very dark, others emotionally and intellectually intricate; all linked and turning in and out on each other to make one world - a fantastic modern novel.

the store.com's Book of the Month....They must be kidding.

You may have heard that this is 5 novels published (cobbled?) together over the specific objections of the dead author. However, in addition I counted some 40 short stories sandwiched among the 5 novels, and, guess what, not one of the stories or novels has an ending! If you can get through 200 pages (yes) of descriptions of little Mexican girls being raped, tortured, mutilated, butchered and dumped, then you might be able to read through to the end...and find that nothing happens.

An obvious conclusion would have been for the 80ish writer who spent his whole life in frank detachment from humanity, prefering to "cause no harm" (somehow he manages to fight in an infantry company on the Eastern Front in WWII for 4 full years but never kills anyone - laughable in itself) and to "not interfere" (he does nothing in response to finding someone he knew and seemingly admired...crucified), to then meet up with his serial killer nephew, who takes the same detachment from humanity into torturing 9 year old girls to death for sheer amusement.

The meeting of these minds (and souls?) and its consequences, which all the other dozens of players could then interpret, would have been brilliant.

But in fact, they never meet...and nothing happens. Is everyone waiting for Godot here?

This latest novel by Roberto Bolano goes with me wherever I go, and the hardback is a heavy book to carry around! Bolano's complicated love story/mystery has woven itself into my life. I am not finished yet, but I can be sure this will be my favorite novel in years.

Don't read this book before sleeping. Like the characters it chronicles, you'll receive disturbing violent dreams. This was the best book I've read in a few years. Haunting, raunchy, violent, funny, at times light and airy, at times heavier than one can bear.

2666 es extraño y definitivamente no para cualquiera. Es un "tour de force" que se debe leer en ciertos pasajes con paciencia, en especial lo referente a los 200 asesinatos que se detallan en exceso, todos espeluznantes, aunque probablemente basados en hechos reales según leí en alguna parte(?), probablemente lo más difícil de leer y entender, el sin sentido de la muerte. Pareciera remarcar hasta el cansancio que la muerte es horrorosa, sin sentido y mucho menos justa, es solo eso muerte y horror. Y el horror se debe detallar...Como queriendo decir ¡Entiendan!
Lo interesante es el viaje no el destino. Al final no habrá respuestas. Solo historias paralelas que se unen casi accidentalmente en torno a múltiples y sufridas historias.

El estilo de escritura es fácil de seguir.
La edición española es excelente: muy buen empaste (paperback), papel y tipografía; fue un agrado leerlo.

2666 is strange and definitely not for everyone. It's a "tour de force" which should be read in many chapters with patience. In particular, "About the murders" which take to the reader to the horror, the nonsense, and injustice through 200 or so terrible crimes.And the horror must be in full of detail... It's like he was saying...¡Grasp it!
Finally the most interesting of it: It is not in the end but in the journey. Don't expect answers just suffered lives mingle by destiny.
Easy to read style.

Bolaño has managed to destroy the novel as people have done in the past. Critics have compared him to Joyce, Kafka,and Cortazar but he is an entirely different beast. Bolaño manages to conquer and dissipate the novel viscerally, through silence, allegory, dreams, and horror, rather than academic reference. In that way, it's similar to Ulysses, however he references specifically to the heart, and something within us-a mysterious and horrifying beauty-that we have never encountered before.

This is the best novel of our generation of readers. Highly recommended.Bolaño is a genius.

Very disappointing...this book does not live up to its hyped-up reviews. The book reads like a very rough draft for a novel, in that the text is disjointed, the rhythm of the story is disorganized, and the core story is inflated from the 300 pages it deserves to about 870 pages, due primarily to the inclusion of hundreds of pages of random, pointless details with little bearing on the story. A couple of critics have called the book "Borgesian," but I find it hard to imagine how a novel could possibly be LESS Borgesian than this one.

