ny times book review 2666

Since his death in 2003, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño has become one of the more colorful gods in the pantheon of international literary myth. (Who can forget the time he impregnated a dragon using nothing but the power of his neglected avant-gardism?) My favorite episode of his biographical legend is the part where, at the age of nearly 40, having spent his wild-haired youth as an experimental poet obscurely chasing revolutions (political and aesthetic) all over Latin America, he finally decided it was time to hang up his spurs (or whatever revolutionaries had worn in the seventies) and try, with the air of a man resigning himself to becoming a vacuum salesman, to earn a stable living by writing fiction. This is funny because Bolaño’s fiction—dreamy novellas in which air-force pilots skywrite opaque poetry and priests tutor despots in Marxism—is perhaps the least commercially viable body of literature ever written for the alleged purpose of making money. His novelistic skill-set seems designed to repel consumers. He has an apparently life-threatening allergy to cuteness, fictional convention, and reader-enabling shortcuts. He seems personally offended by the artifice of narrative closure; although he’s addicted to detective plots, he employs them almost purely as philosophical exercises, often abandoning them halfway through. He loves (like Borges) to invent elaborate bibliographies for fictional authors, which occasionally creates the sensation that you’re reading a card catalogue instead of a novel. He follows his restless talent down every available rabbit hole of improvisation, no matter how dark and unpromising. Single sentences stretch on for pages, obsessively sifting the most minor gradations. Surreal metaphors bloom without warning: “It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness … the grass and earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings.” This all adds up, indisputably, to great literature—at his best, Bolaño strikes a new kind of balance between aim (quests, escapes, investigations) and aimlessness (dreams, description, metaphorical riffing), in which the aimlessness is so energetic and oddly urgent it steps up as a whole new species of purpose. But in what world would it ever possibly sell?

Well, apparently in this one. The newest entry in Bolaño’s legendary oeuvre is the enormous, posthumous, ambiguously complete, inscrutably titled novel 2666 —which arrives omni-buzzed and hyperdesigned, poised to be the most fashionable literary blockbuster of the holiday season.

Having just spent the equivalent of a full workweek crawling through the book, however, I’m having trouble envisioning it as the hot Christmas item some people might expect. Its 893 pages are indisputably brilliant, but they are not, by any definition, brisk—they’re tall, crowded, brutal, dense. In fact, one possible explanation of the mysterious title is that it would take any normal author 2,666 pages to convey what Bolaño manages to convey (or half-convey, or almost possibly begin to suggest he might convey) in just under 900. Reading 2666 demands a degree of sustained artistic communion that strikes me as deeply old-fashioned, practically Victorian. There are underwhelming patches, tonal dead spots, and even stretches that border on self-parody. The opening chapter is, at times, prohibitively dry. (It took me a second reading, immediately after finishing the book, to pick up much of its resonance.) Even when Bolaño is absolutely on fire, hypnotizing you with his dirty magic (which is often), the pages don’t fly by—if anything, they drag you right down into the dense fudgy core of time, where moments congeal into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into eons.

Plot summary, I’m afraid, is futile. Bolaño has a lyric poet’s feel for narrative logic, and 2666 is a modular epic—a novel built out of five linked novellas, each of which is itself a collage of endless stand-alone parts: riffs, nightmares, set pieces, monologues, dead ends, stories within stories, descriptive flourishes. It begins with four literary critics—three Europeans and an Englishwoman, embroiled in a fierce international love quadrangle—who’ve built academic careers based entirely on their obsession with a vanished German novelist, the absurdly named Benno von Archimboldi. On a tip, the scholars go searching for Archimboldi in Santa Teresa, a dystopic Mexican boomtown (“equal parts lost cemetery and garbage dump”) near the U.S. border, where, they soon discover, hundreds of women have recently been kidnapped, raped, and murdered. These mysterious killings, based on a real-life crime wave that broke out in Ciudad Juárez in the nineties, become the center of 2666 , around which Bolaño mobilizes his small army of cosmopolitan protagonists: a Chilean professor who’s terrified that his teenage daughter will be the next victim; a black American journalist assigned, on a fluke, to cover a boxing match in Santa Teresa; and the elusive Archimboldi himself, drawn toward the murders at the end of his life by a surprising family connection.

The heart of 2666 is its fourth and longest section, called simply “The Part About the Crimes.” It is, flat out, one of the best stretches of fiction I’ve ever read. I broke my pencil several times writing catatonically enthusiastic marginalia. Bolaño takes the crimes on directly, one by one, compiling a brutal, almost journalistic catalogue of the murdered women. Although he’s clearly outraged by the culture of misogyny, exploitation, and indifference that enables the killing, he refuses to load the fictional dice. He humanizes not only the women and their families but the corrupt police and even the murder suspects. It’s a perfect fusion of subject and method: The real-world horror anchors Bolaño’s dreamy aesthetic, producing an impossibly powerful hybrid of political anger and sophisticated art.

