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2666: A Novel |  | Author: Roberto Bolaño
Creator: Natasha Wimmer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy Used: $7.48
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Seller: Wills Books
Rating:  124 reviews
Sales Rank: 149453
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Pages: 912
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.8
ISBN: 0374100144
Dewey Decimal Number: 863.64
EAN: 9780374100148
ASIN: 0374100144
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa-a fictional Juárez-on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: It was one thing to read Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives last year and have your mind thrilled and expanded by a sexy, meandering masterpiece born whole into the English language. It was still another to read it and know, from the advance reports of Spanish readers, that Bolaño's true masterpiece was still to come. And here it is: 2666, the 898-page novel he sprinted to finish before his early death in 2003, again showing Bolaño's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread. But where the motion of The Savage Detectives is outward, expanding in wider and wider orbit to collect everything about our lonely world, 2666, while every bit as omnivorous, ratchets relentlessly toward a dark center: the hundreds of mostly unsolved murders of women in the desert borderlands of maquiladoras and la migra in northern Mexico. He takes his time getting there--he tells three often charming book-length tales before arriving at the murders--but when he does, in a brutal and quietly strange landscape where neither David Lynch nor Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh would feel out of place, he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane. --Tom Nissley
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 124
HELLZAPOPPIN' IN 900 PAGES September 1, 2010
Joseph S. Romaninsky (Gouldsboro, PA)
This big book is not for everyone. Nearly a thousand pages. Three hundred pages
alone are devoted to serial killings of women in a Mexican border city, and they
are gruesome. This complex book will test your patience, stamina, and moral fiber,
among other things. It is a virtual tour of the Hell that parts of our world were,
are, and continue to become. The novel is in five parts that the author origin-
ally intended to publish separately. The five distinct but interrelated parts tell
the fascinating tale of an elusive, reclusive, German novelist of the late twent-
ieth century. Intersecting story lines which may take hundreds of pages to converge
are told from many personal, geographical and historical viewpoints. Some scenes
and characters are so vividly drawn they visited me in memory flashbacks for weeks
after I finished the book.
The only writer to whom I can compare Bolaño in terms of the scope of this novel
is Thomas Pynchon (e.g., Against The Day). If you love long, intricate, and marvel-
ously inventive novels, the kind you know you must read again someday, then you may
enjoy this big, exciting work.
 Merits a title few books deserve: Masterpiece August 26, 2010
Eric Treanor (Half Moon Bay, California, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm aware of two authors who have made lasting formal innovations in the novel during my adult life: W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño.
Both writers died--Sebald abruptly in a car accident; Bolaño, as predicted, of liver failure--precisely when they were becoming internationally recognized as major figures in world literature.
Not surprisingly, they were exploring the same phenomena: the decadence of civilization, organized evil, the transformation of beauty by science, an obsession with literature, the relationship between storytelling and love. Bolaño adds to this list an unapologetic fascination with the connection between sex and violence, suggesting that the two are not merely interrelated by indistinguishable.
The reader's great fortune, of course, is to see the difference in their formal approaches to those phenomena. They could hardly be more different. And yet like all great art both possess an aura of inevitability.
With each passing week, 2666 increasingly appears to be the great novel of our time. Like all great novels, it is prophetic--by which I mean: it announces, in advance of everyone else, where the seeds of our pending destruction lie buried. Dostoyevsky foresaw the destruction of Europe in the death of Christianity and displacement of 19th century liberalism by totalitarianism aligned with science. In our case, Bolaño sees the seeds of our doom in a dusty desert Mexican city named Ciudad Juárez.
Five years ago, to declare Ciudad Juárez the cradle of our doom would have seemed crazy. Now it does not. Mexico's descent into madness and our own inability (political, moral, economic, aesthetic) to cope with that descent looks more and more like Yeats's rough beast. And the rise of the police state in Arizona demonstrates that we're placing our hopes for the future in hate. History has given us plenty of lessons on what happens next.
I suppose it's a shame that Bolaño didn't quite finish his book. Like The Savage Detectives, it can be accused of pervasive untidiness. On the other hand, untidiness is no doubt one of its ambitions, being a repudiation of the myths of control and perfection that Bolaño saw as a kind of dishonest and dangerous ugliness. He spent his youth, after all, in exile from Pinochet Chile.
This book an be exceedingly difficult to read. The long middle section, called "The Part About the Crimes," gives us an unblinking collage of the murders of hundreds of girls. I do not know how Bolaño intuited that the 1990s murders of girls in Ciudad Juárez foretold the dissolution of the Mexican state--and possibly the beginning of the end of liberalism in the Americas. But he did. The question now is, What else does this novel foretell, that we are still failing to see?