"He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

In many ways, the key to unlocking this novel is found in this quote. Bolaño was a master of self-mythologizing (anyone who's read the Savage Detectives can attest to that), so it makes sense that he would elevate himself to the heights of Dickens, Melville, Kafka and Flaubert, especially when one considers that a) this was the novel he worked on up until his passing and never managed to complete, and b) most of his work is considerably shorter. But this is anything but concise. It weighs in at a hefty nine hundred pages, tackles a billion different themes and covers a staggering number of emotional tones, features an enormous cast of characters, and offers no easy answers. It's also, by any reasonably objective standards, a mess. Granted, Bolaño was as self-indulgent as he was brilliant (again, also see the Savage Detectives, a great novel that's probably fifty pages longer than it should be), and he never lived to finish this novel, so it makes sense that parts of it should've been raked over the coals by a good editor.

Here's why none of that matters, though: 2666, for all of its unanswered questions and underdeveloped themes and gratuitous sex and violence, is one of those imperfect, torrential works that blazes a path into the unknown. Out of all the novels I frequently list as favorites, this is easily the one I have the most to complain about. But it's also one of the most daring. There's this sense throughout that only Roberto Bolaño could've written this novel. Only Bolaño would've been daring enough to explore the violence of the male psyche as thoroughly and as stridently as he does here. Only Bolaño would've contrasted the otherwise charming first section of the novel, dealing with the friendship and eventual sexual relationships between four academics, with a burst of apocalyptic violence. Only Bolaño would offer us the episodes of fiery oration and fascinating madness. Only Bolaño would write convincingly about the fascination of madness itself, and of violence, that is one of this novel's recurring themes. You can keep your Chuck Palahniuks and your Bret Easton Ellises - for me, the only author who's anywhere near Bolaño in his ability to bareknuckle box with humanity's darker side is Cormac McCarthy.

By now, I would've included a summary, but 2666 defies quick recaps. The best I can do is it deals with the magnetic Santa Teresa, Mexico, site of many unsolved murders (described in graphic detail, so bring a cast-iron stomach), and the equally magnetic Benito von Archimboldi, a reclusive, Pynchon-type author. But there's plenty more where that came from A math professor struggles with insanity. A sports journalist goes to Santa Teresa and finds himself in over his head pretty quickly. An artist cuts his own hand off for the sake of his art. An albino is jailed for the murders, but insists he was framed. A medium communicates with the murder victims, and it's unclear whether she's faking it or not. We even get a whole chapter on Archimboldi's winding history. It's hard to say just what ties all of this together, beyond a few thematic concerns, but Bolaño knows how to keep you reading. Not just by setting up terrific mysteries, but through his remarkable characterization, his visceral punch, and his dark sense of humor.

Like I've kept saying, 2666 is a long way from a perfect novel, but I can't imagine giving it less than five stars. A work this compelling and this daring deserves no less, even if it is obviously incomplete, even if there isn't a whole lot of resolution (Infinite Jest doesn't have that, either, but it's my favorite novel), even if Bolaño occasionally tells when he should be showing. But why let uneven pacing and a few lingering mysteries keep you from treating yourself to such a magnetic novel, anyway?

Different angles/levels/points-of-view/roles/impact; one reality. The best book I've read in a while. From the distance of a European intellectual circle to the heart of the actual victims. Is all there. The intensity of the reflections that induced in me are hard to explain...

I bought this book based on reviews, big mistake this time. I spent most of my time looking up defintions to 100's of words. I hated the spewing of authors I'd never heard of. The writing or words are geared towards intellectuals. I haven't even finished this book, I can't seem to get past the long winded boring little stories leading me somewhere in the slowest pace possible to nowhere. Maybe I'll get around to finishing it, but based on the 1 star reviews, I may not end up enjoying this book at all, even in some of the 4 star reviews they claim this book is more for academics or writers interested in the creative processes. BORING

While I am in awe of the ambition displayed by Roberto Bolano in 2666, it is not the masterpiece some have made it out to be--or perhaps it is a messy, deeply flawed masterpiece of some sort. It's nice to wonder what Bolano would have done with it had he the time and good health to do his ambition justice.