Bolaño’s novellas and short stories are often perfect exercises in pacing and tone. 2666 is, as the book itself admits, very clearly not that. Bolaño was working on the classic “loose baggy monster” plan of the novel, aiming not for a tidy, fussy, impeccable minor work but for a heroic, encyclopedic, reckless, god-awful brilliant mess. He wanted, as his Chilean professor puts it, not Bartleby the Scrivener but Moby-Dick —one of the world’s “great, imperfect, torrential works” in which the writer engages in “real combat … against that something, that something that terrifies us all.” That something was, at least partly for Bolaño, death. He was apparently not quite finished revising 2666 when he died, at 50, of liver failure—a real-life tragedy that strikes me, on a purely artistic level, as somehow appropriate. 2666 is Bolaño’s everything book: It aspires to say all he had to say about his career, his central obsessions, and his geographical touchstones (Chile, Mexico, Spain, Germany). His death, in the last moments of its creation, applies the final indeterminate Bolañesco touch: mystery, openness, imperfection—a simultaneous promise of everything and of nothing.

See Also The best passages, the five-page sentence, and more on 2666 from Vulture .

2666 By Roberto Bolaño. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

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‘2666,’ a Most Difficult Novel, Takes the Stage

By Jennifer Schuessler

• Jan. 27, 2016

CHICAGO — “2666,” the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s darkly enigmatic, wildly digressive, sometimes densely philosophical and above all extremely long final novel, has awed, mesmerized, baffled and exasperated readers around the world since its posthumous publication in 2004.

Among the awed and mesmerized is the theater director Robert Falls, who will also admit to some bafflement, if not quite exasperation.

“It would take 45 minutes just to explain what the novel is about,” Mr. Falls, the longtime artistic director of the Goodman Theater here, said on a recent afternoon. But that hasn’t stopped him from turning it into a five-hour stage adaptation that begins performances on Saturday, Feb. 6, the culmination of what he describes as a nearly decade-long effort to wrestle Mr. Bolaño’s baggy monster to the theatrical ground.

“I became weirdly obsessed with this novel years ago, and I still don’t quite know why,” Mr. Falls said. “The process of staging it is part of trying to figure out what it is I personally respond to. I still don’t quite know.”

Mr. Bolaño’s nearly 900-page novel, to attempt a plot summary, is about far-flung characters who converge on the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (modeled on Ciudad Juárez), including three European academics obsessed with an elusive German novelist named Archimboldi, a widowed philosophy professor who is losing his mind, an amorous police detective and an American journalist drawn to the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women whose mutilated bodies keep turning up in the desert (based on a real-life crime wave in Juárez in the 1990s).

But “2666,” written in five loosely connected parts, is also about evil, memory, chaos, futility, dread, hunger for meaning, and, not least, the sometimes maddening lure of literature itself.

Seth Bockley, who is adapting and directing the production with Mr. Falls, compared the production — which features 15 actors playing almost 80 characters, elaborate video projections and even a full-fledged movie, projected on a screen that lowers over the whole stage at several points — to “binge-watching” Bolaño.

“There are absolutely times when the book is mystifying and unbelievably digressive, and you have no idea what’s coming next,” he said. “The challenge we took on wasn’t to be confusing and experimental and wild, but to ask, how do we do what Bolaño did, only in the time-based, 3-D, actor-driven medium of theater?”

The project had its origins in Barcelona in 2006, where Mr. Falls saw posters for the Spanish paperback featuring an image of pink crosses in the desert and the ominously mysterious title. (Its significance is never explained). A Spanish friend told him the story of Mr. Bolaño, who was an obscure avant-garde poet before turning to fiction late in life and shooting to international stardom with “The Savage Detectives” and then near-sanctification with “2666,” which he had rushed to finish before his death from liver failure in 2003, at 50.

When the English translation of “2666” came out in 2008, Mr. Falls “devoured it” and was soon “carrying it everywhere, highlighting and crossing out pages,” he recalled.

He did an informal reading of a partial script in 2009 with the cast of his production of “King Lear,” then at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He later brought on Mr. Bockley — a 34-year-old writer and director whose eclectic résumé includes adaptations of two George Saunders short stories, the book for the musical “February House,” and spectacles for the Chicago site-specific company Redmoon.

Sharing directing duties “was the big, unusual leap for me,” Mr. Falls said. “But I admired Seth’s work, and he was much more experienced with the use of narrative voices” — much of “2666” is addressed directly to the audience — “which is something I’d never really done.”

