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Overview

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008

Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008

Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008

San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008

Seattle Times Best Books of 2008

New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008

Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed ...

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More About This Book

Overview

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008

Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008

Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008

San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008

Seattle Times Best Books of 2008

New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008

Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman—these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.

In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals."

Editorial Reviews

Janet Maslin
…think of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp (both explicitly invoked here) and the Bob Dylan of "Highway 61 Revisited," all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers. Bolano's references were sufficiently global to encompass all that, and to interweave both stuffy academia and tawdry gumshoe fiction into this book's monumentally inclusive mix.
—The New York Times
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolano 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…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, Bolano has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable.
—The New York Times Book Review
The Barnes & Noble Review
Roberto Bolaño is a master of digression. Among the countless stories that he tells in 2666, his 900-page cinderblock of a novel, there is not one that feels incomplete. (Considering that Bolaño died in 2003 before he finished the final book of the five-part sequence, that's quite a feat.) In his hands, narrative tangents, followed to their logical (or illogical, as the case may be) conclusions, fill in the spaces opened up by the boundlessly layered story lines.

To call 2666 ambitious is to understate its scale. Comprising five almost autonomous books, the novel is a chronicle of the 20th century, unafraid to confront its more gruesome turns in its sweep across history. The binding link, insofar as there is one, is the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, modeled on Ciudad Juárez, where for the better part of the 1990s there were hundreds of brutal murders, with the bodies of young women turning up in dumps and deserts at the city's margin. The fourth, and longest, of the books takes up the matter of the murders directly, taking readers sequentially through each of the killings, along with the sexual abuse, mutilation, and police incompetence that accompanied them. They vary in their specifics, but the broad template is the same. "In September, the body of Ana Muñoz Sanjuán was found behind some trash cans on Calle Javier Paredes, between Colonia Félix Gómez and Colonia Centro. The body was completely naked and showed evidence of strangulation and rape, which would later be confirmed by the medical examiner," Bolaño writes with the blank neutrality of a police report.

He treads a difficult line in his account of the murders, explicit in his brutality without letting his descriptions slip into the exploitative. In each case, he is matter-of-fact, but the sheer accumulation of grisly detail can be difficult to stomach. For the most part, the crimes remain unsolved, and in the instances that the police do track down the killer, it turns out not to be the sought-after serial murderer but another case of domestic violence in this grim, industrial borderland. These murders, for Bolaño, contain all the violence of Latin America's colonial legacy, and the willingness of its witnesses to lay aside their own horror. Bolaño is at once oblique and microscopically precise in laying his themes on the table.

With Santa Teresa as a loose backdrop, 2666 radiates outward in all directions. The first book traces four obsessive European academics as their quest to find Archimboldi, the hermetic novelist at the center of their scholarly enterprise, leads them to Mexico. The second picks up with Amalfitano, a melancholic scholar whom they meet in their travels, as he begins to lose hold of his sanity, while the third, and in a way the most isolated part, tracks Harlem-based journalist Oscar Fate as he covers a boxing match in Santa Teresa. And finally the fifth, after "The Part About the Crimes," returns to Archimboldi.

Bolaño, with 2666, seems to have taken up the banner of postmodern genre pastiche: his account of Archimboldi's journey from rural Prussia to the Eastern Front of WWII to literary fame has all the trappings of the traditional bildungsroman, while the Oscar Fate section fits squarely alongside the gruffly laconic noir of American pulp. What separates Bolaño's efforts to catalogue the 20th century in letters is the utter authenticity of his effort; it never feels as if he is playing mimic. Or as Amalfitano would have it, literature is at its best when it doesn't suppress its own anarchy, "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." Bolaño would seem to agree.

As in The Savage Detectives, Bolaño's much-acclaimed 2007 novel, the question of how life comes to bear on writing, and writing on life, is never far from the author's reach. Like the visceral realist poets of that novel, 2666's quartet of critics -- Pelletier, Espinoza, Norton, and Morini -- structure their entire existence around the pursuit of a phantom author. The mysterious Archimboldi, in turn, becomes immersed in the literary life almost by accident, clinging to the notebook of a Ukrainian poet that he finds by chance in the village where his unit is seeking shelter. For Archimboldi, Ansky's words are consuming, a lifeline amidst the hopelessness of war: "He no longer thought about suicide, because he was already dead. In the mornings the first thing he did was read Ansky's notebook, opening it at random." For the authors among Bolaño 's cast, the imaginative possibilities of literature lend structure to an existence that seems otherwise without it -- the very texture of life is reflected in the mode of its telling.