If you liked The Savage Detectives, read 2666. If you've never read Bolano, don't start here.

Initially I was drawn to this book because of the jacket art. It is beautiful, dark, and complicated. The first paragraph on the inside cover pulled me in even more. I wanted to know more about the women who had disappeared in Santa Teresa, Mexico.

So now I must admit that I have just forced myself to finish 2666. This book is heavy and dark, two characteristics that I usually like in a novel. But I kept wanting for closure to all parts of this book, though I did not get that satisfaction in the end. I could have cared less about the first part - the part about the critics. The part about Amalfintano was the best for me. This character left you wanting to love him and hope for his happiness. I suppose part three was necessary to bring in Quincy (Oscar) Fate so he could save Amalfintano's daughter from herself, her boyfriend and the uncertainty of her future in Santa Teresa. The part about the crimes took so long to get to that it irritated me. The killing of these women was my sole purpose of reading this book and it left me asking is that all you can give me about these women. The next part of the book was about the character Archimboldi. This was the most complete section of the book that followed the life of Archimboldi. It took us from his childhood, war in Germany, death, love, relationships and his unlikely development as a writer.

I would not reread this book as it is. Is it five separate books? Yes, yes, yes.

2666 es la última novela de Roberto Bolaño. Literatura de signo magistral que prefigura la aparición y constitución de un nuevo clásico latinoamericano. La médula espinal de esta obra póstuma es el escritor desaparecido Benno von Archimboldi. La vida de cuatro críticos se entrecruzará en la pasión y búsqueda de tal escritor, camino que los conducirá a la ciudad mexicana de Santa Teresa. Conocerán en la segunda parte a Amalfitano, el nuevo protagonista, que ha viajado, sin ninguna justificación aparente, a México, en dónde se entrelazará su relato con el de los críticos. La historia gravita, además, sobre la fuerza de escenarios reales, en especial el de la frontera, Santa Teresa, contexto en donde transcurrirá también la historia de Fate, periodista estadounidense que involuntariamente se verá involucrado también con la ola de crímenes que atestan la ciudad. Por último, la biografía errante de Archimboldi (Hans Reiter), desembocará del mismo modo en México, y en el mismo desierto fronterizo que sentimos respirar a lo largo de toda la novela. 2666: atmósfera de descomposición y arbitrariedad que parece regir el destino de todos sus personajes, y el de sus testigos.

I understand that this is a work of fiction, but after reading this book I find that it not mentioning El Paso or Texas at all in the books is a serious flaw in the book. Much of the violence in Juarez can be traced to its proximity to El Paso. The cites are connected. It's like writing a novel about East Berlin and pretending that West Berlin doesn't exist. You can see El Paso from the colonias that are described in the book. I can't help but think that Bolano did not have a very good understanding of the area, the situation, and the politics involved.

This book is pure magic. Forget what you've heard about Bolano the person. He's left us with something that transcends his biography. This book, alongside Carey Harrison's Who Was That Lady?, is, in the opinion of this bibliophile, of the best two books of the 2000s.

Me leí esta novela porque estaba muy inquieto y deseoso de leer algo que hubiera escrito Bolaño debido a muchos comentarios que leí en los medios de comunicación sobre este autor y sus obras. Como leí que esta era «su mejor obra», me decidì a leerla. No está mal, pero la comparación con García Márquez le queda grande a este autor. Lamento decirlo, pero esta novela tiene mucho material que es prácticamente «relleno», lo que la hace innecesariamente larga. Más corta, le hubiera quedado mucho mejor.