There was a staged reading at the Goodman in 2012. But the play still seemed potentially unproducible until lightning struck last year in the form of Roy Cockrum, a former actor and onetime Episcopal monk who started an arts foundation with part of his $153 million Powerball winnings, and chose “2666” as its first grant recipient .

“It’s like a Bolaño story: an actor turned monk turned Powerball winner,” Mr. Bockley said. (Another Cockrum-backed project, Charles Mee’s “The Glory of the World,” about the mystic Thomas Merton, is running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Feb. 6.)

Mr. Falls, 61, has made his reputation with grandly scaled, operatic stagings of American realist classics, like his acclaimed recent production of “The Iceman Cometh” starring Brian Dennehy and Nathan Lane.

But the sprawling, phantasmagoric “2666” — which is being presented outside the Goodman’s regular season and financed entirely with the Cockrum grant, previously described by the theater as “in the high six or low seven figures” — is big even by his maximalist standards, longtime colleagues say.

“I think this really goes beyond anything Bob has done,” said Henry Godinez, the Goodman resident artistic associate who plays several roles. “He’s at the point where he could just kick back and do the next ‘Death of a Salesman’-type play, but instead he chooses something this risky and dangerous.”

Mr. Falls offered a more modest take. “I sort of aspire to the same life older conductors have, of continuing to be challenged by classical repertoire and new music. There’s such a great history of conductors going into their 80s and doing great work. Theater directors, not so much.”

The play is being presented with three intermissions. To keep things moving, Mr. Falls and Mr. Bockley boiled the novel down to essential characters and story lines, though they would periodically restore some of the stories-within-stories-within-stories, like the tale of a painter who attaches his mummified hand to a self-portrait — one of the many stories of artistic madness that pop up throughout Mr. Bolaño’s work.

“There’s an incredibly beautiful, digressive, poetic sensibility to Bolaño that we realized we needed to let back in the room,” Mr. Bockley said.

The directors and the design team worked to create a distinct style for each of the five parts, keyed to the radically different literary genres Mr. Bolaño drew on: fairy tale, hard-boiled crime novel, academic satire, lyrical short story, “Don Quixote”-style picaresque.

At one point, the directors toyed with doing one part in Spanish, with subtitles. And then there was a lucha libre-style scene they experimented with in rehearsal, in which two actors, playing lovelorn academics brawling over a woman, were pelted with sombreros, stuffed animals, paper flowers and other props while mid-’90s Mexican death metal roared over the sound system.

“It’s really like watching five different shows,” said Sean Fortunato, a member of the ensemble. “People are really going to surprised at how fast it goes by.”

The noirish third part, about the American journalist who is drawn to the unsolved murders in Santa Teresa and falls in with some local thugs, is told partly through a Tarantino-esque movie, shot over four days around Chicago and at a taco restaurant and a disco built inside the Goodman.

But the dark heart of the novel is the 300-page fourth section, called “The Part About the Crimes,” which toggles between a police procedural and dozens of one-paragraph descriptions of the murder and mutilation of women, in the dispassionate style of a forensic report.

The critic Sam Anderson, writing in New York magazine, called it “flat out, one of the best stretches of fiction I’ve ever read.” But it’s also the place where many readers have put the book down, whether out of boredom or sheer horror. (“I made the mistake of starting that part when I was staying alone in a cabin,” said Mikhail Fiksel, one of the production’s sound designers.)

The directors said they had pared back on the reports of the murders — recited by three women, Greek chorus-style — but then put more back in. “I really feel like the audience should experience what you do when reading the novel, which is a certain ‘Enough. Enough with the dead women,’” Mr. Falls said.

In rehearsal, actors playing the less-than-motivated police detectives on the case tweaked the scabrously misogynist jokes that provide dark comic relief (Mr. Bolaño’s own list goes on for several pages). There were laughs, but Mr. Falls also offered an analogy to the murder wave that has gripped minority neighborhoods in Chicago.

“We live in a world where people are constantly being murdered,” he said during the break. “How many until we notice?”

In the final part, which circles back to the elusive Archimboldi, Mr. Falls and Mr. Bockley don’t solve the murders. But they do provide more of an ending than the novel, which, more than one critic has noted, doesn’t so much conclude as simply stop.

The book is in some ways unfinished, which a play can’t get away with, Mr. Falls said. “You’ve got to give the audience what it wants,” he added, “but not in the way it thinks it’s going to get it.”

Performing Arts Across the Globe

Play About U.S. Constitution in Canada:  How do you retool “What the Constitution Means to Me” for those unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution? Consult Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms .

Latino Representation: John Leguizamo talked diversity at the Emmys, and he has ideas for theater too .

