ISBN13: 9780374100148
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS

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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 90 reviews)

Life's too short, people... by Scott Alic (Toronto)

1 Stars
November 05, 2009
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...

No Country For Young Women by T. Karr (MO USA)

4 Stars
October 26, 2009
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.

5 Books by John Cullom (Washington, DC USA)

5 Stars
October 26, 2009
The best thing you can read is a book by a major writer at the top of his power swinging for the fence, and this is certainly that. East of Eden is another one of those, and more obviously triumphant. But Bolano isn't a triumphant or even optimistic sort of writer. This is a hugely ambitious experiment, and to me, successful even with (what I consider to be) flaws. Here are a couple of things that will give you an idea of how novel the experiment is, and they should give you an idea if this is your bag. The book consists of five "parts," and in Bolano's conception, these were not to be published in one book. The publishers overrode his concept and published them in this form. However, his idea was that these five could be read in any order, giving a different experience to the reader depending on how they were picked up. That's even bolder than Joyce's book without a cover concept for Finnegan's Wake. It works too. If you want to be bold, switch the first and last sections, see what you think. I think there are a lot of other successful arrangements as well, and this method of reading is recommended by the enjoyment the critics get in finding Archimboldi's books haphazardly throughout their lives. I also love the bravery in the refusal to be comforting in this book. There is a theme that's in the Savage Detectives as well, that is probably the only one worthy of a serious writer: That while a life in literature may not be full, redemptive, and may bring significant damage to the writer and those around him, that is not the fault of literature, but a reflection on how irredeemable this world and life is as a whole. To hope for any of those things may be reaching for too much, but literature is our most powerful method of reaching; to turn one's back on portion that life is to lose control of one's soul. Hey, Bolano is bleak in a way that I haven't seen in anyone else, but he's funny too, and in the Archimboldi part, he's soaring at times. I did not walk away from this book (actually, I haven't walked away from it yet) depressed, but reinvigorated in the feeling that literature is part of the world that can act as a counterweight to a sprawling ad hoc garbage dump if not everything in it.

truly awful by A Reader

1 Stars
October 11, 2009
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.

Facinating Title by Robert McRobert (Florida)

5 Stars
October 08, 2009
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!

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

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