This book is a wonder. It can be viewed as an unrelenting critique of western culture in the last half of the twentieth century, with its portrait of appalling criminal behavior, inept and corrupt governments, gruesome war and disturbed minds. In five more or less interconnected sections, with dozens of subplots and stories, the novel is a sweeping panorama of destitution and murder interspersed with unexpected warmth and humane behavior, and love. Many of the horrible scenes are described in plain, bare bones prose, while other sections are dazzlingly poetic. It belongs on the shelf with the great books of the last century.

Ok - like many I bought this book based on the NYT review. I finally got 430 pages into the book and realized I couldn't care less what happened or why. I can't take it anymore. I'm not even remotely curious, intrigued or engaged. Truthfully, I am remotely curious, but that's it. Something must have gotten lost in the translation.

After reading overwhelmingly glowing reviews on this book, I anticipated a great read. Now I am an educated, well read person, but found this book extremely slow moving and boring and could not get past the first two chapters. Luckily, I did not pay for the book but listened to it as an audiobook from my local library. I am sure that the book is technically well written, but there was just nothing to catch and hold my interest.

Roberto Bolano clearly does not value your time. Because this, is a complete waste of it. The story could have been trimmed and told in 30 pages. I listened to this on audiobook, even that was treacherous. Im going to start consulting the negative reviews on the store before I delve into anything from now on. Value your time, skip this book.

This book is brilliant because, even though the paragraphs are long and sometimes laborous, but never are they tedious. One of the best Detective titles I`ve red. . I closed the book slowly, running my hands all over it, before I held it tightly to my heart for a few moments. Was realy great!!!

If you realy like these book you must read these ones:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Secret Adversary: A Tommy and Tuppence Mystery!

I was only able to get through 19 pages of this book, 18 of which went something like this: A, B, C and D met in a literary conference and [did things people do in a literary conference.] Seriously? I am working my tail off on my books while other writers, highly touted by "serious reviewers", can spend this many pages describing such banal material?

Next day I went to the store site and hit the return and refund button. That felt good!

Academics and illuminati who are in raptures about this book please forgive a humble autodidact for being nonplussed by the spectacular and ongoing brouhaha . To quote just some of the hype,"It is everything or it is nothing." I read a lot. I wanted to love this book. I stayed with it. I stayed optimistic. With 100 pages to go I became disillusioned and started praying for a jaw-dropping display of virtuosity and creative brilliance that would reward me in some blinding epiphany or, at least a cogent conclusion. Instead, this is a rare case where I found myself wishing I could regain the investment in time that it took to do the book justice. In a nutshell, I have come down on the side who believe the book is, not withstanding the hype, nothing. Not one character was developed to the point where you could love or hate them. You weep for Anna Karina you despise Madam Bovary. Bolano's crooked lazy policemen, self-absorbed critics. sad broken cadavers and the even the totally unconvincing cardboard Archimboldi provoke a shrug of indifference at most. Tolkien said that there are no two things in the universe that can not be connected by narrative. Bolano has gone to a lot of trouble to demonstrate that you can go through 900 pages and connect nothing with nothing. Thanks for that Roberto. And your point would be...? That it is all about nothing? The futile nature of the convulsions of collective human consciousness on scales both micro and macro? Hardly new or incisive insights.

I suspect that many of the minds vaunting the relevance of this book also argue that it is the role, or even duty of art to reveal some insight or aspect of the human experience in a deep and perhaps even spiritually arresting way. This can be achieved in a poem, in a novel, in a painting, in a play or yes, perish the thought, in a film. The Tin Drum and Lina Werdmüller's Seven Beauties kick this novel's pretentious artistic aspirations out of the park - and they do it in less than two hours. The dirty washing of humanity can be thoroughly examined, in less than 900 pages. If you are the type who is impressed by the knowledge of an author revealed through flashy demonstrations of stuff you can readily access through google or by the breadth of the writer's reading thanks to often irrelevant literary references, then go and buy an annotated version of T S Elliot's Wasteland. That should keep you busy for a year or two. Sisyphus and Marope my ass Bob.