Mideast Turbulence Onstage:  A retrospective in Paris honors Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, whose theater works have examined the region’s troubles for decades .

Roundabout Finds a Leader:  Christopher Ashley, the artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and a Tony winner for “Come From Away,” will run the Roundabout Theater Company , one of the nation’s largest nonprofit theaters.

Simplicity at Edinburgh International Festival:  The event’s best theater production avoided the gimmicks of other shows in favor of well-drawn characters and well-written dialogue .

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2666: The NY Times Review

On the same day as the 2666 Launch Party (which, thanks to the d-bags curators of myopenbar.com was crowded with non-literary folk [seriously, we should all prank them by submitting hundreds of fake events featuring free booze], although Zadie Smith, Natasha Wimmer, Michael Miller, Craig Teicher, Mark Binelli, and many more publishers/reviewers/authors were also in attendance) I received a copy of Sunday’s NY Times Book Review , which included Jonathan Lethem’s front-page review of the novel.

By bringing scents of a Latin American culture more fitful, pop-savvy and suspicious of earthy machismo than that which it succeeds, Bolaño has been taken as a kind of reset button on our deplorably sporadic appetite for international writing, standing in relation to the generation of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes as, say, David Foster Wallace does to Mailer, Updike and Roth. As with Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in The Savage Detectives Bolaño delivered a genuine epic inocu­lated against grandiosity by humane irony, vernacular wit and a hint of punk-rock self-effacement. Any suspicion that literary culture had rushed to sentimentalize an exotic figure of quasi martyrdom was overwhelmed by the intimacy and humor of a voice that earned its breadth line by line, defying traditional fictional form with a torrential insouciance.

Well, hold on to your hats. [. . .]

Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it.

After finishing 2666 this past summer, I wondered how anyone would review this. It’s long, complicated, and made up of five standalone (in a way) sections. Lethem does a fantastic job describing the novel, highlighting many of the interesting aspects without sugar-coating the novel’s “difficulty.”

On an interesting sidenote, the Inside the List section features a note on how foreign fiction has fared on the NY Times Best Seller list.

While Bolaño, who died in 2003 at age 50, has been receiving ecstatic critical praise since his work began appearing in English translation, he has yet to make the best-seller list. The world may be going post-national, but the list is still pretty much an English-only place — like the American book market in general, which has seen the publication of only about 320 works of translated literature this year, out of roughly 15,000 literary titles, according to Chad W. Post of Open Letter Press. This week’s fiction best sellers include only two translated books, both on the trade paperback list: Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist (at No. 8 in its 59th week here) and Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (at No. 18 in its 17th week). Meanwhile, Stieg Larsson’s Swedish thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo drops to No. 17 on the extended hardcover list.

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2666 by Roberto Bolaño

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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A+ : nearly perfect