But more than the fixation on the literary life shared by the characters of 2666, what ties the novel together is the predominance of an unimaginable violence. The murders in Santa Teresa are Bolaño 's avenue into a century defined by the scope of the damage it wrought. What Archimboldi witnesses on the battlefield and channels into art is no better or worse than the savagery dispassionately reported by the Mexican police. In one of the novel's most unsettling scenes, he encounters a corps of Romanian deserters who have killed and crucified their own general. "He wasn't a bad sort," one of the Romanians observes of his commander, the arbitrariness of their cruelty even more stark. And then there are the smaller brutalities. The distinction between sex and violence, as envisioned by Bolaño, can be troublingly porous, and the predation inherent in the Santa Teresa crimes casts its pall over the novel's sexual politics. Even in the comparatively airy first section, the romantic entanglements of the four scholars take on a twinge of the sinister when Pelletier and Espinoza find a sexual rival in a friend of Liz Norton's (with whom both, alternately, are sleeping).

The topography of violence may be what connects the disparate pieces of Bolaño's rangy novel, but that does not mean -- lest this seem too bleak to be readable -- that there is no beauty in its midst. His prose, even as it flits across genres, never loses its undercurrent of humanity; his characters are never hollow vessels for his thematic aims. As Liz Norton muses, "For her, reading was linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths..." In 2666, however, we get both: there is brilliance in its mystery, and in all the surprising ways that its manifold layers become whole. --Amelia Atlas

Amelia Atlas's reviews have appeared in the New York Sun, 02138, and the Harvard Book Review. She is currently based in Berlin.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780374100148
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date: 11/11/2008
  • Edition description: First Edition
  • Pages: 912
  • Product dimensions: 6.10 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 2.00 (d)

Meet the Author

ROBERTO BOLAÑO was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, and grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. He died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

Read an Excerpt


2666
A Novel

By Roberto Bolaño
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC
Copyright © 2008

Roberto Bolaño
All right reserved.


ISBN: 978-0-374-10014-8


Chapter One The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D'Arsonval. The young Pelletier didn't realize at the time that the novel was part of a trilogy (made up of the English themed The Garden and the Polish-themed The Leather Mask, together with the clearly French-themed D'Arsonval), but this ignorance or lapse of bibliographical lacuna, attributable only to his extreme youth, did nothing to diminish the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him.

From that day on (or from the early morning hours when he concluded his maiden reading) he became an enthusiastic Archimboldian and set out on a quest to find more works by the author. This was no easy task. Getting hold of books by Benno von Archimboldi in the 1980s, even in Paris, was an effort not lacking in all kinds of difficulties. Almost no reference to Archimboldi could be found in the university's German department. Pelletier's professors had never heard of him. One said he thought he recognized the name. Ten minutes later, to Pelletier's outrage (and horror), he realized that the person his professor had in mind was the Italian painter, regarding whom he soon revealed himself to be equally ignorant.

Pelletier wrote to the Hamburg publishing house that had published D'Arsonval and received no response. He also scoured the few German bookstores he could find in Paris. The name Archimboldi appeared in a dictionary of German literature and in a Belgian magazine devoted-whether as a joke or seriously, he never knew-to the literature of Prussia. In 1981, he made a trip to Bavaria with three friends from the German department, and there, in a little bookstore in Munich, on Voralmstrasse, he found two other books: the slim volume titled Mitzi's Treasure, less than one hundred pages long, and the aforementioned English novel, The Garden.

Reading these two novels only reinforced the opinion he'd already formed of Archimboldi. In 1983, at the age of twenty-two, he undertook the task of translating D'Arsonval. No one asked him to do it. At the time, there was no French publishing house interested in publishing the German author with the funny name. Essentially Pelletier set out to translate the book because he liked it, and because he enjoyed the work, although it also occurred to him that he could submit the translation, prefaced with a study of the Archimboldian oeuvre, as his thesis, and-why not?-as the foundation of his future dissertation.

He completed the final draft of the translation in 1984, and a Paris publishing house, after some inconclusive and contradictory readings, accepted it and published Archimboldi. Though the novel seemed destined from the start not to sell more than a thousand copies, the first printing of three thousand was exhausted after a coupld of contradictory, positive, even effusive reviews, opening the door for the second, third, and fourth printings.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Copyright © 2008 by Roberto Bolaño. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Customer Reviews
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  • Posted July 11, 2009

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    Reminded Me Why I Read

    First off, Bolaño's "2666" is the best book I've read in ten years. I've got a Bachelor's in English and my favorite hobby is reading - so I've read a lot. I love to read everything. And although I read constantly, this book reawakened me to what meaningful reading can feel like.