Surely truly great novels, while they share access to "mind-scape" that may be unique to the medium, are still united by respect for the concept, not necessarily of linear narrative, but at least by a sense of "story". This is not a story. Bolano has simply emptied out the dirty laundry of the human experience and spent a creepily long time with the blood-stained lingerie. I wish he was alive so that we could ask him, "Why Roberto? Why?" You can get the same insight and feel the same sense of despair and disgust from watching 10 minutes of the evening news. No characters. No Story. No Point. Nothing. If this is the "First Great Novel of The 21st century", I think we should all return to the great old stuff with a deep sense of gratitude.

According to Mrs. Bubis, wife of publisher Mr. Bubis, one of the only people alive that knew Benno von Archimboldi, "how well anyone could really know of another person's work?"

Reading "2666" by Roberto Bolaño, I feel the same way. It has been quite a journey for the English reader with a talent of his kind. From "By Night in Chile" to the chilling "Romantic Dogs," (which I finished a week before this novel) to "2666," one of Bolaño's "longer" works, preceded by the fantastic "Savage Detectives."

Much has been written (and will be) concerning this novel (see the great reviews, beginning with the one in the New York Times). In short, and without giving too much away, the story revolves around five intervals, which Bolano wanted to be released separately (in 5 year increments), involving a cast of characters as thick as the book itself. Part 1 (About the Critics) concerns four critics: Jean-Claude Pelletier from France, Manuel Espinoza from Spain, Piero Morini of Italy, and Liz Norton who, through their love of Archimboldi, come together and discuss and revel in the mysterious nature of the man. Part 2 (About Amalfitano) and Part 3 (About Fate) concerns a Chilean college professor, Amalfitano, and his dealings with his daughter and a strange geometry books; and an African-American, Quincy Williams aka Fate, who takes a assignment in Mexico covering a boxing match, which soon gets derailed due to his interest in the murders of the women detailed in the next chapter. Part 4 (About the Crimes) concerns the cornerstone of the novel, the parts tying all these people together: the murders of women, detailed by Bolaño, in the city of Santa Teresa (Cuidad Juárez) in the Sonora Desert in Northern Mexico on the US border. Part 5 (About Archimboldi) gives the final insights into our characters and ends the novel much as we began.

With Bolaño, it is the manner of his story-telling that wins him fans as well as enemies. In "2666," he pushes the boundaries that he may have placed on himself before his death in 2003. My favorite passage, in which Liz Norton realizes the genius of Archimboldi, gives you a sense of his style, if you have not read him before. This could also sum up how some readers felt reading Bolaño their first time they tried to pay attention:

"It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote."

His style is attractive and inviting (although for some the large blocks of text and absence of quotations is a turn off) and the story itself is superb. If this was unfinished. If this novel was not how Bolaño envisioned or felt represented him, help us all what a complete "2666" would look like. Nevertheless, this is Bolaño's masterpiece. The hype is for real.

It's my true belief that the author died before finishing or editing
this potentially great book. What else is to be said? The book, even
though very trying at times in its unedited state, was becoming
fascinating when both it and the author passed away.

Acabo de terminar esta gran obra y aun quiero seguir leyendo acerca del gran Archimboldi, la baronesa, los criticos, los detectives, y el resto de personajes que hacen este mastodonte parecer un cuento corto. No se arrepentiran de leer este y otros libros de Roberto.
Jealousy is a horrible thing, but for those of you awaiting the English translation, jealousy is completely justified. I cannot imagine the anxiety I would feel waiting for one of his books to be translated. Don't worry though, the translation is coming soon.