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   Very impressed.    From the Reviews : "You could say 2666 is the epic novel that Borges never wrote. Though the book is often quite maddening -- in the way it's so plethoric, constantly introducing new characters and dropping others, never having a main protagonist, choosing to leave so much unexplained, proceeding like a dream -- it also always has a power to command the reader, to absorb and mystify you. And however much the novel circles around uncontrollable evil, social disorder and the questionable value of literature itself, Bolaño's true preoccupation remains always, unmistakeably, the search for love and meaning in life. A masterpiece then ? Maybe. Certainly not nothing." - David Sexton, Evening Standard "Pas un roman, mais un bréviaire pour les temps présents, un immense manuel de deuil et de mélancolie. Un De profundis baroque et énigmatique, le crime passionnel d'un homme mort par et pour la littérature, qui laisse aux vivants ce livre, comme une armée vaincue fait retraite en br�lant la terre derrière elle. (...) Ce serait un livre moderne, indifférent à la modernité. (...) Ce serait inoubliable." - Olivier Mony, Le Figaro "Bolaño�s most audacious performance. (...) 2666 is less fun than The Savage Detectives but it is a summative work -- a grand recapitulation of the author�s main concerns and motifs. (...) Bolaño is an uncompromising writer. He alternates between brisk vignettes and passages of meandering opulence. His prose is short on adjectives and sometimes deliberately infelicitous but it can also beguile. It is studded with aphorisms, many of them calculated to invite passionate disagreement. Deranged similes are a hallmark of his writing" - Henry Hitchings, Financial Times "Only the final book, a compelling mittel-European picaresque of Archimboldi�s rise from Prussian peasant to an author sought by the Nobel committee, brings out Bolaño�s gift for intense, erotically charged encounters, subtly nuanced relationships and assured, complex plotting." - James Urquhart, Financial Times " 2666 ist ein k�hnes, wildes, hochexperimentelles Unget�m von einem Roman. In der vorliegenden Form keineswegs perfekt -- besonders der zweite, dritte und fünfte Teil haben große Längen --, ist er doch immer noch so ziemlich allem überlegen, was in den letzten Jahren veröffentlicht wurde. 2666 , das kann man getrost voraussagen, wird für die Literatur Südamerikas so prägend sein wie in der vorangegangenen Generation die Hauptwerke von Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa und Julio Cortázar." - Daniel Kehlmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "It is complete, achieved and satisfying, though there is an unignorable urgency to it that is truly mesmerizing and breathtaking (.....) Although existentially unsettling, 2666 is also funny, very funny, and oddly reassuring; no run-of-the-mill apocalypticist, Bolaño maintains a belief in art, in a "third leg," even though so much conspires against it, like time and the ways it distorts and disintegrates everything. 2666 holds an "unquiet mirror" up to hell and stuns with its brilliance. It is a heroic achievement, a modern epic -- a masterpiece." - J.S.Goldbach, Globe & Mail "It takes some force of will to make it through this sequence of five separate, tangentially linked novels" - Alfred Hickling, The Guardian "Naturally in such a work there are boring passages, irrelevant passages, highly indulgent passages, places where you can clearly see Bolaño pushing his fiction writer�s confidence game too far; yet, the whole of 2666 is such a masterly and awe-inspiring performance that the reader settles into and clings to it as one settles for the world." - Vivek Narayanan, The Hindu "Roberto Bolaño's 2666 is a difficult experience to shake off; it lingers in the unconscious like a sizzling psychotropic for days or weeks after reading. It is a novel both prodigious in scope and profound in implication, but a book ablaze with the furious passion of its own composition. At times, it reads like a race against death. At others, you can only wonder at the reach and raw intelligence of the writing. (...) The uncertainty and the loose flaps, the digressions and the rare unfoldings, the borrowing or pastiche of different genres, the blazing curtains of prose, the frequently hilarious non-sequiturs, together create an effect of startling anarchic grace, no less magnificent for being swallowed up in the novel's own encircling silence. (...) Much of the writing goes beyond any recognisable literary model and can only be approached on its own terms." - Richard Gwyn, The Independent "The next time you hear about the "death of the novel", beat the speaker over the head with 2666 . And then make them read it. Five books in one, masterfully interwoven not only by recurrent ideas and characters but by a torrential humour, deep humanity and sheer storytelling bravura, the posthumous masterpiece from the Chilean-turned-Catalan magician (splendidly translated by Natasha Wimmer) should stand on every self-respecting bookshelf." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent " 2666 , a detective novel without a solution, contains much dark philosophical humour, wickedly effective pastiche and pages of gutsy, irreverent boisterousness (not to mention peculiar sex). (...) Among other things, 2666 offers an apology for the novel as a vast network that links all things, no matter how trivial or disparate. It is a marvellous gallimaufry of the funny, fabulist and, at times, oddly beautiful. All human life is contained in these burning pages, and Natasha Wimmer deserves a medal for her fluent translation." - Ian Thomson, Independent on Sunday "Whether he is as good as he wanted to be, or in the way he wanted to be, is another question, and the answer can�t be simple. It depends, I think, not only on the literary quality of the hugely ambitious late work, especially 2666 , but on how we read it and what we are looking for. (...) The way these stories arise and fade away doesn�t give us the sense that the narrative leads nowhere; just the sense that it doesn�t lead anywhere obvious, and that we are going to have to work out the connections that Bolaño has left for us to make." - Michael Wood, London Review of Books "This is no ordinary whodunit, but it is a murder mystery. Santa Teresa is not just a hell. It's a mirror also -- "the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant, useless metamorphosis." (...) He wrote 2666 in a race against death. His ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void. So his reach extends beyond northern Mexico in the 1990s to Weimar Berlin and Stalin's Moscow, to Dracula's castle and the bottom of the sea." - Ben Ehrenreich, The Los Angeles Times " 2666 , like all of Bolaño's work, is a graveyard. (...) His ambitions for 2666 were greater: to write a postmortem for the dead of the past, the present and the future." - Marcela Valdes, The Nation "Die ganze Potenz seines Könnens legte er in diesen 1200-seitigen Roman (.....) (E)in Ineinander von Stimmungen und Überlegungen, Erregungen und Meditationen. (...) 