    It isn't necessarily the lightest of literary works. At times, the book felt like a marathon. It's not something you zoom through. Bolaño breaks up the long, complex story with countless stories-within-stories that could stand alone but aid in the richness of the overall. In the end, I was not only supremely pleased with the book itself but proud of myself, in a way, for getting through it. The rewards are ample. I have not spent so much time post-read considering plot, symbolism, meaning, characters, scenarios, situations and style in several years. You could write twenty books on the themes of "2666."

    All of the "books" (Parts) within the book correlate more than they connect. Each book has it's own flow and appeal. "The Part About the Crimes" can get very tedious. But there are reasons for it's drawn out dictation and blunt style. The characters in each Part are rich. The environments are haunting. There really isn't a traditional plot. The book is about human nature in the face of an often unforgiving world. With Bolaño, the world isn't always just unforgiving. It can be merciless without reason. But it still just keeps on spinning.

    I recommened this book to anyone I know who enjoys reading. Even those who didn't love it as much as I did, or have issues with it, state that they're glad they read it.

    As for the awards, the critical praise and the title of "the first classic of the 21st Century" - they all apply suitably. Personally, I'd been looking for something to snap me out of a literary/writing funk. There are great authors out there, and there is some great writing going on. But I wanted something with a challenge that wouldn't confound me, maybe something a little more mainstream and definitely something worth the time and effort. "2666" not only gave me that, but inspired me further. It makes you think without making you feel like an idiot. It opens you up to the emotions that a good writer can create by putting words together and allowing your mind and heart get sucked in. It reminds you how to read and why you read. And for all its flaws (and it does have them. Too long in spots. Too tedious at times. Too convoluted at other times. And yet, at other times, parts end abruptly. If you want to nitpick, you can find more), the flaws help you feel at ease. That a really, really great story doesn't have to be perfect. Maybe that's why I found it near-perfect for me.

    To those who buy it, I say: Really read it, not just the words. Try to appreciate it for more than just something with a beginning and end. Stick with it, even through the tough spots. Then make someone else read it and spend several hours arguing, debating, and re-living it.

    7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted December 15, 2008

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    A worthwhile challenge from the end of days...

    2666 is huge, apocalyptic, brilliant, and evocative of the entire spectrum of human emotions. It's a symphonic masterpiece in text and structured like a Kurasawa movie. Five narrative threads where characters from across the globe come to the scene of a horrific and continuing series of crimes against young women make up the story. Though the actors in the story journey to or live in Santa Theresa, Bolano's fictional doppelganger for Cuidad Juarez, for personal reasons unrelated to the murderous crimes that have left a pall on the city for fifteen years, all find themselves caught up in the drama and the tragedy of the deaths and disappearances. From the Faulknerian confidence of his sentences, to the detailed explorations reminiscent of Joyce, to the epic scope of Goethe or Mann, Bolano has written a novel for the ages. For those who think big, meaty books aren't their cup of tea, stay away from this one. For those who are sick of being spoon fed the pablum that makes up most popular fiction, this is a book to challenge your skills as a reader and worm its way into the spot where your compassion lies. Written in the final years of his life, when he knew he was dying, Bolano has put heart, soul, mind, and body into this one. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for those seeking epic greatness in literary fiction.

    7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 5, 2009

    Dazzling imagination....

    I found 2666 to be a dazzling and endlessly fascinating tour of Bolano's imagination. Don't expect to read the book and have all the loose ends neatly tied up or have the story(s) unfold linearly. Major characters intermingle with minor ones who are never encountered again. Some are used as foyles to move the narrative and reappear at unexpected moments, others provide local colour to fill in the palette, and many of the rest are just the frothy exuberance of a completely engaging writer. These characters had the same effect on me as Mozart's endless thematic material in his best works where he throws away themes that most any other composer would have been glad to serve as the central motif. A more intrusive editor might have trimmed a hundred pages, but I loved every last bit.

    Yes, there are parts that are hard to read just as in real life we sometimes want to look away. Those graphic images remain vivid long after you put the book down. But then so do the depth of the characters, the twists and turns, and the eccentricities of the humanity presented.