This book would make a great table leg, coaster, or booster seat for a small child. I could not force myslef to finish it; I am simply not that masochistic. Last night I read seven pages that described a woman walking, sleeping, standing, walking, spending money, walking, laughing, sleeping, walking, and then ultimately dying. In short, the author puts far too much effort into describing banal situations that have nothing to do with the plot... wait, what is the plot?? The interconnectedness of the 'books' is abstract at best. Another major turn off is the fact that multiple pages are spent describing dreams. "She looked in the mirror and was horrified. The fog rolled in and loud penny-colored drops rolled down the walls. The smell was terrible and her reflection smiled." PAGES of this drivel folks, pages. I would rather stick forks in my eyes than read one more page of this nonsense.

Nobody cares, or should care, so I don't know why I'm writing this, but, in my opinion, 2666 joins Europe Central as the only important literature of the last twenty-five years. I expect that it'll be considered one of the all-time greats, a Ulysses, or Magic Mountain, or In Search of Lost Time, of our time.

..... my reviews are not ever really long and this one will be no exception. maybe roberto would have even appreciated the shortness of this one....in my own delusions/dreams i would like to think so.

2666 is nothing less than the literary masterpiece of our time.

thank you thank you thank you to natasha wimmer for a remarkable translation.

One word sums it up, BORING. I have considerable patience reading a book, I can afford to give the writer time to develop his characters and his story. I read the first 100 pages, boring, I skipped ahead to the gory parts, boring. I don't have enough time to waste reading this mind numbing, boring book. I'm done.

I kept on hoping that the stories would coalesce into some coherent message or just an ending. Not too much to ask for. Well, hope clouds judgement and the stories really have no point and they are just hodge-podge collection of seemingly leftover bits, not even the choice bits. And what was the point in spending pages and pages describing the brutal murders of the women in Juarez? I get the writing style that heightens the horror by using clipped, straight-forward, repetitive sentences, but going on and on is really just appallingly self-indulgent. Even in books that I have not liked, I have been able to find some redeeming qualities - not so here. Having said all this, I get the distinct impression that Bolano could not care less what the general public thinks of his book. I think Bolano wrote it for himself and possibly other authors or critics.

I got the book as a gift, and was quite eager to read it, given the good reviews in the book cover and backcover.
I hate to leave a book unfinished, but after reading part one and two, I couldn't stand to read it anymore and just quit. It's far too descriptive, too digressive, too slow, too long and with a very uninteresting story. Maybe there are some intellectuals who actually like this book, but it's definitely not for me.

By the 58th page I hated all four main characters in the of the first section. By the hundredth page I couldn't take it any more and had to skip to the second section. The second section, while more interesting than the first still left me bored and uninterested. I truly don't understand why people like this book other than perhaps it's one of those pretentious books for pretentious and that people claim to like it because they've been told they should.

I, like most other readers, was first intrigued by the reviews of this book. From The New York Times and The New Yorker all the way down to my local paper, everyone had something to say about it. Dreamlike, epic, worldly, etc.

I don't normally purchase books, but I purchased this one.

I adored the first part, the second part, the last part, but the third part left me cold and confused and the fourth part, as you may have gathered thus far, is a collage of police response, political response, and personal responses to the hundreds of murders on the Mexico/US border.

I felt as though Bolano was trying to weave together his ability to write the personal narrative of a few characters, his ability to write almost fairy tale-like history, and an objective, raw account of reality. Instead of weaving them together, though, he placed them side-by-side, a sort of sampler plate of Bolano's abilities. It meant that most readers will most likely enjoy only some of the five sections.

His knowledge and perspective are astounding. The prose, when meant to be, is unique, intriguing, whimsical, or completely emotionless and succinct. Definitely written for a modern audience, as, unlike past authors, Bolano doesn't stretch anything beyond necessity, doesn't linger on any side story unless it's something the reader will inevitably feel to be vital. He keeps up a swift pace.

I recommend reading it. I recommend it for the pithy little quotations, for the little things that tie each part together, details from one clarifying mysteries from another, for the feeling that you're being taken on a crazy journey across multiple continents throughout the twentieth century, for the fact that you, as a reader, are bound to adore at least one of the five sections.