2666 ist ein literarischer Amazonas, in dessen labyrinthische Verzweigungen und Stromschnellen hinaus ein jeder Leser mit einem Boot segelt, das sich als zu klein erweist. (...) Bolaño zieht das ganze Arsenal seines Könnens, um reale Gegenwart zu schaffen. Stupend sind sein Wissen und seine Beobachtungsgabe, die Potenz seiner (historischen) Imagination, die Sensitivität der Einfühlung, die Psychologie der Figurenzeichnung und nicht zuletzt die Organisation eines so gigantischen Stoffes und so vieler Erzählstränge." - Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung "It is here that 2666 begins to betray its weaknesses. Each of its parts is brilliantly paced, and aside from the first few dozen pages of the third, consistently compelling. All are connected not only by the crimes, but also by a myriad of interwoven motifs. But the whole thing does not hold together. Bolaño goes too far this time in the centrifugal direction. The difficulty is not the novel's heterogeneity of form. Just as The Savage Detectives offers a crowd of voices, 2666 gives us a virtuosic range of narrative modes: academic satire in I, minimalism in III, reportage in IV, the bildungsroman or fictional biography in V, allegory and surrealism in places throughout. There is no problem with Bolaño's implication that to know something one must speak about it in different ways. The problem is that there is no single central something about which the novel attempts to speak." - William Deresiewicz, The New Republic "An outline of the narrative is, maybe, an evasion of what the book is about: it obscures the violence, the explicit and often overwrought sex (cocks a foot long, and no screw under three hours); it also obscures Bolaño's teasing, self-consciously literary tone. He is a relentlessly digressive author, and the book is packed with subplots, details and disquisitions to the point of neurosis. (...) When the dazzle has faded, what is the pattern that will be left imprinted on your vision ? Is it only the omnipresence of death ?" - Robert Hanks, New Statesman "The newest entry in Bolaño�s legendary oeuvre is the enormous, posthumous, ambiguously complete, inscrutably titled novel 2666 -- which arrives omni-buzzed and hyperdesigned, poised to be the most fashionable literary blockbuster of the holiday season. Having just spent the equivalent of a full workweek crawling through the book, however, I�m having trouble envisioning it as the hot Christmas item some people might expect. Its 893 pages are indisputably brilliant, but they are not, by any definition, brisk -- they�re tall, crowded, brutal, dense. In fact, one possible explanation of the mysterious title is that it would take any normal author 2,666 pages to convey what Bolaño manages to convey (or half-convey, or almost possibly begin to suggest he might convey) in just under 900." - Sam Anderson, New York "It�s hard to know what to make of 2666 . It reads like a puzzle crafted by a sadistic, sympathetic literary master. Given the way it rambles without urgency, it�s hard to believe it�s is the work of someone at death�s door. There are long stretches when I felt abandoned as a reader. (That he�s not here to explain himself makes for a perfect punch line.) Yet Bola�o reveals enough to keep us reading�a turn of phrase, a captured moment that just feels so confident, so singular. (...) If there�s something, anything, that ties these five books together, perhaps it�s a sense of the nakedness of life, the proximity of death and the occasional yearning to reach out and stroke the liquid air. It should be noted that although many lives are snuffed out in these pages, the writers seem to live on. 2666 may not be Bolaño�s masterpiece, but it�s also inescapable, unignorable and lasting." - Emily Borrow, The New York Observer "(O)ne doesn't really feel the lack of final revisions doing much to diminish its power. At many points, one feels about to be able to compare the book to something else. (...) Randomness and consequence competing for control over history, the struggle of the individual to survive with a functioning ethics: the themes carry over into the final section (.....) For a while yet, our brain feels rewired for multiplicity. This is not just a cultural or geographical question, though if 2666 contains a lesson it is that people are always from some confluence of factors more bizarre than a country. And it goes deeper than the question of multiple voices. We have eavesdropped on characters and then felt ourselves in the funny, sad, and dangerous process of needing and making meaning. Since there is no logical endpoint, we close with an image from the novel that is out of time. A world of "endless shipwreck," but met with the most radiant effort. It's as good a way as any to describe Bolaño and his overwhelming book. " - Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books "Almost 300 slow pages later, with "The Part About Archimboldi," this epic, maddening, mesmerizing adventure picks up energy as it nears its end. Archimboldi appears, not quite living up to his fanfare. The book tightens its focus, to the extent that a book with a huge population but no real principals can do so. And a description of Archimboldi�s prose offers a crystallization of Bolaño�s." