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 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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Not for me, but:
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.
2666:
I got all the info i needed to purchase this book. But this is definately not your ordinary mystery novel. Recommend it highly.
I am writing about the shipper:
The package was in time and they took extra care. Thanks guys P.S. I did not start reading the book, saving for spring (common park, a blanket and the book what a girl can ask for more? :)
Tough first place to start:
I had never read Bolano, but the overwhelming praise and mystique surrounding 2666 had me itching to dive in. Thus, I decided to start with this 900+ page master work. Perhaps a tough place to start... Here's fair warning: 2666 is sprawling in every sense. There were parts I absolutely loved (the beginning had me completely hooked), but then it began to trudge along. And trudge along. Then right when you're ready for it to pick back up, the novel continues it's oblique path you have to push through. My... more info