It's not perfect. We know that Bolano didn't have the opportunity to give it the time it deserved. But it's worth your time.

I'd like to think of myself as reasonably literate, but I find myself stupefied by the critical circle-jerk which has fomented around 2666. I appreciate that taste is subjective, but I was hard-pressed to find a single passage, clever parallel, insight into any facet of the human condition or turn of phrase -- in over 800 pages -- that made me feel like the reading experience was worthwhile. (That, in itself, is almost impressive.) In all honesty, I've never experienced a book which was so devoid of reward. I don't need the bad guys to get comeuppance, I just want a sense that my life has been somehow enriched by the time spent in the world offered by the book. Or even a sense. Of anything. All I found were endless culs-de-sac, bloated streams of consciousness which negate themselves, multiple interpretations of the dreams of distant relatives of unimportant side-side characters. There is the slimmest interconnection between the five books here, and even the title which unifies them is of nil significance: it takes the editor's note, appended to the end of the book, to explain that Bolano makes a reference to the year 2666 in an earlier novel. How anyone but the most devoted Bolanophile would pick up on that is anyone's guess.

I barely made it through, fueled only by some masochistic sense of completism, and a rapidly ebbing hope that there was some reason for the whole endeavour. Is there really that much demand for a sprawling, formless, utterly pretentious bloated drudge? Is it merely that the backstory of the author's awareness of his impending mortality as he wrote imparts the book itself with some credibility? If anything, I think that there's a morbid comedy to be found in the idea of Bolano racing against time to pack his novel with as many red herrings as possible - really, that's all I felt there to be here. Even books which I've found frustrating reads -- Eggers' "You Shall Know Our Velocity", Sebold's "The Lovely Bones", Easton Ellis' "Glamorama", Ballard's "Crash" -- have had some quality which propelled me onwards. Guess I'm destined not to get Bolano, like I don't get Jean-Luc Godard...

Sorry - just had to vent.

Just so you know I'm not a full-on hater, I'd like to give props to Daniel Alarcon's "Lost City Radio", which I read last week and whose unpretentious style I found exquisite. In my opinion, a young talent worth following...

to call BS on a book, and simply return it to the library, unfinished, without feeling that I had failed at something important. I made it to around page thirty. The writing style was terribly boring with little accounts of people attending literary conferences: They meet, they meet, again, they meet, again - - - Stop it! NOT RECOMMENDED!

As a Literature major, I've plowed through many, MANY exceedingly long texts. But after 550 pages of this novel, I just could not go on any longer.

If you are a fan of Latin American literature and specifically magic realism, then I would suggest giving it a try. I find it relentlessly monotonous, and Part III: The Part About the Crimes has the same Groundhog Day effect as Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude.

Awful. At least for me. I usually struggle through an entire book if I bought it just on matter of principle, but I couldn't take more than the mere beginning of this. I would prefer to be boiled alive in oil.

This is not an enjoyable/pleasurable book to read. Do not be misled by the 1st 100 pages or the other reviewers who would lead you to think it's a beautiful masterpiece. I am hard pressed to believe that the other reviewers even read this book. They gush on an on about how great it is, but every one of them fails to mention the overriding fact that this book is a GRUESOME and HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT book. The largest section of the book is basically 300+ pages of autopsy reports. You will read the words "vaginally and anally raped" over and over and over, until it runs through your mind day and night. I don't know what's more disturbing, the book itself or all the people who claim to love this book but somehow overlook or just never mention the brutal and gruesome violence which is the core of the entire work. If a masterpiece is a book to be reread again and again, then this book fails to be so. I could NEVER stomach this book for even one more read.

I understand that fans of this book are very passionate about it and want to defend "2666." I, however, found it extremely depressing and frustrating to read. So much in fact that I did not finish the book.