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times " 2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it. (...) As in Arcimboldo's paintings, the individual elements of 2666 are easily catalogued, while the composite result, though unmistakable, remains ominously implicit, conveying a power unattainable by more direct strategies. (...) By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world's disasters, Bolaño has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review " 2666 is not Roberto Bolaño�s masterpiece but almost a compendium, in individual scenes, of the qualities that made him a great writer. (...) By the end, after close to nine hundred pages, the reader will be impressed by the range and power on display but might wish that the novel cohered, rather than merely concluding." - The New Yorker "History, in this concept, is like a collective nightmare, and reading 2666 is much like enduring a horrific dream -- all you want to do is wake up but you can't -- because the multitalented Bolaño was a spellbinder: he knew how to make readers keep turning pages. (...) This is a daunting book, a book to admire more than like. But despite its faults -- the section on the serial murders is, frankly, tedious -- it beguiles a reader as few books do. If you're not one of those timid readers singled out at the beginning of this review, if you're a reader who'd rather see a novelist aim for the moon, even if he falls on his face, then this is the book for you." - Malcolm Jones, Newsweek " 2666 is a novel of stupefying ambition with a mock-documentary element at its core. (...) 2666 is indeed Bolaño's master statement, not just on account of its length and quality but also because it is the fullest expression of his two abiding themes: the writing life and violence. Bolaño's interest in the former is easy to explain -- he believed that a life dedicated to literature was the only one worth living." - William Skidelsky, The Observer "With The Savage Detectives having already been proclaimed Roberto Bolaño's "masterpiece", a new superlative is needed for this, the Chilean author's colossal final work." - Hermione Hoby, The Observer "The detailed and relentless cataloging of the deaths of hundreds of women in the border city of Santa Teresa in the novel's longest part, titled "The Part About the Crimes," serves as a lens through which readers witness the brutality of a modern society whose fabric has been torn by the exigencies of global capitalism, internal and external migration, and the dehumanization of the characters who people this nightmarish landscape." - Martha Kramer, Political Affairs "Like all superconfident bastards, 2666 is flattering, unpredictable, swaggering -- and irresistible to anyone who wants something to care about in the world of books. No wonder reviewers loved it. Reviewing a novel like this is about the most intense thrill a critic will ever have, short of writing one themselves. (...) The intoxicating force of 2666 also lies in its utter disregard for boundaries." - Tom Chatfield, Prospect "Bolaño is occasionally lyrical but more frequently direct, demonstrating a facility with styles and tones from broad comedy to blackest despair. The five discrete sections that make up 2666 could stand as novels in their own right, twists on different genres from academic satire to clinical police procedural to bildungsroman." - James Crossley, Review of Contemporary Fiction "(M)addening, inconclusive and very, very long; hideous in parts and beautiful in others; exerting a terrible power over the reader long after it's done. (...) As for the title, there are clues to its significance in other books, but trying to take apart Bolaño is like looking under the hood of a car to see what makes it go. The big cryptic number, like so much in the book, is a riddle without a right answer -- ineffable, yet palpitating with meaning." - Alexander Cuadros, San Francisco Chronicle " 2666 has still bigger goals in its sights, and though the mind shrinks from parts of it, it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by its ambition, and much of its achievement. (...) This is an unlikely bestseller, I must say: it is often very hard-going, deliberately frustrates the reader�s wish to discover, and challenges his ability to recall the details of plot and character at every point. (...) Does he have enough subject-matter to sustain his huge fictional design, or is he one of those writers who turn to exhibitions of the extreme to disguise a fundamental poverty of observed human experience ? The question goes unanswered, but I will say that the wild chaos of 2666 held me from beginning to end -- reminding me, above all, of The Man Without Qualities -- and sent me back to read all Bolaño�s other novels. You will want to experience this one." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator "The fact that the book remains as riveting as any top-notch thriller is testament to Bolano's astonishing virtuosity. (...) What is most memorable about 2666 is the sheer abundance of its narrative. Bolano mints characters with a spendthrift generosity, though there is nothing preening about this breadth of scope. (...) Bolano is equally unstinting with his subplots, which spring organically from the novel, like the colourful offshoots of a rampant tropical plant." - Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times "The first temptation might be to dismiss this wondrous novel as no more than cult fiction. (...) But 2666 is a major literary event. (...) (W)ith Bolaño nothing is simple. 