 I could not bear this rambling collection of thoughts August 22, 2010
PG Reader (Punta Gorda, Florida)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is the first time that I have ever written a review for Amazon. I read them all the time before I choose a book, and I felt as though I had to give back to the Amazon community to disuade others from reading this book. I had heard that this book got all sorts of critical acclaim, and so I bought it with hopes that it would live up to the hype.
I had to stuggle my way though the first 200 pages. The prose was bland and tedious. I did not relate with any of the characters, and frankly, I did not care if any of them lived or died. I felt like I was back in college and had a homework assignment to read this book. I finally stopped because life is too short to waste on a bad book. There are wonderful books out there, and go read them, but not this one. You will thank me.
 Did 2666 kill the Surrealist novel? August 16, 2010
Charlotte Allen
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
During the long months it took me to read 2666 I was convinced it was an important work of fiction, but I only occasionally enjoyed reading it, and now, three months since I finished it, there's not much from it that's stuck with me. Two characters, and an ambiance described perfectly by the quote from Baudelaire that Bolano uses as a preface to his novel: "an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom". Except that the horror is to repetitive and mundane to be any sort of oasis.
The first character who lodged herself in my cranium was Liz Norton, the gorgeous goddess who enlivens the otherwise tediously literary first section of 2666. Liz charmed me right away because "For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal layrinths..." I doubt that pleasure loving Liz would have had the fortitude to wade through Bolano's enormous enigmatic construction. The second character I liked and remember was Oscar Fate, a black journalist who vomits his way through an ominous yet aimless third section. I remember Mr. Fate because his section has an immediacy that differs from the emotionally distant tone of the rest of the novel and convinces me that it's the dying Bolano, with his taste for loneliness and prostitutes, who's looks most directly out of Oscar's eyes.
The rest of 2666 blurs together in a Surrealist college of strange stories and long obsessive lists embedded in a self-referential matrix at whose center lies the great enigmatic writer Archimboldi. Bolano may have been describing what he was aiming at with 2666 when he describes Archimboldi's work: "The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely." But there are few children in 2666, fewer animals, and almost no nature. What's left at the end of 2666 is the competitive, frightening, violent, and sexually obsessive world of human men.
In retrospect, 2666 seems so tedious and dreary that I have to ask myself why I was convinced, and still am convinced, that it is an important if unpleasant novel. Is it because Bolano suggests that we "are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown... (we) 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" and thus implies that any reluctance on our part to read another grisly yet boring page about a murdered girl is only a validation of 2666's status as the great work of a great master? Well, no. I'm not that big a sucker for authorial self-aggrandizement. For me 2666's importance comes from its place in the history of the Surrealist novel that began with Nadja, reached its apogee in Hopscotch, and has perhaps come, like Soviet Communism, to its bloated tragic end in 2666.
I've had a soft spot in my head for charming Surrealist bad boys since I hung out for awhile with a group of post-Situationist poets in my early twenties. And two of the most charming (and most important) of the Surrealist authors are Andre Breton and Julio Cortazar. Cortazar was one of Bolano's favorites, and 2666 borrows a great deal from Cortazar's masterpiece Hopscotch, including the division into loosely related sections and the recursive presence of a master writer who provides a meta-commentary on the novel that contains him. Cortazar in turn borrowed his mysterious not-quite-a-prostitute heroine La Maga from the title character of the original Surrealist novel, Nadja. What the three have in common is the rejection of reason, morality, and work, and a predilection for living off ladies of easy virtue who are deserted the moment they become inconvenient, then idolized in absentia. So why after multiple readings do I still find Nadja exciting and Hopscotch marvelous but am certain I'll never pick up 2666 again? Is it because the Marxist faith that Breton espoused and Cortazar maintained gave them some hope for the future, and that hope for the future is a necessary precondition for experiencing and communicating pleasure? Bolano, having passed through the ultra-cynical baptism of the Situationists, has no hope left for any project of social improvement, so what we're left with in 2666 is like the Surrealists' beloved sado-masochism without a tinge of revolutionary romance - an interminable night of horror. I hope that this transformation from revolutionary idealist to hopeful realist to self-involved cynic doesn't say anything about the transformation of our larger world, but I'm pretty sure it does. And that's why 2666 matters: it's the last panel of a triple mirror reflecting our recent centuries, and if the picture's not pretty, it's not the mirror's fault.
An Incredible Literary Achievement July 24, 2010
Katherine McCarthy (Forest Hills, NY United States)
Am still working my way through this work. I ordered the three volume edition so I could carry it with me on buses and subways. An incredible monument to 20th century literature. Can't really describe the puree of magical realism, true crime, and surrealism, but see Patti Smith's 3 part review on her website. A major achievement.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 124
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