    To dive into this book is to enter an all-encompassing thought-world. By the time you're through, you will understand the initial instruction to read the book at least twice, similar to Thomas Mann's introduction to The Magic Mountain. Do yourself a favor and read it. I loved it!

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted January 8, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    Beautiful, but beware

    Belano's themes are international and his language is intoxicating. He varies the experience from impossibly long and elegant phrases to coldly clipped bullets of information. I have found no other mystery as hauntingly suggestive of the human condition as this. But, read at your own peril; by the end of the fourth part you will be rattled, I promise. This book is as brutal as it is beautiful.

    2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 15, 2011

    Impressive, Difficult, Long

    This is not the type of book that I typically would read. It is dense and challenging to follow. Bolano is incredible for the output and creativity and detail and breadth of reference to obscure topics, and particularly captures a central american mindset in a fictional town of Santa Theresa, Mexico. Never making his main points directly, always from many directions and just touching. The first chapters, and a mysterious author Archimboldi, hooked me in. It travels great distances of psyche and character to resolve this mystery, sort of. Difficult chapters on the murders, hard to take. I stuck with it, was educated, stimulated. But it was work, not recreation. It's the kind of book that would be interesting to discuss, but I am not sure I would recommend it to a friend to have someone to discuss it with.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted June 5, 2009

    Brilliant but dissapointing

    I am sad to say that I was slightly disappointed with this novel. I (also) selected this book after reading a review of it in Time magazine, and feel as though I was deceived. The characters are dreary, the plot is scattered, and I felt that the premise of the novel surrounding itself around the murders of various women (imitating the Juarez murders) was inaccurate. As the Note in the back states, the novel could be divided into five parts, each read separately, which explains why the combination of all five left me confused and apathetic to the whole novel. What ever happened to the first three critics that were in part one? Or the philosophical widower? It would have been nice if Bolaño tied all the characters and the individual plots together in the last part. But he doesn't, and the reader is left feeling bemused.

    However, I will say that the author is undeniably brilliant. His writing is superb and unique; the breadth of his intellect is observed throughout the novel. If you are looking for a challenging, even philosophical read, than I would recommend this book. If you don't care for it after the first part, you can stop reading it because he never returns to those characters and their stories. I'd say give it a try.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted April 12, 2009

    Disappointing

    I had never read any of the author's works previously. After a highly laudatory review in the NY Times Book Review I decided to give this work a try.
    I found it very disappointing. I found the characters unappealing, the plot ponderous and the writing style unbearable.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 16, 2009

    Victims of violence and coverups

    This is a long book with many characters. The writing style can often slow the reading - long paragraphs. The descriptions of the murder victims are detailed but necessary to sort of numb the reader into grasping the immensity of the violence. Other graphic sexual descriptions detract from the story line.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted November 4, 2009

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    900 page Hispanic attack

    I read book one twice through, with highlighting, thinking that I might miss something that would be important further on. Total waste of time as it was merely a long winded and frankly pointless introduction to books 2 and 3. The characters were somewhat insipid and it's theme seemed to be a treatise on the superficiality of intellectuals and of academia in general if anything.
    Book 2 was a condemnation of Hispanic society and of it's complete and utter inability to form effective institutions on any level due to endemic corruption, and the weakness and lack of moral fiber in Hispanic men in general. "Why are we so screwed up?" he seemed to be asking in every vignette, punctuated by descriptions of one grisly rape/murder after another, clearly puzzled and frustrated by the lack of outrage or anger or guilt and the unwillingness or inability of ANYBODY in a position of authority to do ANYTHING about it.
    I haven't read book 3 yet, but of course I will. I'd like to point out that the translation is excellent, the best I've ever read for a Spanish language novel. It really captures the authors wit intact and has a modern colloquial feel. These books are actually quite funny.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted April 1, 2009

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    Potent and Ambitious

    Roberto Bolano's novel is an stimulating indulgement within the realm of timeless literature. The author, knowing that this would be his last novel before his untimely departure, managed to construct and illustrate and colossal work of fiction that will surpass his death. The characters are intriquete and similar in their vulnerabilities. The plot unfolds around the mysterious deaths of hundreds of women over the last years in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. From the beginning pages readers will be thrusted into an air of mystery which will unfold casually during the length of 900 pgs., however, be warned that if the book is not read with all five sense being alert simultaneously, by the end of lengthy piece of literature you might be left with the strong distaste when deciphering that the true theme of the author's work has utterly gone over your head.

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    Posted September 7, 2010

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    Posted November 25, 2008

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    Posted December 14, 2008

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