2666 is also a deeply self-conscious work which concerns itself with the act of reading and writing (something almost every main character is seen doing at some stage). (...) It is both notably realistic (...) and elaborately inventive. It is an important development in the novel form and an unforgettable piece of writing that will resonate for years to come." - Stephen Abell, The Telegraph " 2666 is not a novel that any responsible critic could describe with words like brisk or taut . (Not like all those other brisk, taut 898-page novels.) That's not Bola�o's method. He's addicted to unsolved mysteries and seemingly extraneous details that actually do turn out to be extraneous, and he loves trotting out characters -- indelible thumbnail sketches -- whom we will never encounter a second time. (...) But 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. This is a dangerous book, and you can get lost in it. How can art, Bolaño is asking, a medium of form and meaning, reflect a world that is blessed with neither ? That is in fact a cesspool of chance and filth ?" - Lev Grossman, Time "Wading through its 900 pages, one never feels that he could have pushed things further but chose to rein himself in; at every turn, he went for it. The result is a wild, ungoverned book, full of surreal inversions and wistful comedy, the source of countless pleasures. Yet it is also a menacing proposition for readers of average intolerance, exhaustingly playful and tauntingly long, founded on dream sequences and digressions, replete with red herrings and wild geese. The book's fever-ishness can be contagious; symptoms include nausea and déjà vu. (...) (I)ts whole approach seems to have been derived from Goethe's notion of "world literature". The difference is that Goethe conceived "world literature" as a way of thinking about all books, whereas Bolaño, with his mixture of dynamism and overreach, managed to achieve it in a single novel." - Leo Robson, The Times "(A)n exceptionally exciting literary labyrinth. (...) What strikes one first about it is the stylistic richness: rich, elegant yet slangy language that is immediately recognizable as Bolano's own mixture of Chilean, Mexican and European Spanish. Then there is 2666 's resistance to categorization. At times it is reminiscent of James Ellroy: gritty and scurrilous. At other moments it seems as though the Alexandria Quartet had been transposed to Mexico and populated by ragged versions of Durrell's characters. There's also a similarity with W. G. Sebald's work (.....) There are no defining moments in 2666 . Mysteries are never resolved. Anecdotes are all there is. Freak or banal events happen simultaneously, inform each other and poignantly keep the wheel turning. There is no logical end to a Bolano book." - Amaia Gabantxo, Times Literary Supplement "Even as the novel exudes the improvisatory nature of lived experience, Bolaño eases the reader towards the void represented by the murders in Santa Teresa. Quirky, vibrantly etched characters undergo crises that resonate with the darkness at the heart of the novel." - Michael Saler, Times Literary Supplement "In the staggeringly intricate, vast, and brilliantly unnerving 2666 , too, everyone is constantly moving toward the unknown, but this time, they're not alone." - Zach Baron, The Village Voice "Knowing that his liver ailment would probably kill him, Bolaño pulled out all the stops for his last novel and threw out the rulebook for conventional fiction. (...) Archimboldi never meets his critics, the reporters never solve the crimes, and nothing is resolved at the novel's end. (Even the title is left unexplained, though an editor's note offers a clue.) This is not because Bolaño didn't finish it but because he was more interested in conveying the culture of violence and how writers respond to it than in telling a tidy story. (...) The novel is probably longer than it needs to be, but there isn't a boring page in it, and I suspect further study would justify everything here." - Steven Moore, The Washington Post "Auf uns Leser wartet das Glück einer einzigartigen Entdecker-Reise, über Hunderte und Aberhunderte Seiten einer von Christian Hansen berückend aus dem Spanischen übersetzten Prosa, die tatsächlich ihresgleichen sucht. (Wenngleich Roberto Bolano wohl auch an dieser Formulierung die stilistische Prüderie gerügt hätte.)" - Marko Martin, Die Welt "Metaphernsicher, mit Sinn für rasante dramaturgische Schnitte (auch den locker eingestreuten Kürzestdialog beherrscht er hinreißend), dabei höchst ambivalent zwischen Frechheit, Wahn, Zynismus, Trauer, Wut und Komik schwankend, berichtet dieser chilenische Vielfraß und Alleskönner vom Bösen. Der deutsche Übersetzer Christian Hansen ist ebenfalls hoch zu loben. Er hat Bolaños rasch dahineilende Sätze in ein sehr gelenkiges Deutsch überführt und sich vor affigen Floskeln gehütet. Doch eine Crux gibt es. Sie betrifft den fünften und letzten Teil (.....) Deshalb mein Rat: Stellen Sie auf Seite 769 einfach das Lesen ein." - Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Die Welt    Quotes : "The multiple story lines of 2666 are borne along by narrators who seem also to represent various of its literary influences, from European avant-garde to critical theory to pulp fiction, and who converge on the city of Santa Teresa as if propelled toward some final unifying epiphany. It seems appropriate that 2666 's abrupt end leaves us just short of whatever that epiphany might have been, resulting in another open-ended ending, in paths to retrace and resume, leaving everything behind again." - Francisco Goldman, The New York Review of Books (19/7/2007) Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

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 know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week. Don't you ? Don't you really ? he asked himself. Really I don't, he said to himself, and that was as elegant as he could be.

     "A sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world," said Fate, "a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border, a serious crime story, for fuck's sake."

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of the streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who know where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.

     And at last we come to Archimboldi's sister, Lotte Reiter.

The end of simulacra.

the paintings of the four seasons were pure bliss. Everything in everything, writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance.

Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even the things that haven't happened yet.

     "No, not American either, more like African," said Junge, and he made more faces under the tree branches. "Or rather: Asian," murmured the critic.

About the Author :

       Chilean author Roberto Bolaño lived 1953 to 2003.

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